This is code for straight-up Socialism or Chinese Style "Capitalism". Picking winners and losers by the Government.

I would instantly agree that we need to stop picking winners like we do now under Crony Capitalism, but putting that power more in the hands of Bureaucrats and Politicians is not the solution.

Along those same lines, Windows 11 is dropping support for older Intel Processors lacking certain features. Supposedly, it's to improve virtualization, but how much would it cost to just not support that virtualization as well on older processors?

It's a boon to PC manufacturers that push Windows 11. The big PC makers say "Works best with Windows!" on their websites and don't highlight or give you any price break on units with Linux installed. Didn't I read that MS requires that they get a payment for every PC sold, whether it runs Windows or not as part of their licensing agreement with the manufacturers? I know the manufacturers get a big break on Windows copies from retail.

I thought Apple should have bought Dell when Dell went private a few years ago, made PCs with no Windows advantage, pushed Linux and maybe even Darwin on these new PCs. I'm not saying don't sell Windows too. They could keep the Dell and marketing separate to not dilute the Apple brand. They would have enjoyed massive buying power for PC parts, screens, batteries, SDs. They could have gotten Dell for a tiny fraction of their massive war chest a few years ago. Could have had most of it financed, too, just like the deal to go private did. This idea might have faced anti-trust scrutiny.

Apple should have recognized that MS wasn't going away and as long as they are there, they are a potential huge competitor in many of their markets.

It would have also been revenge for the obnoxious remarks Michael Dell made back in the 90s when Apple was experiencing hard times.

Slackware has never enabled CONFIG_SMB_SERVER in any kernel.

Uhm, no the sale tax isn't 8.875%. The combined sales and use tax rate equals the state rate (currently 4%) plus any local tax rate imposed by a city, county, or school district. An additional sales tax rate of 0.375% applies to taxable sales made within the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District (MCTD). The combined rates vary in each county and in cities that impose sales tax.

https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/st/...

I used to live in Monroe County, and it was 4% state and 4% county split for a total of 8%.

Thus spake the master programmer:
                "Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to
                be maintained."
                                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Clearly it's Large Hadron Colliders all the way down.

Would your very large defense company employer actually let you sign into Google services?
I'd imagine that stuff like gmail/drive/etc are probably considered a liability.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to get the best of both worlds though. Allow users to authenticate with third-parties against Steam's OpenAPI equivalent to allow access to *their* data, while allowing anonymous data extracts to more global variables (e.g. how many discrete users are playing this game, age range, country, CPU/GPU etc) for unauthenticated services.

In the end, Steam is making money off of game (ok, and hat) sales, so they don't need to monetize your data in the same way that FB etc are, but that same data can still - if used correctly - be very useful to gamers and the industry at large if provided in a way that protects the privacy of the player.

You might also like Descent Underground, though it's not fully released yet it is slowly getting there:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yes, it was an intern in this case, but in reality it could have just as easily been a permanent FTE, a contractor, or whomever with an agenda.

I have the ZW2 as well. How's the battery life on yours? Mine seems very unpredictable as one day it'll be fine and the next it will chew through 3/4 of the battery by noon.

'Advertiser friendly' is anything that gets lots of attention, but isn't going to be the subject of a significant amount of negative publicity.

Nope. If they're visiting websites while logged in whole on-premises, then hopefully your other compensating controls (DNS filter, firewall, AV) can help deal with that. Not trusting the device initially is more to prevent things like:
a) Unauthorized devices in general attaching to your network (home device, infiltration devices, etc)
b) Machines that have left the premises (e.g. a laptop that may have been infected in the field outside the firewall etc)
c) Overall better identification and management of systems within an environment: knowing what and where.

No, but the usual points of concern aren't printers etc but users and their PC's. A printer doesn't go out and browse bad sites on the internet during work hours, users do.
Whitelist the printers. Blacklist any user PC until it's be validated. If you *CAN* validate the printers, even better!