I had in mind the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. It caused a local bike shop to close for the day because they could accept no payment, and I had to find another bike shop not using CrowdStrike to get my tire looked at.

True of the person buying something or sending money. However, the person receiving money through a card payment still needs an Internet connection.

I was not aware of that.

Which means you need to store enough stuff that you can afford to rent a table for a day, and you can't have one member of the household watching and the others performing household tasks (such as cooking and cleaning) while there are no customers. How often does each neighborhood hold a flea market? Or do customers in a particular city need to go out of their way to attend a flea market that might be on the other side of town?

I am unfamiliar with flea market customs in European countries that might affect the viability of electronic payments smaller than a euro. "Flea market" on Wikipedia didn't give even a ballpark estimate for where they are held, how often, and cost to rent a table. What keywords should I put into DuckDuckGo to learn more about this? I tried europe bans garage sales which returned irrelevant results about the transition from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles.

High-stakes gambling, whether on casino games or on the outcome of sport matches, has never needed a lot of local computing power. JRA PAT (Japan Racing Association Personal Access Terminal) was an application to bet on horse races that ran on a Super Famicom with a 3.6 MHz 16-bit CPU, 128 KiB of RAM, and 64 KiB of VRAM. The same machine hosted Vegas Stakes, an application that simulated casino gambling.

In the city, maybe. In rural areas outside the service area of cable and fiber, the penalty is nearly a second of speed-of-light latency to and from the geostationary satellite and the data transfer overage bill from the ISP at the end of the month. Likewise for work done on a laptop while riding public transportation to or from home: if it isn't completely local, you incur a mobile hotspot/"tethering" bill from your cellular ISP.

If the work version is called an XStation, is the gaming version called a Playbox? The marketing departments of Sony and Microsoft might have something to say about that.

Thin clients have been around at least since X terminals in the early 1990s.

One could do a useful thin client that "just" runs X, VNC, or RDP on 256 MB of RAM and a cheap ARM processor. This isn't enough for (say) a development workstation unless you're using tools made for RAM capacities typical of 2003, which means no Visual Studio Code with LSP-driven tooltips.

I provision my development workstations for a heterogeneous load. When a task is constrained by throughput of one resource, such as compiling a large program using a lot of CPU, I temporarily switch to another task that uses a different resource. This could be system library updates (which are network and disk bound), updating doc comments of the code that I wrote (which is thought bound), or reading documentation (which is network and thought bound).

Between the first and second shrinks, on what machine would high school students taking a programming class do their coursework?

A cash register needs electric power but not Internet access. It can cache the prices of all products on shelves at the start of the day. If electric power is known to be unreliable in a particular region, the store can run its registers on a backup battery or a generator or even put a price sticker on each item.

I couldn't find that in the article. The heading said "5 min read", but the body was only about 250 words, ending at "announcing that a payment has gone through."

That depends on the size of a transaction. When a transaction is close to 1 USD, such as at a garage sale, the flat portion of the bank's fee (around 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total) is a sizable fraction.

I don't see how putting three prices on everything could account for the flat portion of a transaction fee, such as 0.30 USD per swipe. When the bank charges 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total for credit, the bank takes more for three 5 USD orders (0.45 USD each, totaling 1.35 USD) than for one 15 USD order (0.75 USD).

Say you're buying something for 0.50 USD at a garage sale. With two quarter dollar coins, the seller sees all of it. With cards, the bank and payment network take 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total, which is more than half of the price.

Is it also "If you're a minor, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or "If the power is out, or the payment terminal's antivirus service is having a senior moment, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or "If you can't afford a mobile phone with a data plan, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or at a garage sale, given the flat portion of the transaction fee: "If you are buying less than 10 NOK's worth of goods, you're not supposed to be here"?

If Google wasn't evil, we'd have working JXL in 2021. The lack of pressure also allowed Mozilla to waste years writing a NIH implementation in their own toy language. The benefits from JXL are pretty great all around, including both lossy and lossless, it's a pity we didn't get it sooner.

Google pushed their own WEBP and AVIF hard despite neither being as good as the rest. WEBP is very slow and hardly better than old JPEG, AVIF is at least usable but loses to other modern formats for anything except extremely low bitrates.

Shooting a driver who was attempting (partially successfully) to run over his teammate is not "treading on others", it's doing his duty. Even though the orders he received were issued by a deranged orange monkey, assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon (such as a car) is still supposed to be responded to with deadly force.

Look at the complexity of ITER. Even in the small chance that usable fusion can be achieved, it will suffer from the same problem that fission does. They are both too damn expensive to be competitive with renewables or natural gas.