No, he's telling the truth: Internet Explorer is deeply integrated into Windows.

Oh shit, sorry! I thought you were talking about someone else. Never mind.

Why would a manufacturer's device need a trusted introducer to communicate with that same manufacturer? Vizio can be its own CA. There's no intermediary between themself and themself.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

As someone with two EVs in our household, I think I might be qualified to answer this.

1. As the other poster already said, the cars need to be usable as cars. Having one tethered to the house means still letting the food in the fridge spoil while one of us is at work. That's no bueno.

2. It's not expensive to have a portable generator. Yeah, the big monsters that the richer folks have on the side of their houses can run you a pretty penny, but something you keep in your shed for an emergency isn't going to break the bank to buy and maintain. As for the gas, presumably you've been saving a bunch of money not buying gas because you drive an EV, so having to buy some gas once in a blue moon to run a generator is no big deal.

3. You stock up on fuel before a storm. Yes, it feels very silly to take an EV to a gas pump.

4. The generator gives you another option for "fueling" your EV. We haven't needed to do it, but in a pinch the cars can be L1 charged from the generator. This essentially turns the EVs into extremely inefficient gas cars (somebody on YouTube did the math on MPG charging EVs from a typical portable generator and it's pretty bad), but it means not having to wait in some long ass queue at the nearest DCFC station that has power restored.

Maybe if it's a secondary car. Can't very well power your house if your car is parked at work.

I've got a Bolt and saw on the Bolt subreddit that some crazy people have rigged up 12V inverters to theirs, which provides roughly 1kW for powering some essentials during an outage. I didn't see the point. I've got a 5.5kW portable generator in my shed, and if there is an outage I'm going to need what juice remains in my car for using it as a car (and to go to gas stations to get fuel for the generator, which always feels a bit silly in an EV).

I suppose it makes sense to have an EV that can provide backup power if you live somewhere with a particularly flakey electrical grid. Where I live, it only really goes out after a major hurricane and then it'll be out for several days. That's a use case more suited to a backup generator rather than tethering your car to your house for up to a week.

The problem is that the typical type of old guys you're referring to also tend to want the old school pricing, and those days ain't coming back. I know someone like this - they'd love a basic body-on-frame pickup truck from back in the day, but they're not paying $30k+ for it.

Yeah, we had it pretty good when you could get a base model Tacoma with a standard tranny and a four banger that couldn't get out of its own way, but damn if it wasn't cheap.

Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

So, how'd you feel if other businesses took the same approach? Let's clutter up the sidewalk with plumbers, electricians and other tradesman riding around in little vehicles that can't go in the road. It wouldn't be long before someone says exactly the same thing I just said for the food delivery companies: if you want to run a business, there's inescapable overhead costs, with one of them being the purchase of vehicles that can legally operate on the roadways.

That's an entirely separate issue. I'm not getting into the socioeconomic can of worms that is job loss due to automation. I simply said the robots shouldn't be on the sidewalks in the first place, which would amazingly also solve the problem of their path being blocked by "protestors".

Nope. When it was Sam Altman doing the whole "You're probably not going to have a job thanks to the tech my company is developing, so here's a pittance as a way of saying oops, my bad." thing, I felt the same way.

Hey kid, I flooded your bedroom but here's a free inflatable pool float you can sit in. We're good now, right?

I have a modest proposal: Let's build factories to manufacture glass panes in less prosperous states and then go around smashing windows to create demand for their products. What could possibly go wrong?