Personally, Walmart finally caved for two reasons:

1) They were starting to lose customers who want to use contactless payments, especially now with new and renewed credit cards or debits cards with the Visa or Mastercard labeling now all offering the ability to pay by "tapping" on a terminal. Walmart's recent earnings report supports this view.

2) Walmart was watching with interest how other contactless payment holdouts like WinCo Foods (western USA supermarket chain), H-E-B Grocery Company (mostly Texas supermarket chain) and Home Depot (national hardware superstore chain) started to implement contactless payments in the last 18 months. Since it appears the switchover had little effect on the bottom line, that's why Walmart was finally convinced to upgrade their payment terminals to include contactless payment support.

From the middle 1980's to around 2005, John C. Dvorak, like him or not!, was an icon in the technology journalism industry. With his passing, he will be seriously missed the more you think about it.

This isn't news. Look up the history of the Rothschild family and now how their private banking interest was tied up in just about every war in Europe from the 1770's on.

What's happening right now is all those crude oil tankers normally loading up in the Persian Gulf are now all heading to loading up from American ports, of all things! And some may head towards Venezuela, shiping heavier Venezuelan crude oil to European refineries equipped to process the denser crude.

I think when JR Central introduces these new modified 700S Series train sets, they will likely cater specifically to business passengers willing to pay for more comfortable seating. As such, trains will run on the "Nozomi" trains that run only between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka stations.

Especially once they started to use DOCSIS technology to push faster Internet services. And they were able to keep up (mostly) with fiber Internet, They now offer symmetric 1.2 gigabit speed Internet with DOCSIS 4.0, which has started its national rollout. I expect Comcast once it achieves near-natonal coverage of DOCSIS 4.0 to push it to 4 gigabit symmetric access.

In short, I expect Comcast to be less in the cable TV business and more in the cable modem Internet business. And very likely they may widely offer a cloud storage DVR with effectively unlimited storage to save video from cable TV channels and streaming services for later viewing.

The weather in Norway and Iceland is cold enough that they can just pump slightly cooled outside air to cool the data server farm.

The big issue is HOW to get the age verification. This isn't a cellphone where verification can be done by biometrics like reading a fingerprint or Apple's Face ID. Relatively few laptops out there can do biometric verification unless it's newer Apple MacBook models with Touch ID fingerprint verification.

This is why I've always contended the majority of AI data centers will be located in countries where power is cheap and plentiful. China has a good number of them because they're probably located near one of the many coal-fired powerplants built in the last 35 years.

As such, I expect both Iceland and Norway to be major locations for AI data centers. Iceland because of its vast available geothermal power and Norway because of its vast available hydropower.

...About 14 seconds from pressing the power button to the initial sign-on screen.

I think the augmented reality glasses will likely need a good amount of wireless bandwidth to connect to an iPhone. This explains why the iPhone 17 with the N1 I/O chip supports the new Bluetooth 6.0 standard, which may allow for this higher bandwidth connection.

Except aviation gasoline still uses tetraethyl lead so gasoline-fueled aviation engines can run at much higher compression than automobile engines. Getting rid of tetraethyl lead in aviation gasoline has been a very contentious issue in recent years because many engines on General Aviation airplanes may not be able to properly run even with 99 RON unleaded gasoline.

India needs to start phasing out its coal-fired power plants. That's why China is trying to do, but there are so many coal-fire power plants built in the last 30 years shutting them all down will take many years to complete.

Look, tetraethyl lead was a "cheap" way to get gasoline-fueled engines to run higher compression without pre-detonation (knocking) damaging the engine. The development of electronic fuel injection in the 1970's and 1980's pretty much eliminated the knocking problem by electronically adjusting the timing of spark plug ignition via knock sensors and a small computer, which meant modern gasoline-fueled engines for street-legal vehicles rarely suffer from this issue. Besides, modern refining technology makes it possible for gasoline RON octane ratings as high as 99 (circa 95 pump octane) in unleaded fuel, pretty much eliminating the need for tetraethyl lead.