Is this any different than when Linus Torvalds takes a patch for the Linux kernel from Microsoft?
You can take money from others with differing views on Free Software (this is still /. right?) just so long as it doesn't influence your views and judgements. This is different from "political donations" (perhaps better understood as "political investments") which seek to altar a person's actions and positions based on money paid.

Microsoft (as Dr. Evil): Unless you update all your computers to Windows 10 Chancellor Merkel, you have to pay us one meeeeelion dollars.

Then a henchmen informs Dr. Evil that $1 million is not really very much money any more -- and this is even less than that. The salaries and benefits of maybe 8 people? The chancellor's retinue for Davos this week probably cost more.

Generally when Linux slows to a crawl, the OS has a poor time distinguishing between different tasks running through the desktop which all need to communicate with the X11 library. Once one task goes rogue, its interaction with X means that other tasks performances are going to be shoddy. There are two good solutions. First, you can hit Ctrl+alt+f2 through f6 to get to a virtual terminal. Since it has no interaction with the X11 library, it's quite speedy once you are able to log in. A second solution is to SSH into the machine from another machine and the same speed and technical reasoning applies here as well.

..welcome our new Facebook overlords. /., for its part, gets its chumbox from Taboola. So despite having ads disabled, I can still read about the 3 dangerous foods to feed my dog or the Dr. Marty ProPower Plus Supplement.

The attack vector is Outlook + a Windows box. This particular vector has been around for at least 25 years -- with lots of noises coming out of Redmond saying "We'll fix the problem", some hand waving, and the problem continuing. Sure, there should be backups, but maybe you could try using Free Software for you email stuff instead? At least stop using Outlook on Windows? If you have a particularly technically illiterate person, buy them a Mac and watch with glee as they try to open viruses programmed for Windows.

Sorry, was going to mod you insightful, but the mouse hit and I went redundant instead. Replying to undo my mod:)

The original iMac was criticized for not having keyboard, printer, or mouse ports -- just USB. My 2019 MacBook Pro's 4 USB-C ports might end up working out in few years as USB-C replaces the irreversible and bulkier last gen version -- HDMI's already obsolete as it can't run a 4K display. That said, I totally miss my 2011 MacBook Pro's (RIP) SD/HDMI/Ethernet ports.

Communism and Fascism are both fig-leaf authoritarian governments. Mao, Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot ruled as dictators who put a bullet through the brain of anyone who tried to oppose them politically.

Democrats were more than happy to argue with Obama during his 8 years as president -- the rancor and dissent may look messy but it's evidence that we're a democracy. To the extent that the party in power has been unwilling to constrain executive overreach, they enable dictatorship.

Our system of government was founded on a system of checks and balances which is why wer'e different than both fascists and communists. But it only works if we use them.

3) An old release of MATLAB that I purchased as a student, which doesn't require Internet activation.

I've been using Matlab on Linux for ~20 years on and off. Why not use the Linux version?

I'll bet a lot of people who returned the wallet were expecting some kind of reward -- I certainly would give one if my wallet returned to me.

If you have $10 in your pocket, the reward probably won't be great. If you have $100 in your wallet, it shows you probably can afford to pay pretty decently.

Just my 2 cents

The world doesn't need our solutions it needs our discretion and self-restraint as a species.

Totally agree, which is why this is important. Most large animals (i.e. megafauna) are extinct because of humans. Bringing back the European lion, the woolly mammoth, or the Tasmanian tiger is just hitting the "undo" button on actions we took in the past. Drawing the line at "things we hunted to extinction" makes sense to me.

Slack is great, but I don't understand how a fancy IRC client that somehow managed to take over a gig of memory is worth $16 billion.

What's to keep you from buying an off-the-shelf SSD and installing it? I did it with my 2011 MacBook Pro a few years ago and had a minor issue which Apple Support was happy to address without charge. This was always the case with the Mac Pro pre-trashcan days.

FWIW, before Apple's obsession with soldering everything on the motherboard, people used to buy the default configuration and add more RAM or a better GPU later. This looks to be the case again.

I think $6K might be reasonable for upgraded version -- 28 cores and 1.5 TB of memory -- but certainly not for this machine. I know several people who build hackintoshes for Hollywood professionals (and get paid for it) as their Steve Jobs "Trashcan" Mac Pro (yep, that's the last time it was updated) and I'm sure for whoever is making the new Star Wars movie the cost of this will be a rounding error.

Currently, the *only* advantage of the Epic store is the smaller cut it takes from devs out of every sale. If the Epic store succeeds in any meaningful way, Valve simply knocks down the cut they take. Epic, meanwhile, has a lot of catch-up to do with Valve in terms of development which could take months or years. Valve reducing their cut would take days at most to implement.

Competition in this area is good so I do hope devs get more of a cut. I am entirely unsure of what Valve is doing to earn its 30% -- they certainly aren't making many new games.