Ars went into more details but it appears it was a few reports made a few years ago on Reddit is the source. While the news article that reported it first seemed to imply it was something happening.

The truth is simple - surely on a 3 year old printer, there has to be more than 3 reports of this happening. I mean, YouTube is usually full of people demonstrating things like this the moment it happens. So there's got to be more than a few reports of it, especially in the few days since the article.

Unless it happens to be a printer Brother only sold 3 of, you'd think there would be way more reports of things like this happening. Even when HP did their firmware lockdown there were plenty of reports of it happening when it happened. Especially since the reproduction steps are trivial - update firmware, and see if your third party cartridge stops working.

Leonardo Da Vinci probably had artistic influences. It's not transitive.

Genre-defining
Technology-defining
Aesthetic-standard

Doom has a lot going for it.

It has a few competitors whose legacies are also clear as day:
1. Minecraft has had more players than Doom, and is also a bit of a genre definer, with a great many survive-craft-build games sharing its dna
2. Mario has the legacy as the series with the most staying power. Not really reinventing itself as much as iterating in a way that never seems to die.
3. Tetris has an unusual place as a genuinely timeless, totally re-playable game that can hold its place, mostly unchanged, forever

None of those quite reach doom as the right game at the right time doing new things in just the right way, but those are probably the only other contenders

GPS requires 4 satellites because it has to get you latitude, longitude, altitude and time, so you need 4 satellites to provide you with a solution for 4 variables. More is better, as it gets you an over-solution which lets you get better accuracy if you get a better constellation of satellites.

But having an atomic clock on board only resolves the time variable, so you're still needing 3 satellites to provide you with the lat/tong/altitude. And it's not great, because even at airliner altitudes and speeds, that atomic clock will drift, thanks to Einstein.

The INS (inertial navigation system) is still reasonably accurate - given most airliners will have ring laser gyros to measure acceleration and is technology already present today. Sure it drifts, because you get the fun of a double integration, but the INS errors are remarkably small - generally speaking a couple of nautical miles drift over the course of a 8-12 hour flight.

If you slaved the INS to the GPS then GPS jamming remains a non-issue since the INS can supply the positional information while GPS loses lock. And with a little computation smarts, you can detect if GPS is being jammed in a more sophisticated manner (where false information leads it to being off-course). Remember, the INS is quite accurate, so there's no reason for GPS position to differ very much when you compare positions. If you're calculating how the INS is drifting, it should be reasonably small between updates, and the absolute drift should remain small. If it suddenly jumps perhaps the GPS is receiving a spoofed signal.

But spoofing is a far more sophisticated attack than just mere jamming.

Yes, it's just a resolving door with the private sector to public sector to private sector pipeline. The rules are written by those who worked and will work again for the groups that have vested interested in them. The American public seems relative okay with this because the American public thinks that .. *checks notes* .. uh government sucks or something.

https://www.sesame.com/researc...

A tablet is a computer with a touchscreen but no keyboard or trackpad built in. More than half the time, I don't use my laptop's keyboard or trackpad. I hook it up to thunderbolt with an external monitor or monitors, mechanical keyboard, and mouse. But tablets are lighter. A Macbook Air is 2.7 lbs. An iPad air m3 11" will weigh 1.01 lbs. A rather significant difference. A Surface Pro weights 2 lbs. I'd love to use an iPad air m3 11" as my daily, if it had a real OS.

Supposedly Apple is about to release a Macbook Air with the M4 chip, and I do believe Asahi Linux will work on them. The only issue is all the Mac stuff is in Rust and given how many issues they had pushing Rust stuff into the kernel. (Things like the DMA and GPU drivers are in Rust and the DMA Rust bindings was very controversial as the DMA maintainer refused to accept the bindings until Linus pushed it through).

So you might get a cheaper, smaller device running Linux. And it'll at least be more open than the locked down iPad.

Think pragmatically. Why is this useful? Not to you, not as a force of good or bad or anything. It's easy to see why various actors would want this:
- to impersonate people
- to sell relationships to people
- to be there for people where society can't/won't pony up the money for real people
- to make it cheaper to do things like [fill in the blanks]
- because it's cool
- to hear what you sound like, but it's not you

I mean , if you don't understand why .. this is what technology is. It's neither good or bad, it's just something we can now do (apparently, I'm not very interested in what this is, just it bugs me when people are like "argh why" when science and technology is about saying "we can do this" agnostic of purpose and application)

A near-miss implies the accident was avoided. In this case it happened, after failing both human-based procedural controls, and basic technology controls like evaluating the size of the transfer, or comparing values of various fields to catch copy-paste... which was for some reason, even allowed when entering data into the field. But it's comforting to know that even though it takes weeks for Amazon and Walmart to process a refund, the banks can sweep their own mistakes under the rug faster than you can say Little Bobby Tables.

It's a near miss, because apparently it happened like 6 times in the past year, which is an improvement over the year before where it happened like 18 times.

As for refunds, they could go quicker. It's deliberate that refunds are slow. Think of it this way - the last time you went to get something expensed, how many people did you go through - you probably sent it to your manager, who sends it to their manager and up an down the chain it goes. Maybe you'll stop at someone who has approval authority. But it has to be generally approved.

When they issue refunds, that's exactly what happens. Your refund is approved, which means they send the refund request up to the next person in line who checks it, then it goes up and down the approval chain until it hits the person who actually pays out the money. Except, what happens is the request hits a bucket of requests that's processed once a week, then passed onto another bucket which is checked at the same time, once a week, etc. etc. etc., so really, the refund is just sitting around for someone to mass approve it.

It's deliberately slow. If you wanted it quicker the guy who puts the request in could easily get everyone's approvals in an hour and get your money back in a couple of hours. (They have no problems doing that for say, paying out court orders and such - ever notice how you can show up with a sheriff and attempt to start repossession that they can have you your money in under an hour?).

Or Apple contracting a company to build the "dustbin" Mac Pro in Texas? That failed with the company blaming it on being unable to hire skilled workers who'd accept minimum wage.

There's nothing skilled in putting tab A into slot B assembly. You can tell anyone off the street to do it.

Manufacturing is basically unskilled work at the level of consumer electronics because they're just slapping parts together and using a screwdriver or glue.

Anyhow, the big problem with the Mac Pro wasn't that they couldn't get people to assemble them (it's a dull job, but unskilled and generally in decent working conditions), but the parts. One in particular were the screws - the screw manufacturer (American) was running 3 shifts and they still couldn't make enough screws for Apple. Apple had to relent and import screws from China, which were not only cheaper, but of higher quality manufacture.

Not all manufacturing jobs are crap - the higher end manufacturing - think cars, trucks and other heavy vehicles - is very skilled labor. At this point each thing is heavily customized for the buyer so you're not making the same device a billion times, but each time you're attempting to build is custom and unique, and it takes skills to properly adapt to all the potential options.

Those ASML light sources are built in the Netherlands, broken down, shipped to their destination, then put back together. It's a highly skilled job and ASML engineers spend a few months unpacking and putting it together on site, and another couple of months are spent aligning everything together. Of course, they only build like 3 of them a year, and it's all highly remotely monitored because downtime is expensive so they can see how well the device works and access parameters remotely and even send parts over pre-emptively. It's cheaper to have a part sent early to be ready to replace at the next scheduled downtime (even if the old part is still workable) than to fix a broken unit.

hot-swapable batteries

Apparently, a big reason for this is the airlines. If you check your laptop (either deliberately - some people don't want to do any work on planes, or incidentally if you're forced to gate-check your baggage), you cannot have batteries in there. Unless they are built into the device.

So a laptop with a removable battery would force you to remove the battery in order to check it, a laptop or device with built in battery, well, you cannot do anything about it so it can be checked baggage (plus the device is also more stuff between a fire and the battery so it's much harder to set off multiple batteries).

It's the only time you're allowed to check in batteries - they have to be built into the device and cannot be removed.

Even the local grocery store has a dress code (no shoes no shirt no service).

In chess, people do (weird things (fail to bathe, make weird noises, make weird gestures, wear weird clothes), to distract their opponents. So there are rules against this kind of thing.

In addition, chess organizers want the players to look good, because they want the sport to be respected. Being respected makes it easier to get corporate funding for the tournament, or to gain recognition from the Olympic committee, etc.

Most places have a dress code, even one that's informal.

Many collectible card games, like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, Pokemon, etc, have tournaments. Even the ones held in stores have informal dress codes. Basically, have some sort of basic level of hygiene. You won't believe how many people, from kids to fully grown adults, fail at this and wear clothes that stink, they haven't showered in days, etc. Many places will kick you out for not even having a basic level of hygiene - it's gross and people in small confined areas like the back of a store, it can get rank and offensive really quickly.

Now, none of those games generally have more than a casual dress code, but then again, none of those games are going for much respect - though higher level tournaments some modicum of basic dress is enforced.

But chess wants to be held above - if you're a chess master, you want to appear respected and show off your intellectual might. Sometimes dress makes the man, so a formal dress is called for at the higher levels

Many places have a dress code, even informally stated. Even the loosest of tech companies where it's T-shirts and jeans casual, that's still a dress code.

You are willing to group all non-human animals under one professional there.

TNG and later Star Trek series generally only got good after the 3rd season. That's why we hated when Enterprise ended so quickly because the 3rd season was when it really got going. And it really seemed to apply for series like Discovery which stumbled along until the 3rd season where it finally found something it could work on. The first two serasons were a mishmash of bad ideas and those storylines were abandoned in the third season.

Note that angled right at the sun when the panel is on the back side of the screen would mean either the screen is at an unusable angle, or the panel is not going to get anywhere near the amount needed.

It's a gimmick, much easier to have a handheld foldable or rollable solar panel to go with your laptop, so long as the laptop is willing to accept lower USB-PD rates. ,/blockquote>

That's only good if you plan on using your laptop while charging it. Given it can produce about 20W estimated max, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption.

While the lower powered CPU chips can work on under 20W, the screen then becomes the big power draw.

On the other hand, it might be useful for people who work outside where they don't need constant computer use - but they can be outside for 10+ hours a day on their job. They may use their computer a couple of hours tops. This can make it useful because they could put their laptop in the sun for it to charge and thus they don't really need to plug in for their workday out in the field.

These would be jobs like architects, designers, engineers on construction where they're overseeing the work, and only use the computer to reference design drawings and other documents and perhaps send a few things out.

Or it could work for those who work in city infrastructure - things like traffic lights and such are often programmed with a laptop at the side of the road, and there are probably opportunities where the laptop is forgotten and drains the battery. Could put it in the sun and let it charge so when it comes time to program the controllers and sensors it's usable. (Sure, they probably have the charger, but I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities where the charger is forgotten and it's now a 2 hour journey back to the office to fetch it).

Then again, it's all concept laptops. Sometimes the only way to try an idea is to make it and see what happens. If there's no interest, then that's it. It's likely something that seemed possible, they did it, now they need to see if there's any practical reason for it to exist.