Are those clauses still valid when the software and support for it are no longer available? Can Microsoft audit me over a copy of Office 97 I bought 28 years ago?

I would hope that removing all consideration for one party by no longer supporting the product the agreement is based on would invalidate said agreement. The balls someone has to have to wash their hands of a product by no longer offering it or supporting it and then trying to audit people are still using it.

Does such an agreement continue to exist once the vendor stops supporting the product? Seems pretty one-sided to no longer provide any support yet still have the right to perform audits. I would hope that such an agreement would be invalidated if it was ever brought to court.

What is keeping these customers from simply ignoring VMware and these auditors?

Some people would rather do anything in the world than pay attention to the road while they're driving. And it seems like police have completely given up on enforcing any traffic laws.

These are just copies. Unless you raise the animal in the exact same way under the exact same circumstances, there are likely to be variations in their personality and behavior. They also might not even look exactly the same as their coloration/pattern may still be different due to X-chromosome inactivation.

Essentially a virtual machine; a software implementation that mimics the hardware and "software" of the human brain within a digital space. Now of course that is currently impossible, and a large part of why is that many aspects of the human brain are still a black box to us. It is possible that some day we will not only understand every complex chemical and electrical interaction within the human brain down to the atomic level, but we'll also be able to emulate it digitally. If we were to reach that point, I don't really see why we wouldn't be able to copy the exact structure and all the contents of someone's brain. Perhaps the process would be destructive to the original organic brain like in We are Legion (We are Bob) or Pantheon.

And Texas just completely banned THC despite over 60% of residents wanting it to be legal for recreational use, because governor Sitler wants Texas to be a nanny-state.

Rome was on top of the world over 1000 years. The British empire was around for almost 400 years.

A billion people is plenty and at that level, the strain on the planet is low enough that people back then seriously thought it was impossible for a species to go extinct (like God would just conjure up some more elephants if needed).

We hit 1 billion humans in 1805. The last claimed sighting of a Dodo was reported in the hunting records of Isaac Johannes Lamotius in 1688.

They'd have to ban the entire internet. As of today, how difficult is it to rent a VPS in another state and set it up as a VPN? I imagine if Texas were to ban VPNs there would be plenty of essentially one-click options released the next day.

All it takes is one kid to figure it out and start selling USB drives full of porn in hidden TrueCrypt partitions at school.

I know we don't, and I think it is fucking stupid. Republicans can pretty much do whatever they want because conservatives will keep voting for them over Democrats regardless of what laws the pass. It just funny to me that the party and people who never shut up about small government obviously want a nanny-state and what they really mean by small government is that a select group of people should have control over everyone.

Abbott isn't even half a man. He wants Texas to be a nanny state so instead of putting decisions like this and THC up to the voters through ballot initiatives, he just makes the decision for us. Even if 100% of conservative Texans disagree with Abbott on these subjects, they'll still vote for him over a Democrat. This means shit heads like Abbott can pretty much do whatever they want so long as the gerrymandering keeps Texas red.

Each year, about 45,000 people in the USA are killed by gun violence. [everystat.org]

For context, over half of those are suicides.

Oh look, another stupid dipshit...