I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.

Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?

Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.

Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?

Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.

You are comparing it to a hash, following some extra rules on what the data could be. You have exactly the length of hash before you can reliably count on duplicates (and collisions happen much sooner). In torrent v1, this is SHA-1, which has a 160-bit (or 20 byte) hash. Which means for every single additional random bit, you have doubled the number of possible matches.

If your torrent has an uncommonly small chunk size of 256KiB, that’s 261,144 bytes. Minus the 20 from above, and you have a likely 256^261124 chunks that match your hash. That’s a number so large that Google calls it infinity. It would take you forever just to generate these chunks by brute force, since each would need to be created, then hashed, then the results stored somewhere. Many years ago, I remember someone doing this on CRC32 (32 bits/4 bytes) and 6 byte files. It took all night, and produced dozens of hash-matching files. You’re talking many orders of magnitude bigger.

But then what? You’d still need to apply the other rules on what the data could be. Rules that are probably more CPU-intensive than the hash algorithm.

The one trick that AI might be able to use to save the day is that it may contain in its corpus the original file. In effect, that would make the AI an unlikely seeder.

Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.

OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.

As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.

Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.

I really doubt he will agree to another debate. But the best way for it to begin would be at the beginning, when they thank everyone for making it happen, if she thanked Trump for his donations to her previous campaigns. She wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for donors like him.

It would immediately piss him off for the entire event.

Most people are on multiple platforms. Find them now, while you still can. Save whatever contact info you can for them. You don’t know when you’ll need it, nor why.

You have to keep in mind the scenarios where it will be used. While truly fast charging does exist today (20 minutes or so for 80% charge), that is not widespread, nor is that the way it’s typically done. Level 3 (DC fast charging) is expensive (moreso than gas), potentially detrimental to the battery, and still usually not very fast (an hour at least). As such, you aren’t going to charge at your local gas station the same way you get a fill up today.

Most people use a level 2 charger, either at home or at work. This means it can sit for 8 hours to refuel. Many parking garages have this as well. Level 2 chargers deliver AC directly to the vehicle, meaning you don’t need a lot of infrastructure- just a 240v line and a billing system. This in turn means it’s cheap and relatively easy to install. Sometimes you’ll see these outside of Starbucks or a grocery store, but not especially often. You’ll get ~25 miles of range per hour charging using level 2. But even if you spend 2 hours drinking coffee, or buying groceries, you’ve only added 50 miles of range.

This is where level 3 comes in. It requires some pretty significant equipment (which is part of why they’re always broken), because it has to convert AC into high voltage DC. It also has to chill the cables internally, otherwise they’d quickly overheat from the electricity passing through. But this takes up space that’s probably not really available in the lot.

I am seeing fast chargers now being installed at travel centers/truck stops along major highways. It fits in nicely with regular stops on a road trip for food. I’m also seeing them being installed at most Walmarts, since that’s perfect for grocery shopping.

Around here, that last group has been from Electrify America, which does NOT require an app. They have a standard credit card reader.

In the US, completely unpaid internships are rare. Most are paid, but fairly poorly. There are a few major reasons for this:

You have to meet a lot of requirements for unpaid to be legal, and it all has to be documented.

Internships are a “farm” program- many interns are offered and accept a full time position afterwards. If they were unpaid, they are unlikely to accept.

Minimum wage is an absolute joke everywhere in the country. Why bother fighting it when you can pay as little as $7.25/hour? Even doubling or tripling that makes it appealing to poor college students and the farm program, and won’t cost much.

(Your example would be illegal in the US, and possibly even enforced)

My point was, where do you draw the line? Any answer is equally arbitrary. MS drew it at 8th Gen Intel Core. Would 6th Gen have been the right answer? 3rd? Core 2 Duo? All of them can run Win 10 just fine, and can (at least technically, and for today) run Win11.

I’m only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn’t that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.

The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can’t or don’t, the code will be more compatible.

There also isn’t “any” computer; it’s simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?

While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there’s definitely a line to be drawn.