And if you look up tech support on this, it's all unrelated nonsense tips. Even in the official sources it doesn't go much beyond turn it off/on, reset the settings, reinstall the app or reinstall the OS. While this might "solve" stuff, it doesn't fix the core issue and the issue might re-occur without a fix. Why go through all the trouble of wiping and reinstalling, if there is often a very focused and simple fix that truly solves the issue. But Microsoft has started making it harder for users to have ownership over their systems for years now. Keep your users dumb, then you can control them.
This is super dumb, it's the same logic all those movie studios used to have the government crack down on piracy (destroying our rights in the process). Just because someone uses an alternative, does not mean that company has lost anything. It doesn't mean it was a sale and that sale was removed by the alternative. If the alternative wasn't available, the sale might have been there, but it might also have not, there is no way of knowing (and my instinct is most of the time there would not have been a sale).
For example with movies, just because someone pirates the movie, doesn't mean they would have gone to see the movie in theaters. They could have for example not bothered watching the movie (most likely), since they deemed it not worthy. They might have waited to watch it till it aired on TV or for cheap on a streaming service. Or might have watched it with friends on a streaming service for example.
And with software, just because someone uses GIMP doesn't mean they would have bought Adobe tools instead. For example they might have simply not done the thing, if it costs money they wouldn't have bothered. Or they might have used one of the dozens (if not hundreds) of alternative tools. They might have paid someone else to do it, who might already have the Adobe tool, so not an extra sale for Adobe there. Or they might have used butterflies to change air currents, which focus down cosmic rays to directly flip bits on their computer to edit the image (C-x M-c M-butterfly if you are using Emacs).
Fun fact, we do not just orbit the galaxy in a circle, we also have a motion perpendicular to that circle. We oscillate up and down through the plane of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is super thin, like super ultra thin. If the Milky Way were a pancake, it would only be the thickness of a sheet of paper, a sad pancake indeed. However in terms of human scales it is still huge, so we have a large way to travel. Our galactic orbit is tilted as compared to the galactic plane, so throughout the cosmic year we move up and down as compared to the center. A motion of 100-200 light year, so pretty big. That orbit also has procession, so we move through different parts.
The galaxy itself is also moving, although at that scale it's easier to think of the galaxy to be stationary and other galaxies moving towards or away from us. In general we are all moving towards a galaxy cluster known as "The Great Attractor" as it is the most massive (except for your mom).
It's also often forgotten that our sun isn't the only star moving in the galaxy. All of the stars orbit the galaxy in a lot of different orbits. And some don't orbit at all, instead moving with escape velocity (or faster) to get flung outside of our galaxy. Some have their own orbit in companion dwarf galaxies that in turn orbit our own galaxy. It's easy to think of a galaxy as a fixed thing, with all the stars in the same place moving together like on a disk. But this isn't the case at all, stars aren't bound together and can follow their own path. Over time their relative positions change and the constellations we know won't exist anymore.
The structures we see in galaxies like spiral arms for example are only structures in the same way a wave in the ocean is a structure. It is clearly a thing that exists, with properties we can at least somewhat constrain (like size for example). But the water inside that wave is just water like everywhere else. At one point it's part of the wave and then at some point it no longer is. It's the same for stars, sometimes part of a structure, other times not (although it gets complicated quickly if you dig into the details)
I've never not seen that happen? It's probably to prevent fraud and a lot of the time it's just old people who fumble the payment and need actual assistance?
As long as the store person there can reset it remotely for me it's fine, then I don't have to wait and they don't need to come over.
I think it's different when the payment times out, I've had that happen when the payment terminal crashed for no reason. Then it automatically resets back, so you can try again. But a failed payment is different from a rejected payment.
The other day the payment wasn't approved for me (broke AF). The terminal beeped, the checkout counter went to a "Please wait for a representative" screen and the tower next to my checkout station went blinking green.
Luckily a very nice lady from the store yelled from her workstation if I needed help. I said I didn't, just broke and needed to use another card. She reset my counter with her terminal and I was good to go. But it definitely feels like you did something really wrong.
Not as bad as running through the checkout without paying tho. I saw a man with his daughter of about 5 or 6 I think. She had one of those kid carts and tried to run out as the father was trying to pay for the sandwiches they were buying. All of the alarms went off, flashing lights, beeping gates, audible alert, the whole shebang. The kid got really scared as everyone just laughed as the father said: Hold on honey, we actually need to pay. The staff could easily disable the alert, but had to manually reset the gates. They needed to call it off on their headsets as well and two times staff came running to check if everything was alright. That's not a mistake the kid will make in the future I bet.
Yeah this is called AI washing. Basically firing people, outsourcing all the jobs, stripping a company till there is nothing left. The goal is to maximize profits till the company is basically dead and then sell the husk. Because it's done under the AI label, customers and other interested parties see it as being innovative and not just money grabbing.
Is this the most bizarre tech? These things seem lame as hell to me. Except for the knife, that's cool. I've seen those ultrasonic cutters used in hobby and industry and those work well. Using them in the kitchen I don't know about, especially given the price, but still a cool thing.