I wouldn't say WARNINGLY. I more or less think he was impressed by Putin's 'strength' and 'savvy' - without explicitly expressing an opinion on the action itself. Kind of like "gee, I wish I had been able to overturn the 2020 election with my lies the same way he's able to single-handedly control the Russian army and promote lies about Ukraine threatening Russia like the Nazis did". Kind of like "having the balls to cheat blatantly on your taxes is 'smart' rather than simply corrupt".

So, in typical form, Trump outed himself one more time as a psychopath. Dog bites man! Not exactly news. Whether CNN spun that is more or less besides the point. The guy is a psychopath - isn't that bad enough?

Well, given that they've already signed up to buy all the gas and oil Russia can supply, it wouldn't appear Xi cares too much what the world thinks of his business partners. I imagine the Chinese (or US) currency China uses to pay for their hydrocarbons will have more value than Rubles - though I don't know how it'll get into the hands of customers for Lenovo products.

He definitely spoke admiringly about Putin's 'savvy'. I have no doubt that he didn't begin to talk about outrage and atrocity until he saw how his true feelings played. And if Trump's stopped fawning over Putin, it doesn't appear Tucker has. He's not fawning, exactly - just musing that maybe America should be more like Russia...

The problem isn't so much what content is there on Facebook - it's the way Facebook decides what to show you. You'd think the whole point of social media would be to have your friends suggesting content - and a minuscule fraction of what's in peoples' feeds is just that. But most of it is paid content - much of which is not flagged as such - calculated to keep you on the site looking at more paid content - also not flagged as such.

And in the most egregious case, posts will be labeled " likes ". As in your cousin likes American Express". There must be some grain of truth to justify this - i.e., my cousin must've clicked 'like' on some American Express ad - but the distinct implication that he 'liked' the ad I'm being shown is an out and out lie.

Not sure what shape a law would have to be to deal with this problem, but it's definitely a problem when a site calling itself 'media' is presenting you with such a distorted, manipulative view of the world in which ads, propaganda and your cousin's cat pictures are all presented with equal weight and not clearly labeled as what they are.

Well, that's the optimistic POV. But since Microsoft is currently in the mode of trying to copy / take over successful cloud operations, I'm more inclined to see this as a way to leverage X-box market share and X-box 'exclusives' (some obtained via multi-billion dollar acquisitions, no less) to develop what will ultimately be a subscription-based cloud gaming platform - rendering dedicated gaming hardware largely obsolete while securing a nice recurring revenue stream.

That alone wouldn't be (too much of) a problem. X-box isn't a monopoly, though they certainly gained market entree by leveraging the PC gaming platform they controlled. Still, why do they need to own game developers other than to steer users of those games wherever they want them to end up. And why should they be allowed to do that. I'd have a similar problem if Sony were to buy this studio. Sony does some in-house game development, but they didn't buy their way into that (or did they - I'm not sure).

Maybe a better comparison would be Google, since Stadia is the cloud service MS is targeting here. Google's a distant 3rd (or 4th) in gaming, so they're not gonna be accused of monopoly leveraging. But I have no doubt that MS saw Stadia as a potential end run around their X-box hardware business, and in typical MS fashion, turned on a dime to throw money at fending off the threat by cloning it...

How is that an answer? So, in addition to reducing native implementations for competing game platforms, they also get to shore up their cloud-based platform. Two monopolization birds with one stone...

Okay, I guess blockchain potentially solves the problem of everyone you buy something from creating their own dossiers on you. And that's worth solving, I guess. But at the cost of creating a whole new ransomware for hire industry? No thanks. The same trust could be accomplished with government-issued blockchain currency, without having to consume huge amounts of electricity in the process. Even if you're not a criminal, you may not 'trust' the government to know what you're doing, but if what you're doing is legit, they probably know about it anyway. And I suppose laws could be passed to prevent some kinds of government tracking of purchases using their blockchain currencies.

Bitcoin and the like also intended to create 'actual tradable value' as opposed to government-issued fiat currencies 0 backed by nothing but government promises. Sounds nice for the gold-standard obsessives out there, but it really just creates the current pyramid scheme, the endgame for which will be an unstable future currency - once the 'market' determines how much bitcoin it needs in circulation. Not a battle I, for one, care about fighting.

Did I criticize the good things they do? I criticized their anti-competitive behavior - that's a bad thing, IMO.

MS is just a corporation that happens to hold monopoly power (yes, still) over desktop computing. I.e., not just a corporation. The investment of too many corporations on some critical piece of WIN32 software - not to mention 'standardizing' on MSOffice and Outlook, insures that that monopoly has and will continue to endure. There was no reason in hell that Microsoft had to build its own Chromium-based browser, but it did. Okay, there was a reason - to grab some share of Google's spyware business either for the money or to hurt Google's marketshare and boost the share of their competing search and other Google clones. Sleazy, but probably legal - and maybe even 'ethical' use of the Open Source codebase. But their moves to make not using Edge as hard as possible - and to force new products on to Edge users - are not legal moves for a monopoly holder. Hopefully, the DOJ will move quicker this time than before, but I'm not counting on it. So all we have is whatever stink we can raise.

I'm guessing that the 'remedies' for their past monopoly exploitation have expired just in time for Windows 11 to come along and start making mischief again. Their goals at this point seem a little more benign, but only a little.

1. They've read the writing on the wall. Linux is the server (and mobile) OS of choice, and the web browser is the desktop API of choice. Nothing they do can reverse that.
2. OS's are a commodity item. Nobody's going to pay $100 to upgrade from whatever version of Windows came on their PC to something newer.
3. Advertising can make more money than software sales.

So. Windows is now about
1. Maintaining the desktop monopoly, without which they have nothing. Hence 'free' upgrades, WSL so linux devs don't flee to linux desktops.
2. Using the desktop monopoly to 'win' back browser market share and attempt (once again) to steal Google's business.
3. Using some combination of Office and the new Chrome laptop clone to make sure that as the industry moves toward thin clients, Microsoft's core monopolies remain in place - though their future profits may come from other technologies (Bing, Azure, gaming) supported by those monopolies rather than the monopolies themselves.

Do you really think Epic would have 'picked a fight' over the app store if Apple didn't price gouge them for using it? The problem isn't Apple's control of what apps can run on their platform. They have a point about providing an extra level of security and convenience for iPhone users. The problem is subscription services having to pay an extortionate 30% ongoing fee for 'using' the app store - when there is no alternative available.

My point is that they could do it, and this 'mishap' hints that, if they could get away with it without alienating developers that are not locked in yet, they probably would.

Except that the 'proprietary' approach to 'embracing' open source is to release the bulk of your package as open source, but retain a crucial piece as proprietary - with the option to make that piece more crucial at whatever time you think being open source has outlived its usefulness. You either tie the OS part to a tool like VS, or in a more extreme case, you fork the original into a closed source version and walk away from the OS version.

If the Open Source version of the project has truly developed a critical mass community of maintainers, that can be survived. But if, as with .NET, it's only got a critical mass of users, well, then to paraphrase a particular fool from a while back: "fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - er, uh... won't get fooled again".

George Orwell couldn't have come up with better terms than "post truth" and "retruth".

Interestingly, it's reached 65K on the heels of the news that Sinclair Broadcasting was hit with a Russian ransomware attack. Guess the 'market' demand for Bitcoin got a bump from that...