They could, but how do you determine which role is which? A global company like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, can't realistically operate entirely from the US - plenty of jurisdictions requires a larger companies maintain a regional office to operate in them, and even without that you often need local expertise in various fields, especially those with a financial/legal bent, and obviously for things like logistics, sales, and marketing (which can be a whole minefield of PR screwups if you don't understand the nuances of local culture) too. Overseas offices therefore are not going away without inflicting massive damage on the US's global companies.

If you complete MAGA's ultimate goal and get rid of, say, all the Indian H1Bs since TCS dominates the sector, that you'd realistically have to offshore the task of producing any Hindi localisation and region specific coding, because - you guessed it - you almost certainly won't be find enough native US citizens that also have both the required knowledge of Hindi and can also code. Even if you can recruit enough Hindi speaking coders in the US, given every other big tech company will need to be doing the same thing, you also need to repeat that for lots of other localisations with even smaller potential labour pools too.

That means you demonstrably need an overseas development team that deals with it, and if that can't economically be H1Bs in the US then it's going to be TCS or whoever else's workers in India, or whichever other outsourcing company and country's office you put them in. So, by a neccessity driven by the demands of Wall Street to prioritise value and return a profit, now you've got a development team of foreign labour based in an office somewhere outside the US. Surely it's not up to "the party of small government" (LOL) to dictate what tasks a private enterprise can and cannot do with their staff unless it's some kind of national security matter? If not, then they can tell them to work on whatever else they want, including all the coding that might have been done by H1Bs *or* US citizens based on their offices the US. If so, then there are some well known systems of government where that level of control is the norm; absolute monarchies/dictatorships, facism, and communism, and I think we can safely rule out MAGA going down the communism route...

"Distracting" is probably the whole point. Look at the cool video, and not the UI disaster that is the rest of Windows 11. I guess you could also set it to a clip of Homer Simpson thinking of clowns when Marge is talking to him and switch to desktop to accurately mirror your state of mind in a typical Teams call? Can it play the audio too? $deity help the poor bastard that forgets to lock their screen when they leave their desk and falls victim to the very obvious office jape that this affords if so (HR are probably going to rolling up their sleeves and rubbing hands in glee when they hear about this).

But really, WTF asked for this? Other than the kind of user that has all that garish dynamic aRGB lighting on their "rig" or Microsoft got trolled by 4Chan, I got nothin.

Even if you assume full RTO (which won't happen), at $100,000 per H1-B, you're only going to need a reasonably low number of people in the team to setup a remote office for the entire team and ship a manager out there to oversee them - or just outsource that role too.

Fairly obviously, this almost certainly won't result in many thousands of H1-Bs each paying $100k to the US government each year; it'll result in many thousands of jobs that would have been paying US taxes on their wages, and then paying for accommodation, a car, for leisure, and whatever else into the US economy paying their taxes and spending their wages in wherever the new (or expanded overseas) office is instead.

Smart countries will be making setting up offices and bringing those outsourced workers in much easier right now, but I'd also expect some buildings in India are going to see their "Tata Consulting" logo get one from Amazon, Microsoft or whoever alongside it too.

[To answer your question, the figures typically come from CDNs and major websites doing browser data analysis so, while there's quite a bit of wiggle room, they are going to at least be in the ballpark and definiltely not orders of magnitude out.] Personally, I think people are being too simplistic about the stats and likely outcomes and, arguably, focusing too much on entirely the wrong issue.

I totally agree on your main point; 7-8 years is a good run for a specific major release of an OS, or any other software application. You might not like the decision, but Microsoft announced the end of official support some years ago and that we're now approaching that deadline is just BAU and not something anyone should really have an issue with. They're not taking Windows 10 off you (yet?), but they are making it clear that if you continue to run it you're doing so at your own risk from next month. Pretty much everyone, including the FOSS community, does this with older versions at some point. It's been done countless times before, and will be done countless times in the future - in that light, singling out this one specific example isn't a particularly sound argument, is it?

Whatever the percentage of Win10 holdouts is (I've seen recent figures closer to 50%), it's highly unlikely to be entirely down to "lack of TPM". Windows 11 is a privacy raping UI/UX nightmare, so I suspect a large majority of those Windows 10 holdouts have hardware that actually could run Windows 11 just fine, but are actively choosing not to do so. When many of them inevitably get compromised (which they will), it's going to be interesting to see who gets the blame for that - and the fallout from whatever the resulting botnets are used for - in the media, but that's another topic for another day. There will also be another fraction who simply don't know or don't care; the OS is part of the hardware purchase, and if the hardware is working fine then there's no reason to change anything, and they'll only upgrade when things break (likely due to overworked fans packing up after the CPU has been running flat out for several months as part of some botnet or other). Given most users performance needs have hit a plateau, that could be quite a large fraction, and will naturally decline over time. Finally, you'll have the fraction that understand the issue and have legacy hardware, but can't / won't upgrade because of other user-specific reasons - e.g. they just can't afford it right now.

Key point: none of the people in those groups - probably the majority of that 40-50% - are going to be sending their old PCs to landfill any time soon, and certainly not all in one go on October 14th.

The real issue here is that Microsoft has arbitrarily decided - for the financial benefit of themselves and their hardware/advertising partners - to try and force an unnecessary hardware and OS/"telemetry" upgrade, rather than simply put a banner in the setup process starting with something along the lines of "This hardware lacks critical security functionality and your data may be at increased risk...". We know beyond a doubt that this is an entirely arbitrary hardware requirement decision because of all the workarounds posted online showing how to get Windows 11 running on hardware it supposedly doesn't support. That is pretty much textbook abuse of a monopolistic position in the market, and that's the tack PIRG (and the likes of the DoJ, FTC, EU, etc.) probably should be taking; force Microsoft to remove the arbitrary restriction but make it clear that if you don't have TPM 2.0, that's on you. If you understand what TPM actually does, then you probably also have at least a basic clue about PC/network security and will realise that is pretty much zero additional risk outside of some corporate environments.

Yes, there will still be holdouts, just as there still are on even older software releases and Windows version, but at that point it's entirely on them. They've either chosen the Windows 11 path, with all that entails, or they've chosen some other option (trying to secure a Windows version <11, Linux, Mac, whatever) with all that entails. As long as is not a monoculture with a common failure mode, we should be fine with that.

Given the vast amount of data that is collected and sent to the mothership in modern "connected" cars, maybe they realised they can sell that on? Apart from all the obvious stuff like realtime tracking data and telemetry on your driving style while you are are on the road, there's your preferences on playlists, what kind of temperature you prefer (from which health info can be inferred), what stores you prefer and where your friends and family live, (extracted from parking location data), all tied into the real ID you used to buy and register the car - no "dark profiles" here.

It's a model that seems to be working very well for browers and certain OSs, as well as pretty much all of the Internet of Shit. It might cost a bit more and be a lot larger than some connencted $20+tariffs widget, but a modern car is still just another component of the IoS. It's said the margin on a mass market car is around 5-10%; care to bet that the captured data is being sold on to info brokers for a whole lot more?

Let me use a dongle that gives me the ports I want. A USBc port can do A, but not the reverse.

It's funny because TFS summary says it's not an issue in Scandinavia...

Or it's a new take on the "RTO Mandate" approach to headcount reduction leveraging a kind of reverse Dunning-Kruger.

Right now, everyone at Opendoor is thinking of their colleagues and wondering if they are in the 15% that won't get the cut. For a team of 20, that means you've got to either truly believe that you're in the top three of that group, are blissfully naive, or will be polishing your CV and getting it out to agencies this weekend, and since company morale just went to shit, there's a pretty good chance that a chunk of those who *are* confident they'll make the cut will be doing the same, because once everyone else is gone they're going to have a lot more work to do. Good luck running the company on the blissfully naive remants.

Yes, there's probably a LOT of deadwood at Opendoor but, like RTO Mandates, this isn't the best way to get rid of it, and will have the same result as RTO; a lot of the best and brightest will be deciding the door they really want is the exit door.

Seems legit to me

https://www.reuters.com/sustai...

Rich people (at the level you are implying) are generally egomanical, narcissistic, sociopaths who have no idea how to do the day to day things in life because they pay other people to do it for them. If you cream off the ~10,000 wealthiest people on the planet and put them into a community of some kind, even with robots to do the bulk of the work, I would still predict you'd rapidly find yourself back with a "1%" of around 100 mega-wealthy people, amid on-going power stuggles that soon turn ugly and gut the robot population (who else is going to do the fighting?).

With the labour pool mostly gone, the total population of meatbags will reach 0 soon after. It'd be like the Golgafrinchan B Ark, only much more so.

Come to think of it, there's probably a pretty decent dystopian short story with some very dark humour there...

I guess that depends on the volume of the aquifer and the geology. If there's a non-porous layer of rock in the ~1300ft of rock above it then, while the aquifer will inevitably start to collapse creating cracks in the higher layers of rock, it might be some time before enough salt water mingles with the fresh to exceed safe potable water limits. Besides, as long as it's still sufficiently less salty than typical sea water, then it's still going to be a lot more efficient to run it through some kinds of desalination plant than it would be to use ocean water like countries such as the UAE are doing, with a lot less waste brine produced as well.

I guess we'll need follow-up studies to be sure, but with the increasing pressure on fresh water supplies and more turbulent weather patterns making some of the current collection basins for reservoirs less reliable, search for potential alternative sources of potable, or even near-potable that can be readily purified, is probably quite a prudent thing to be doing. Dying of dehydration is not a pleasant way to go.

1) it did increase productivity for some tasks
2) people were only using it once a day

I suspect that with a little experience people will better know which tasks it works for and which it doesn't, while also using it more often.

For a brand new tool to show real potential in some tasks while also being currently neutral overall seems promising in the long run.

Generally in these things the more autocratic a country is the more they can afford it.

Are you implying the US has become more autocratic than China?

So you're saying Trump set this in motion during his first term by picking a pro corporate anti worker fairly extreme fed chair?

Yup, and believe it or not some people pay for the content with ads. Some pay for money. Some just stream it with blockers. Others avoid it because there's too much advertising.

I tend to do the first or the last option, but with the music service included it seemed worth it to me to switch to paying.