US trade with the nation the CCP controls is bad for the US because it gives the enemy economic therefore social and political leverage.

The Cold War never ended. Russia lost the first innings, the US and China (and their respective clients) won. Russian trade is no loss to the US but CCP economic penetration is a danger.

The US trade deficit with the CCP more than buys the entire CCP armed forces. Delink and do business with democracies instead. Any short term inconvenience to the rich elites is a feature not a bug.

Yes, that's not surprising that there's nuance that does beyond the headline. There always is.

Ironically, it's is more of an argument for them. They were not saying there would be no more updates, be them major or minor to windows, but rather than they wouldn't have "numbers" and transition into more of an OS as a service model.

The market doesn't like the sound of that. That's fine, but it's not like if Microsoft stopped numbering their releases they wouldn't be doing the exact same thing: sunsetting older versions of windows and pushing users towards newer supported versions.

I know some people think they should be able to "buy" an OS and stay on it forever, but the internet has rendered that largely impossible. If you want to air-gap your PC and stay on whatever version of Windows you want, go for it, but as soon as you're connected to the internet, they're doing the right thing trying to push people off of codebases that no longer support an economic case for security updates.

I'm an anglophone. I lived in Quebec for 8 years. I work for a company that is headquartered there. I go there all the time.

This is nothing like what Quebec is doing. Don't be a fucking moron.

Virtual machines are the most convenient way to sample a variety of Linux distros on your most performant PC. You can download free prebuilt VM from places like osboxes then if a distro interests you roll your own VM to get comfortable with installing then configuring your system for your use case.

I don't "switch" OS, I add them as it's free and easy to do. Converting old Windows installs to virtual machines is typically easy (and even if you don't use Linux a fine way to back up old Windows installs in an easily accessible manner, for example running Windows 7 or 10 on a W11 host).

No need to wait until a Windows version deeply annoys you when you can run any or many OS on your host OS of choice. Give it a go. It's FUN.

if you drop 1000$ on the ground you watch who picks it up and the person who takes it knows it belongs to you and doesn't belong to them, then you're not out of luck .. it's not really a different set of rules. It's unreasonable to expect people to be able to locate a person who left 1000 sitting in the middle of the street who is nowhere to be found, and it's nearly impossible to prove the 1000 another person has is yours after the fact. On the other side, ATMs have multiple layers of logging, computer and paper trails and cameras. It's relatively easy to prove a) who has it now b) that they shouldn't c) that they know they shouldn't d) to whom it belongs