If you want some more feels, from what I understand it is based on a [spoiler filled link!] mostly autobiographical short story. How's that for a punch to the gut?

I'll see your LHX and raise you older (and slightly better received) Strike Fleet. I have good memories of watching both, back in the day.

Although I see that LHX was developed & published in-house, Strike Fleet was apparently developed by LucasArts and published by EA. IIRC, Strike Fleet fit entirely on a single 360kB floppy for MS DOS and a double sided C=64 diskette. I also didn't realize the main programmer behind LHX went on to make Chuck Yeager's Air Combat one year later.

The Hot Coffee lawsuit was mostly about temperature - the coffee temperature was routinely over 190F or 88C, so when the cup was spilled the person got immediate 3rd degree burns, requiring skin grafts. Cotton pants also held the moisture close to her skin. And yes, the car did not have cup holders.

Now, as for the wisdom of putting a hot cup of coffee between your knees near to one's sensitive parts, that's another matter.

Like someone else stated earlier, this didn't hold up on appeal, and lawyers will end up with most of it. Doctors and caregivers received the rest in this example.

If it were 10 years ago in the BIOS days, I'd agree wholeheartedly with you. Lately, though, with UEFI - not so much.

There's some newer Acer laptops out there that will maintain your battery's charge only, but won't let you charge on Linux (until the machine is powered off). It'll even charge while Linux is loading up, but once Linux is running steady state - charging is disabled. Also, your built in and/or discrete video card(s) is/are watt-limited (aka Max-Q v Max-P or whatever the equivalent AMD terms are). There was even a speed issue initially, but that was worked out within six months or so.
Some Lenovo laptops out there that will not allow battery usageat all if you are using Linux. If you unplug or there's a blip in the power, the machine is off. You can tell Linux to lie to the ACPI layer and proclaim the machine is running Windows, but UEFI somehow knows better. Maybe there's something in the UEFI driver in Windows that tell the UEFI to enable these features.

Lately my experience has been more with laptops, because miners are making it cost prohibitive to purchase PCs with reasonable gaming capabilities. What is absolutely maddening is that most laptops are more or less the same model (Clevo?) with tweaked UEFI to make running Linux or older copies of Windows difficult.

So let me back up a bit. I will agree with your primary assertion - it is not hard to install the Linux of your choice. Running it with all the features of the hardware that you paid for - such as video performance, battery usage/entitlements, processor speed - well, that is a horse of a different color.

So, this is like those Verified "green-status-bar" (Extended Validation?) certificates back in the day, which were triple the cost of a standard certificate, but for email? Also, no support for Let's Encrypt, either. I wonder if the VMC will require a EV certificate as well?

Wait, we're already on the Extend phase? I thought we were still in the Embrace stage. I guess I'm behind. It's nice that they are giving us a bit of warning that the future of network transparency is over RDP and not network transparent Xorg.

Has anyone checked for RDP patents? That, and the ARM (well, non-x86) locked/signed Windows bootloader nonsense might be where the Extinguish phase takes off. Carrot: cheap(-er/-ish) hardware, stick: lawsuits.

Agreed. Anyone remember 3com from the late 90s? They were the gold standard in networking cards. The 3c905 (or 3c920 integrated) was one of the best network cards on the market at the time, and they had full driver support for every OS under the Sun. Then, HP buys them, and BOOM, they are flushed them straight down the toilet. The 3c905 never (officially) recieved 64 bit Windows XP drivers, and so they fell into relative obscurity.

Interestingly, the cards do still work well with some versions of 64-bit Linux. Not Fedora or RHEL, they've been jettisoned there - too old, say RedHat. Some people say they can get certain 64-bit RealTek Windows drivers to work with certain revisions of the 3c905, which makes me wonder if that's where the 3com NIC tech actually went.

This is nothing about Intel. It's about wresting control from power users and server admins. By MS's own OEM rules, Secure Boot must be force enabled - with no way to be disabled - for non-x86 setups. Doesn't matter if its laptops, desktops or servers. I'm sure Google is looking into doing the same thing with its Chromebooks (ARM + locked/signed bootloaders). Only blessed Linux distributions that pay the MS signing tax will be allowed to play, probably on ultra high end 'developer'-class hardware. I hear your counter argument - "What about backwards compatibility?" - well, Qualcomm has an x86 emulator, and I'm sure they'll allow sideloading for a little while. They did eventually learn from Windows RT. At some point, though, Windows S will be the only Windows there is. As an added bonus, they can start putting a "freshness/expiration" sticker on the laptops, so they can drop them after 1 to 3 years without any worry of retribution. You shouldn't expect more than 3 years out of that $1200 laptop, right? After all, your disposable phones cost about that much.

Valve, it may be time to resurrect your Steam Box plans again! Assuming the x86 emulator works well enough, you can have an Arm version as well. Uh, wait...

Why not just do individual emails? Then the customer's privacy is respected, and it is less likely to be filtered out as SPAM. Having no one in the To: field and only recipients in the BCC field would quite likely get it marked as SPAM as well.

I'm also curious about the configuration of their mail server that allows 500+ recipients in the to: field in one email. Unless the script writer was clever, and broke the To: list into $server_limit - 1 sized chunks. Ah, looks like the server limit of email was 1,000 in the To: field, according to a unhappy Coil user on Twitter.
So, Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook limits the To: field to 500 recipients, so it must be an OnPrem mail setup. Assertion failed: their MX record shows their mail server points to Google, so I checked - the G Suite allows up to 2000 additional recipients in the To: field. I suspect that the sending server is using Postfix allows up to max 1000 users in the To: field, so can we gather that their email blast server is running Ubuntu or CentOS 7+, then?

Worse, M.2 is just a connector, which sometimes means SSD or PCIe. Laptop and desktop makers are notoriously bad about stating precisely which M.2 standard their slots support. They'll crow about having one or more M.2 slots though, while remaining coy about what they really support. I have an Acer laptop with - 2 M.2 slots, one PCIe, and one SSD, the M.2 PCIe slot occupied by a smallish drive. When I upgraded to another, more sizable M.2 PCIe, I was dismayed to find out I couldn't use the original M.2 unit in the second slot. Had to sell it. Larger capacity M.2 SSDs of quality are a bit hard to find as well.

Also dismaying is the disabling of certain nice laptop features in Linux (i.e the battery won't charge at all and the CPU and GPU are throttled). Now, I'm not certain if that is caused by a broken ACPI implementation or if it is because Secure Boot is being bypassed, but it is concerning to me that laptops are becoming less usable as Linux machines.

I'm glad you brought up Apple CUPS. Michael Sweet has deprecated support for PPDs and RAW print queues going forward, and the only printers supported must use Internet Printing Protocol v2 (IPP2). There was some hand-waving about printers needing better reporting properties and raw queues being too difficult to manage.

It sounds like he's working on another project, LPrint to provide IPP2 hooks to older driverless printers as a workaround. It won't help for PPD based printers, but it should for impact and thermal printers.