Ah yes, this moral panic is totally different than all the other times people have been whipped into a frenzy by an almost bon existent problem.

We have real problems to solve. I'll leave the fake ones to people like you.

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

Oh good, another moral panic. If people aren't terrified every waking moment of their lives, someone hasn't done their job.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

By definition, they are operating within the borders of Canada, as they have offices here, operations here, data centers, here, and customers here. Even if they didn't have one square foot of property here, they would still be operating here since they have customers here.

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.

Facebook offers services, some free, some paid, to citizens of Brazil so yes, their activities can be legislated.

This is where his supporters on /. tell us that voting for Harris would have been voting for foreign wars...

That just about sums it up. Moving drivers into user land definitely reduces the attack surface. As it stands, antivirus software in most cases is essentially a rootkit, just one we approve of because that low level access allows it to intercept virus activity at the lowest level. With a microkernel, nothing gets to run at that level anyways, so microkernels are inherently more secure.

Traditionally the objection to microkernels was they were slower, since message passing has a processing cost in memory, IO bandwidth and CPU cycles. In the old days where may you had a couple of MB of RAM, or even 8 or 16mb of RAM (like my last 486), with 16 bit ISA architecture and chips that at the high end might run at 40-60mhz, a microkernel definitely was going to be a bit more sluggish, particularly where any part of that bandwidth was being taxed (i.e. running a web stack), so Windows and Linux both, while over time adopting some aspects of microkernel architecture (I believe Darwin is considered a hybrid), stuck with monolithic architecture overall because it really is far less resource intensive.

But we're in the age when 16gb of RAM on pretty high end CPUs where even USB ports have more throughput that an old ISA bus, that I suspect it may be time to revive microkernels.

Yeah, but what about this 5g transmitters in the vaccine? Sure, your cancer is cured, but then you're under mind control of China and may even have an unquenchable desire for sex selective surgery so you can go into women's washrooms...

He's just a plain nut job. I doubt even he has any kind of meaningful political affiliation. He's just deranged.

Well, at my workplace we're opting out of the game entirely. Other than a few machines that require Windows for accessibility or specialized apps, we're moving over to Linux. I test-ran a few different distros, and settled on Debian 12. With a few images and Clonezilla and a bootable USB stick, I've started eliminating Windows 10 from most machines. There's some training that needs to occur, but so far nothing has exploded.

We have perfectly good machines that even if we wanted to upgrade (which we don't), would basically be thrown out, and this dude won't abide that.

I've recently started looking at my power consumption on a 15-minute graph, and it turns out that power usage isn't all that much less during the night. In fact, at times it is higher because all the lights are turned up. But even at night, there's the fridge and freezer, the house electronics, security cameras, etc.

Turns out the stuff I need for work - a notebook and an external screen - barely register.

Yes, and different inverters. I've got a very small solar array, and the micro-inverter on it doesn't even work if it can't find the main power grid to sync to.

A battery will get you over some power grid outage, but not totally off-grid.