I've never linked my PC to a Microsoft account and don't plan to. It's all operating system not a social media account

My copy I lost the key that came with my disc ~15 years ago so it thinks it's a pirated copy. Thanks microsoft. I only have windows installed to play steam games.
 
Luckily Valve has their own branch of Wine, Proton:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
 
And apparently many/most games support running on Proton these days. I'm sorely tempted to just yeet windows once and for all.
 
I will upgrade my computer when I feel like it, thanks. On my "gaming pc" I visit like, 6 websites (gmail, steam, slashdot and a handful of others) and use Steam, security updates are nice but I'm not at enormous risk, and if anything happens to the PC I'll just wipe it and reinstall anyways. This is my only windows PC at this point, there's nothing to back up.

Home assistants to do things like, set a timer, set an alarm, check the weather, turn "smart" lights on/off, adjust "smart" thermostat can be handled by an open source LLM running on a raspberry pi class device. I suspect offline "home assistants" will start hitting shelves soon enough. Weather or news API is the only tricky thing as there's some cost associated with it; the device might come with a 1 or 2 year free subscription to those services.
 
As soon as those devices become available/reliable, I plan on ditching our google home setup.

Slashdot has been dead for years, but I'm still here to post that BSD is dying.

Rob

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

It also restricts the voice of the youth on political issues. Youth can't vote*, but they can express their opinions, and youth are overwhelmingly liberal until at least age 16
 
*In a handful of cities, including, yes, you guessed it, SF, youth citizens can vote at 16 in local elections, and public high schools are polling stations, so most youth in those areas have already been voting for 2 years before they leave public schools

Why not sanction 500, or even 1000 at a time? 15,000? Let's cast a wide net, and then redact as necessary. This is one of those rare cases where "shoot first, ask questions later" is probably a valid solution.

BBC is worlds better than Fox News and all other cable news. Stop complaining.

I read a bunch and I also really struggled with the first book. I would start a new chapter and it would take me a page to realize we'd skipped forward/back in time, and that the characters were somehow related. I'm american born with no asian heritage, and I found all the names really difficult to follow as well. I thought the plot was good but the translation was awful. I did not bother with books 2 or 3

If subscription was industry standard (as Broadcom is saying it is), and VMWare was defining the industry, then VMWare would have already been subscription-based.

That part of the statement seems wishful. At best.

They all have biases.

Some are far FAR worse, however. Like Fox "News", which admits in court that they're entertainment, not news.

Have you lived in a cave the last 25 years? They have this thing now, it's called "social media"

...Did you mean "Taylor Swift Concert Tickets"?

A fun bit of potential math:
These cars all phone "home" for updates, etc.
Lets say there are 6 primary manufacturers for self-driving car systems.
Lets say there are 200M cars.
Then, a manufacturer could have control systems in ~33m cars.

So, if a malicious hacker group is able to gain control over some of these cars (lets say half of one manufacturer's cars), we could see those cars going for important infra (like power transmission lines) en-mass out of the blue. This could result in significant deaths as we don't have a water or food system that can tolerate widespread extended electrical outages.

That is way less likely with humans. So, yea, more random deaths with humans, but less apocalyptic "oh !)@#" kinds of things with 'em at the wheels too.

I don't know why this got downvoted. In my very-extended "friends group" several husbands died of "suffocation". My grandmother died of covid (otherwise healthy before she caught it) but the official cause was listed as heart failure or whatever.
 
The best way to look at the data is to look at "excess deaths" data, it was significantly above the norm in 2020-21-22 and a big portion of the delta between excess deaths and covid deaths those years, a large part of that is likely covid.