Laws change, interpretations of laws change, enforcement of laws change. Once the data exists in their control there is no clawing it back.

This was prior to DoH / HTTPS ubiquity so public wifi hotspots still had some risk, plus it was a fun toy.

Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

Hypercard + Internet (sort of) = WWW

Hyperscript influenced Actionscript, Applescript and Javascript.

Ahh, the "Mythical Man Three Decades"

Yes! I've been approached by hummingbirds in the wilderness on more than one occasion. I also feed them, and have experienced the "Hi! we're here!" buzz when they first arrive, even though I usually have the feeders out several days before they arrive by monitoring the hummingbird migration map, but they are curious and seemingly interested in us for reasons other than sugar water. I usually get a "See you next year!" buzz before they leave in September too. I've observed them observing me while gardening. I really do wonder what they think about us.

Consider the difference between calling a plumber out at 2am on a holiday vs a regular scheduled appointment -- if you wait until it is an emergency it is going to cost more and the result will be lower quality.

It won't, unless (and that's a really big unless) human coding keeps improving and the LLMs are carefully, iteratively updated to take advantage of the best written code there is. That's not happening, and is increasingly unlikely, IMO.

Ditto for any and all other text-based "machine learning" systems -- unless someone literally starts over building LLMs from scratch, and rather than using any old garbage they scrape off the web or pirated books or whatever, actually train it on well written, well understood (by humans) verifiable basic information that has been hand-selected (or at least classified) for accuracy and (such as can be determined) truth. This is no small task, and would require "Manhattan project" level work, and I don't think anyone wants to actually do that.

Absolutely this. I mean how hard is it to mic the actors saying their lines and bump that up in the mix, or even just make it the center channel, and have a volume for *just the dialogue* -- I used to have a 5.1 setup with a center channel speaker, and had a setup where I had volume control for all 5 audio channels, half the time that worked great, but the other half they didn't bother putting the dialogue full-on in the center channel, so turning that volume up didn't help. I mean WTF?!? It's like they don't *want* us to be able to hear the dialogue?!? Now I mostly just use the speakers in my TV, and often the dialogue audio is actually better than with the hi-fi setup, for whatever reason, but still occasionally can't hear it properly without turning it up uncomfortably loud, even using the "night mode" audio setting. I get that, yes, if you turn the volume up high enough, you can hear the dialogue just fine in most movies and TV shows, but it's sometimes ear-splitting loud at that level, especially for some titles, and sometimes I just don't want that and if you live in an apartment, or someone is asleep in the next room, that's just not an option. It's sometimes so bad that I want to put an audio compressor in the mix, but from what I've read, even that doesn't always fix the inaudible dialog problem. Sheesh.

DRM as in 'flag in the drive firmware saying this is a Synology drive' such that the NAS won't accept non-flagged drives as 'legit'. Same idea as a printer that identifies OEM ink cartridges vs others.

Yeah, you're probably right that it's still not for everyone yet, but with a at least a little up-front configuration support, a lot of people could make the switch now and barely notice, since many people only need a browser and maybe office apps anyway. It's a heck of a lot easier to install, customize and manage a linux desktop now than it was even 10 years ago. Maybe still just out of reach for most non-techies without support, but it's tantalizingly close.

Totally, though my previous win10 image has an old version of photoshop on it, that I have used a few times, and it's totally fine on my Ryzen 5600G (with no other GPU in the system) -- it's nearly as usable as it was running on my (AMD A10) machine natively -- I struggled a bit to get the drivers set up initially, but once I finally got it all hooked up right, QXL seems fine, at least for my needs. I was even able to do some light gaming in the windows VM inside QEMU and the performance was acceptable, though I have those games running under WINE now (Heroic Launcher is super easy) so I don't need that anymore, in fact I don't really need anything in that Windows VM anymore. The only reason I still keep it (it has it's own physical disk that I imaged from my old win box, which I also still have) is "just in case". GIMP 3 does literally everything I need and I was already using LibreOffice on windows, so there's no windows-only software that I need anymore. I'm still not entirely used to Darktable, since Lightroom was actually really nice, but I'm mostly there.

I've been using LMDE 5 (and then 6 since it came out) as my daily driver for a few years now, having been a decades-long (desktop) windows user. Debian gives me warm fuzzies, and Ubuntu decidedly does not, even though it's (for the most part) an adequate OS. I think cinnamon is about as close to perfect as it's possible for a *nix WM to be at this point for a general purpose desktop, especially for soon-to-be windows refugees. I'm about to install it onto a bunch of machines to replace win10 before it goes EOL. It's going to be a vast improvement to my "friends and family" support network.

My prediction is that Windows will become irrelevant as a desktop OS for personal/small business use within 5 years, especially if they stick with their plan of no win11 for like half the PCs in current use on the planet. LMDE (or Debian) will run quite well on most any computer that came preinstalled with windows *7* much less 10.

OEM support for linux is something that I think the PC industry is going to embrace in a big way in the next few years. The list of OEM linux PCs is growing by the day.

I realize there are already a number of linux installers one can download and run from inside windows, but it's too bad there isn't a turn-key solution ready to go that would:

1. Automatically back up all user data on a windows machine.
2. Scan it and make software recommendations based on installed windows software.
3. Re-partition or just image and wipe the boot drive and install whatever flavor of linux on it, leaving the windows filesystem in a form suitable for running in QEMU, for the edge cases where people would lose functionality only available to them in windows.

That's essentially what I intend to do "by hand" to a bunch of machines in the next few months, though most of them won't even need the windows in-a-VM thing, so it'll just be backup/wipe/install.

Ubisoft will argue they didn't cancel the license -- you still have legal permission to run the software, but it just so happens that software you have no longer works because the servers it needs to talk to no longer exist, and they never promised to run them forever.

Totally. '95 was awful, but its startup sound, composed by Brian Eno is a nice sound. Definitely a work of art.