He bragged about being the second largest Dem donor, and claimed (with no evidence) that he gave to the GOP anonymously or something like that. Which, doesn't exist. He bought Democrats, which is what wealthy people do.

It's because the government has decided that basically every punishment besides prison is "cruel and unusual", so prison is it. It's insane, really. Nobody benefits from someone like him being in prison and there are other ways to punish him. Release him to the world, make him work a menial job with no computer access (not even a cell phone) for the rest of his life, have the court take all of his paychecks and give him enough to eat and pay rent, with any excess going to his victims. He can then be an actual productive member of society instead of a burden, and there's no chance of him reoffending.

There's a handful of solutions that can be made to work entirely locally. Home Assistant is a smarthome control system that's very customizable and open source, and works completely locally. With some care in picking smarthome components you can get ones that don't require a cloud connection and work locally with an open API, but those can be few and far between for some use cases and there's been a few issues where companies have locked down/closed down their formerly open APIs or local endpoints on their hardware and required cloud integration. There are plenty of projects like ESPHome that cater to DIYers and things like Z-Wave and Zigbee sticks for DIY mesh networks but if you want, say, a smart stove or microwave or whatnot your options are a lot more limited.

The voice stuff is a little harder - there are some projects like Willow that are completely locally hosted but it's still a maturing field. It's been a minute since I checked in on it but it was really only the middle of last year that stuff like that was getting viable. The integrations with Amazon Echo and Google Home (and Apple too, I believe, but I've never personally used it) are very easy and straightforward so it's taken some time for momentum to build and hardware to process it to get chea enough to make it really viable. It should be possible now to build a completely self-hosted, offline smart home but it still takes some care.

If I had to guess, as someone involved in a bunch of security audit junk at his current company - there's probably been a security audit or vulnerability scan on Everything the university offers for download. Some auditor somewhere freaked out that they're offering this 30 year old software for download with visions of some dumbass complaining that they'd downloaded it from them and were liable for their computer getting hacked because they installed this random ancient problem. My company had to clean up some of our internal repos because we had some ancient versions of some of the stuff we use still sitting on them even though we obviously haven't used those versions in years. They were technically there and had vulnerabilities. Alternatively, because of the age and platform of the software, they may not have been able to fully scan and vet the downloads being free of malware. Obviously this is a somewhat silly concern, probably, but the university may want to avoid the slightest chance that someone downloads a fixpack or random utility and just happens to end up with a cryptolocker on their system whether related or not.

I don't know a thing about OS/2 licensing and support contracts, but I guess it's also feasible that the letter of the licenses prohibit distribution of certain IBM fixpacks, updates, drivers, and bits and someone at the university has decided they'd rather not be a potential target, no matter how tiny and insignificant that target would be after 32 years. Sometimes legal jank is legal jank even if common sense says something else.

The main potential usefulness of those kind of skills comes in DOS memory management with conventional memory, high memory, UMBs, XMS, EMS, the EMS page frame, IO ranges... all that crazy DOS stuff that can be a nightmare to sort out and keep running. However, you'd hope they have a hardware and software baseline that isn't changing and the main issue would just be swapping out bits as they fail and maybe cloning HDs as they die (hopefully to something like IDE to compact flash adapters rather than depending on 30 year old spinning rust. Hopefully they have a closet/room/warehouse full of NOS hardware for replacements for this stuff so the baselines don't have to change much.

That said, if they've gotten to the "Buy whatever you can on eBay to keep it running" point of support then having the skills to troubleshoot why the new network card or serial interface card broke the whole system because it turns out it needs to have an exclusion added or moved in the upper memory area to keep from stomping on the EMS page frame because it turns out the new hardware has a hardcoded address range, and some bit of train management software requires EMS so just disabling it entirely isn't an option, then it could be something a lot more involved than just googling alone would really answer easily. I'm a retro tech enthusiast into all this stuff while also having a day job doing a bunch of The Cloud (TM) migration and management tasks and the vast majority of the people I work with, even the more senior and skilled people, would really struggle to get a retro machine up and running even with Google and resources. Especially if it had esoteric, poorly documented controllers or other specialized hardware.

There were a fair number of 486s with PCI, and I believe a single dual 386/486 board with it, but it wasn't super common. It had some limitations compared to later PCI, mostly with voltages and interrupts.

It mostly depends on whether they have a stash of NOS original hardware lying around for replacements, or if they've hit the "Buy whatever you can on eBay and keep it working however you can" level of support.

When they load you into the trains, Iâ(TM)ll be taking photos to feed my Ai so folks never forget.

Until the next generation of you calls for censorship and forced speech.

Misinformation is free expression, comrade.

Several years ago something like this was used for dumping iPod firmware as part of the iPod Linux project. It was even covered on Slashdot at the time. Still a pretty neat hack for getting the firmware out of it.

If I had to guess based on nothing but speculation, this probably basically wipes the driver caches of driver updates/third party installed ones, forcing the system to use included (or maybe only fully vetted) drivers, resets dlls and other libraries to known-good versions and refreshes the WinSxS setup, and maybe resets some core part of the registry. A large part of Windows issues are drivers getting screwed up in some way or system files getting mixed up. Probably something to make sure malware is taken care of too.

You're right though, it does seem like a nontrivial number of issues are application based, so who knows. They may be banking on the idea that a severe enough issue to completely break Windows would also preclude being able to use the function - if it's so broken it won't boot, presumably you can't access Windows Update either.

There were also conversion utilities built into various versions of Windows both to convert FAT16 to FAT32 and FAT to NTFS. There are plenty of videos out there of people upgrading versions of Windows all the way from 1 to 7, 8, 10, 11, whatever is current. It ends up pretty messy by the end but technically works.

As far as memory management, while DOS was a mess by Windows 95 you could get away with not really ever touching it if you didn't want/need to. If you still had some higher-complexity DOS stuff to run you might have to manually mess with it a bit but you could mostly leave it alone.

Part of the big question of current "AI" systems is how much of their output is based on prompts, training, and other inputs from the user(s) vs. something that is clearly directly programmed/manipulated by a person. A person playing a guitar is clearly the direct creator of the music with the guitar as the tool. Synth music is generally created either directly by being played like an instrument, or programmed directly by the musician using programs to specify notes, instruments, lengths, etc. I don't think most people would dispute that the person is the creator in those cases since the output is based on the exact input of the user. Even in the case of somewhat more complex things like 3D printed objects or, say, a fabrication robot that's creating/building things you still have a person/people directly designing something or programming it for a specific output.

"AI" is a little trickier since there's usually more separation. If I tell an AI "Create a musical piece in the style of Mozart" or "Design a machine to lift 50 pounds vertically while maintaining stability" and it comes up with something, who is the creator? The person asking the AI? The people who designed the model? The owners of whatever the model is trained on? The company or person that owns/runs the AI, whether the software itself or the hardware running it? The AI itself? Are the outputs copyright violations of what it was trained on if it was trained on copyrighted material? Or should potential patents be derivative of whatever other patent information it was trained on? If the AI itself can't patent a machine or innovation, then who can or does? Or does it immediately become permanent public domain since there's now prior art, assuming its something that would otherwise be granted a patent? Lots of annoying legal things to work out that may or may not align with common sense, since legal stuff rarely does. We haven't had a lot of precedence established yet about these sort of things.

Lots of good stuff, but you don't actually understand what those "rights societies" do, right?

I'm going to jump in here. I'm a libertarian and an American. This guy absolutely should have his license revoked for his lifetime.

We have an interesting legal structure where I own a piece of property, but my ownership only extends so far vertically. I cannot stop a plane from flying over my house.

But the other side is that folks who fly planes are given great responsibility because they're flying something that can cause a lot of damage on the ground.

Now, I know he was out over the middle of nowhere when he abandoned his plane and he purposely did it out there to minimize the chance of harming someone. But "minimizing" and "eliminating" are two different concepts, and what he did had the possibility to cause great damage or death to someone on the ground.

And he did it solely to get attention online.

So, no, he should never fly again.

Dye packs are used at every bank on the planet. They're not a booby trap because they don't harm the criminal. Mark Rober would be on death row if merely inconveniencing someone were illegal.