I wonder if we will see Disney pushing hard for copyright law changes as a result of this.

This is one of the downsides of the infrastructure as a service model of computing. You're entirely relying on the reliability of a third party. These big cloud providers are, I fear, a heartbeat away from big failure.

The days of America leading the world in technology development are over now. China is now emerging as a leader, a vanguard in technology. We are too busy in-fighting politically and China has taken advantage of this. I am not surprised that the "Middle Kingdom" and world' number 2 economy is overtaking us.

I remember Lotus 1-2-3 from back in the days of the PC AT. Lotus 1-2-3 was an incredibly reliable and high performing spreadsheet application, truly a groundbreaking piece of software. Fast forward to today, and alas, Lotus is relegated to history. However, Excel, Lotus' replacement, is chock full of problems and bloat. With computing resources being virtually limitless and very inexpensive, no software company seems to care about efficient code anymore. In fact, a profit model has grown up around lousy software and selling support contracts. Furthermore, software is designed around planned obsolescence.

When computing resources were precious, the quality of code was indeed much better because a lot of care had to be taken when writing software. I remember in the days of 8088 and 80286 processors software just didn't crash. I remember my father's business computer, an IBM PC-AT clone that used to see months of uptime without a reboot. it just didn't fail .... period. Fast forward to today, and software is just about always crashing for one reason or another. With computing resources being a relatively cheap commodity, there's just no emphasis on code quality. Even worse, the software companies have figured out that selling expensive support contracts with lousy software is even more lucrative. An entire profit model has sprung up arounbd releasing beta (or even alpha) quality software on the end user and then making money off of them being guinea pigs. They then release patches that fix individual bugs while often introducing new ones. Imagine if our cars kept stalling out for no good reason at all; no reason why we would accept this. So why do we accept rubbish software?

Let's just say I am highly skeptical of this!

Just use DNS.

I am with you on this! Enough IPv4 already.

IT professionals are often the ones warning about problems. The people they're warning are often simply MBA types that have absolutely no knowledge of how software and computer systems work. Moreover, they have no interest or inclination towards learning anything about that. MBA types see everything as a fucking balance sheet. As long as IT professional's warnings never get heeded or are seen as cost-benefit analyses, then they should not be held responsible.

I think you've summed up my feelings succinctly. Thank you for that.

Eh, no thanks. I have 0 interest in COBOL or even JCL for that matter. I know that if you're good in both, you can command quite a salary.

I have hit JavaScript fatigue. It seems no matter what tutorial I find, I just cannot get my head wrapped around it. Its syntax makes no sense to me whatsoever. I am about to try one more tutorial from javascript.info and if I cannot get my head wrapped around it, I am finished. I can program in Java and a little in C++ so I should be able to pickup JS but I am failing. :(

Cable TV has long been overpriced and outdated. I don't know why, with modern IP TV services, there is not true a la carte pricing. Of the channels offered, there are perhaps 5 that I watch. I don't care about the others. I wish there could be an offering like 0.25 per channel. I would pick the channels I want and forgo all of the ones I don't. The Cable TV industry has long been one that is absolutely ripe for disruption. Currently, the best offering is Philo TV with a flat rate of 20.00 per month and over 50 channels. It works better than SlingTV and AT&T. But even with Philo, the most I ever watch is just the 5 channels that I am interested in: Discovery, ID, NatGeo, NatGeo Wild, SyFy, and History.

I use OpenBSD for just about everything. And in the single use case where I cannot, I use a non-systemd Linux distro. If you ask me, systemd is a godawful kludge that should never have been allowed to replace Sys V. That much said, I still prefer the BSD init system but at least both BSD and Sys V is not some huge, monolithic mistake that systemd is.

I definitely hope it dies because weakening encryption makes it easier for nefarious actors to break it. Nothing good comes from weakening encryption. I use OpenBSD so I have little to worry about from the government. Everything I use is OpenBSD powered. Still, if a bill like this goes somewhere and becomes law, I could be arrested for using an open source product with strong encryption.