Despite the fact that they don't know the specifics, the specific processor in these laptops has lower value than an unmodified processor of that model number. If the consumer looks it up and finds a rating, the version in the laptop will not be as good as what they've read. Arguably the vendor shouldn't be able to call it an Intel 268v because equal to that product anymore; it should be called modified Intel 268v, so at least the user can look up how exactly it has been modified, or not buy it if they realize it's been nerfed in some undisclosed way.

Btw, the licensing fees are $0.24. I don't need hardware video decoding in my work computer, but many users would probably save that much in electricity costs over the life of the laptop without even considering the improved usability.

Also if you know anything about the history of that case Microsoft was on track to be split up until George Bush Jr got elected and then rather than splitting them up between the office and windows divisions they got... I'm not even going to call it a slap on the wrist. They got rewarded!

In exchange for zero prosecution for their anti-competitive tactics Microsoft had to give tens of millions of dollars worth of software to public schools.

Microsoft had been trying and failing for years to force public schools to switch to Windows and they had been resisting it because Windows is in nightmare to administer. That was a huge boon to Microsoft and it let them push Apple once and for all out of the education market.

So the example you gave is a perfect example of the Republican party not enforcing antitrust law in the slightest. Good job at least you tried.

So take all the companies you view as viable competitors to Amazon.

Now ask yourself who owns those companies? Who owns enough stock that they actually have voting rights and who is on the board of directors.

We have a very very thinly veiled illusion of competition. Yeah technically Walmart and Target compete with Amazon. In practice it's the same handful of major shareholders and the same handful of people rotating in and out of the board of directors on all the companies involved.

Truly new companies owned by new people are extremely few and far between and they get bought out or run out of business through anti-competitive tactics long before they have any noticeable effect on prices or consumer choice.

Notice how every company does mass layoffs of the same class of employee at the same time. That is not a coincidence.

It's not even a grand conspiracy. The same board of directors are hiring the same kind of CEOs triggering the same kind of layoffs at the same time for the same reasons.

And again any attempt to create a brand new competitor using all that engineering talent would find itself either bought out if they're very very lucky or more likely run out of business through anti-competitive tactics.

This is just one of many things that make it harder to get a job in America and other right-wing countries. The fact of the matter is we figured out back when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in charge that right wing economic policies do not work.

But they have truthiness. They feel like they should work so we keep insisting on them.

Funny that I never seen that statistic quoted anywhere.

enforce anti-trust law.

And that means you vote for politicians who'll do it. If you're American that means a Democrat.

Companies would normally be terrified to fire this many engineers because they'd be snapped up by competitors.

Only there aren't any, because we keep voting for people that won't enforce anti-trust law.

Elections have consequences, and your job is one of them.

The job market sucks at 50. And the people you keep voting for, what ever your reasons are, are planning to raise retirement age to 70.

But you can beat the fucking ever loving shit out of them until they either hide themselves or kill themselves and that is very much the goal of the transphobes.

There's two camps among the transphobes. The first just doesn't want to look at them and they will do anything to make them go away. The second are people who are terrified that their son is going to turn out to be trans. And they literally do not care what the damage is to their kid as long as they don't lose the pride from having popped out a son instead of a daughter.

It's a huge point of machismo pride among dudes to have a boy and it's extremely frustrating to them if their kid turns out to be trans. The odds are extremely low but people like that aren't usually very good at math.

What you see a lot is for people who actually have a trans kid they eventually have to accept it when the kid attempts suicide and the doctor pulls them aside and tells them that the second attempt, and there will be a second attempt without gender affirming care, will almost certainly be successful.

I do not believe any of what you just wrote.

I do not believe there is a school in America that is going to have a problem with you bringing a book from home. Let alone one that is going to care if the kid is reading a book from a higher grade.

Now I do believe that a teacher would tell a kid they can't use the computer if they finished their work early and yeah that would be kind of a dick move.

But you are leaving something out.

Whatever the case unless you have a lot of money to hire tutors, which in fairness you might, then your kid is pretty quickly going to start falling behind if you live in a decent School district. There are some horrifyingly underfunded school districts especially if you live in the Southern United States. But if you're in the income bracket that lives in one of those you probably can't afford the tutors you're going to need to make up for whatever deficiencies you personally have as an educator. I don't mean that as an insult, even if you know a lot of math because you're an engineer you're going to have a hard time with some of your kids math because you're going to be more specialized. You're not going to know all the little details unless you're basically following along in the book with them. And that's before we talk about teaching them things like biology and chemistry and physics. Again you probably got a reasonable grasp on those but are you going to be able to devote that much time to learning all those subjects?

You're leaving something out from your post probably because of the excitement of doing the home schooling.

No, but it would let people who care know, and it would let people who potentially care google and find out.

I would tend to assume that if you pay you get more, so it's just a trial version, and this is just an indirect slashvertisement.

I don't think creating a centralized world ID database is going to be a win at this point.

OS/2 had no security features needed for multiuser support. It might as well have been classic MacOS. Citrix had a multiuser version of OS/2 with security tacked on, but it wasn't a realistic solution and was never popular. Building an OS without security was the moronic decision that killed it. Plus IBM never did anything meaningful to promote it so nobody cared. That it was used anywhere (especially in ATMs) was a horrible decision itself because of the lack of security features and has created untold woes. Maybe nobody ever got fired because they bought IBM, but they should have.

It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.

If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.

Apparently it's around $4 per device. The margins are thin on their low end models, and they are greedy, so I guess $4 is too much for a feature that few people care about or will notice not being available. Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.

The real blame here is on the patent holders. AV1 is the solution for everyone else.

It's worse, they recommend software for encoding as well.

It's because they have to pay licence fees for HEVC. Most streaming services use AV1 now, which is free and supported.

He clearly wasn't that good, or he wouldn't have been caught. These amateurs don't seem to understand that they way to do this is to make the system so complex and reliant on you doing certain undocumented actions, that if they fire you it will all collapse on its own. Then you can't be accused of causing damage, because you didn't, you just walked away as asked. It's not your fault that they didn't recognize how essential your services were, or pay you to do a proper rebuild and handover.