Lots of actions were taken. This just happens to be the first that had a meaningful outcome within the legal framework. The ACM looked at this, the government contracts committee looked at this, it was subject to a legal battle in the courts, and ultimately a mix of this allowed the BTI to claim jurisdiction at which point they could issue a legal recommendation which the government jumped on basically instantly.

The contract with Solvinity would have ended naturally in a couple of week since it was due to expire on the 6th of August. Moving the contract to another provider was one of the things that was investigated by the government and the estimated duration for this was over a year worth of effort - unable to be done in the timeframe required. The government renewed the contract for 2 years on that basis. This was subject to a court case where citizens sued the government for renewing the contract, but the contract was lawful and reasoning behind it valid.

It's the government services. They have the power over you to begin with. Have another think about this and tell us why you think Peter Thiel should be in any way involved as a gatekeeper between you and your government (while of course skimming your tax dollars from the top).

Wait... are you Peter Thiel? Because that's the only reason I could think for your post.

Pragmatic? The decision was made at the very last minute despite the grave risks having been pointed out months ago. No action was taken. Now they unnecessarily blocked the takeover instead of taking actual pragmatic action. Such as: offering Solvinity to let the acquisition go through, if they are willing to end the contract for this service early, and sell the servers that are already living in a Dutch government-owned data center to a new partner willing to operate them.

"Competing with things in even higher orbits" is exactly what they are doing in this scenario. Round trip to a Starlink satellite with on-board AI compute is less than 100ms. Round trip with older satcom systems like BGAN to a base station is 700-1500ms. This in an environment where regular radio transmissions are highly unreliable, and putting the processor on board is not viable. As I said, it's a niche application, but a real one, and there may be others.

Did they get health benefits like in the Canadian Union?

You may recognise them under their previous name: IBM.

They were a major player from the day they existed. They birthed onto the New York Stock exchange as a privileged nepobaby with a birthday present of 75% of the Fortune 100 business as "existing" customers, an 90000 IBM employees..

Fast? My biggest complaint with it has always been "painfully slow". Was the desktop manager included with the XP drivers? I recall that being entirely separate, and eventually essentially exclusive to the Quadros. I was able to get it installed but had to pull it from Quadro drivers.

Not quite. This was more of an intervention. In fact the discussions over the past 6 months have largely been focused on figuring out how to actually block the sale and on what grounds. The final decision may even be questionable. Initially the competition authority wanted to intervene and couldn't. The lower house attempted and failed. There was an attempt to move the contract but time didn't allow so the contract was extended for a short period. That kicked off a legal fight where the courts also ruled that despite how bad of an idea this was there wasn't really anything they could do to stop it.

The final deciding factor came from the BTI - who investigates business dealings with critical infrastructure providers. Solvinity wasn't considered one since all they had was a contract to provide services, but it wasn't really until that contract was extended due to the complexity of moving at short notice that someone convinced them they have jurisdiction to investigate, and now they've issued a legal opinion that caused the government to intervene on national security grounds.

There was no real process in this review. It was more of an "oh FAAAARK how can we stop this?" process.

To be clear there is a legal mandate but that is only to maintain the data within the country. The issue of potential foreign ownership didn't really come into the existing law in any clearly defined way.

Foreign takeovers don't inject any capital into the economy, they take capital out of the economy by definition. The GDP attributed to Solvinity's operations would be accounted for by a company based in New York.

To be clear, you think it's less terrifying to have a private for profit company gatekeep your connection to government's digitial services?

I use the new one all the time. It gives me control over more things than the old control panel does. And it isn't slow as molasses.

How does this in any way mean that "Nvidia seems to no long[er] want you to have control over your own video card"? Especially since I can now set the clocks without needing some rebranded version of RivaTuner?

And if you prefer a clean, but slower, interface you can still use the old panel.

Are you thinking of the previous incarnation, GeForce Experience? It required a login, but I don't think the "nvidia app" does. I have it updating a driver right now and it isn't logged in.

Yeah, it has a "redeem" option. Big deal. It's faster than the old control panel and has more features. Including those that used to only be available through a manufacturer-branded utility. It also has some ads, but so does the driver installer.

Well, that's an easy one. If your card doesn't support the latest drivers, this does not apply to you. This impacts the GTX 750 (oldest still-supported GPU) and newer.

Though, as the summary points out, the new drivers don't remove the old panel, which can also be installed from the MS store.

I prefer the new one. The old panel is irritatingly slow and has been since it was first released.

And the old one was so damn slow! God forbid you have to click the dropdown to select a specific application's settings.

GeForce Experience was horrible and it forced you to sign in. Ick. The new app doesn't, has gone past feature parity with the control panel, and is just generally better.

I have no idea what the, "Nvidia seems to no long want you to have control over your own video card", bit was supposed to be about.

Well, it doesn't force you to sign in like GeForce Experience did, which is a plus. And it also now has all the features and controls as the old panel, which was slow as hell.