... you very much, and a new wave of notices about price increases are on the way, despite the European (and North American) summer being really easy on the providers with all the solar installed (and not that much A/C use in large parts of Europe).

What? You're not going to advocate for it??? I thought you were invoking some kind of principle or something.

You're down with Russia killing far more Ukrainians, whom they claim are their own people?

You're down with what China's doing to the Uyghurs, whom they claim are their own people?

And while we're on the topic, how many Iranians should we be willing to kill to save them from their leaders? Nuclear extermination would surely do it... do you advocate that?

But maybe it won't take that much. Regime change in Afghanistan only cost 2000 American lives, 175,000 Afghan lives, and 2,000,000,000,000 dollars, but we sure got rid of those sorry... What? They're back in power?

Only the simplest minds think intervention automagically yields the intended result. In fact the current sorry situation in Iran is a direct result of us trying to "fix" things more to our liking in the middle of last century.

So... Should we attack every country that slaughters its own people?

Even if Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever they would still have to jack up prices because the bubble is devouring all the ram.

If "Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever" we (most likely) WOULDN'T HAVE THIS BUBBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE. They're THE most significant investor in OpenAI (certainly the ones that had to proffit the most, by far) and somewhere in the second place as far as hyperscalers go (usually 2, might be 1 depending what metrics you have, what and where you count, install versus growth, etc.), building these datacenters that gobble up everything.

No, they want to "correct" it to harbor only mainstream hallucinations.

It's unclear what Microsoft is hoping for but when this is finally buried I bet it would be a catastrophe that dwarfs their whole Windows Phone shenanigans, when they put into the ground both their mobile OS (coming since well before there were even iPhones) and the whole Nokia's mobile business that they bought and buried. And they managed to do this over the whole "wild west" of days of smartphone introduction and raise.

They just don't get it that Windows is valuable because it's Windows, because all your apps and peripherals just work, not that you need to pester 5 years some developers to build something for your special snowflake OS that runs only on some tiny market share of light premium laptops and nowhere else. People value Windows because they don't even need to think if their old printer or apps work, it's Windows = it works. There won't be good things coming to Microsoft if they insist in breaking this conditioning.

Google learned to embrace, extend and extinguish right out of Microsoft's playbook. They were excellent students and you can see the results in how email and web "standards" work today.

The difference is that when Microsoft did it the authorities eventually started getting in their way to promote more openness and competition again. So far there is little sign that anyone intends to challenge the way a few tech giants have recently been capturing long-established standards that we rely on for what have become vital services and effectively taking ownership for their own purposes. The governments and their regulators are either asleep at the wheel or, if you're a bit less trusting, bought and paid for.

Do you often use VeraCrypt on a company-managed device? I'm sure if you do then it's with the knowledge and consent of your IT department and they'll be responsible for managing any consequences of the VeraCrypt issue according to their official policy as well.

ISP = Internet service provider. Blocking packets is precisely THE OPPOSITE of providing Internet.

i hate the fact that i need to go on ebay and research whether or not the laptop in offers have soldered ram.

You don't need to anymore, anything that's vaguely power efficient in this space is soldered RAM now.

Framework had to go to some ancient and power hungry Intel 13th Gen on their smallest laptop to keep the socketed RAM. And their "desktop" has soldered RAM!

... "reporting". There's nothing harder to keep the limit for X minutes instead of half a minute and not a different concept for "dodging" the tickets. The point is that these being fixed you can just as well speed with confidence anywhere else.

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

Maybe not.

Basically every computer, phone or tablet not only runs some OS that can act as a powerful stateful router/firewall but also has the UI and some workflows specifically designed for that (connection sharing, tethering both wired and wireless, etc.).

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.