I consider anyone who thinks otherwise an amateur and don't trust their judgement.

I would give some leniance in very special situations where there is a clear, thoroughly planed migration path to FOSS and the problem has very good reasons to require a currently existing tried and true proprietary solution that is cohesive and losely coupled to everything else in the company. Something like that however requires deciders to know what they're doing and those joints usually have their systems under control and can tell a vendor to go and f*ck themselves with confidence if anyone gets pissy or turns up with a fresh absurd future pricing table. Organisations like these usually are 95% FOSS already and basically follow the same rule stated above, for obvious reasons.

Those who don't get 20+ years of this VMWare, Oracle, SAP, whatever sh*t we've been seeing ever since the dawn of time.

Bottom line: Mission critical? FOSS only. Break that rule and I'm getting ready to cash out of your gig ASAP.

Exactly. And Vmware's calculus is that as long as it has a dozen gigantic clients (governments, huge enterprises) that it can charge whatever it wants, then the small fish aren't worth it.

We have bubonic plague infections every year in the United States. Very, very few, admittedly, but it's not like it's been eradicated. So there's still benefit in studying it.

The more I hear about this so-called "SF Democratic Party," the more I'm convinced they don't speak for the majority of SF voters. Seriously. They seem to be some strange, centrist organization that no voters belong to and nobody knows where they get their money from.

lol. Every time someone points out that the USA is just as much of a repressive propagandist as China, some guy gets butthurt and jumps in with some highly specific thing that apparently makes it totally different.

In the USA, the state runs arguably an even bigger propaganda machine. The fact that it's privatised on paper doesn't mean it's not a tool used by the elites and less than is the case in China.

To be fair, given the state of things in the west today, it's hard to argue that end state capitalism is any better for the citizenry than end state communism. It just has better PR.

... for "I want to program for a living.". CS is way more than that, but that was the reason many people chose it. Since AI now can code as good as humans and explain to a human what it's doing, studying CS to program is less of a thing now.
CS and it's"applied math"thing won't go away, but that was less people will study it sounds quite plausible IMHO.

When did this happen? Citation, please.

You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.

What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.

Everybody seems to be complaining ... although that's nothing new. Some people hate Gnome, others hate KDE.

So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good? Cuz we ain't gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop without a UI. Do we all switch to Enlightenment?

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

Your comment is pants.

Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.