Just how do you propose the issue of it spinning round? Anybody inside would, at best, get dizzy, at worst squashed by centripedal forces.

Well what's holding that back is the lack of a "standard PC", a common platform where you can just boot up your OS image and have a basic way to enumerate the hardware so you can actually boot. Essentially that's what the IBM-PC brought the world.

SoCs typically are highly proprietary as every manufacturer wants to do their own thing to keep their customers from switching.

like there's an article in the magazine "mc" about universities ditching MS-DOS and Windows for that new "Public-Domain-Unix" Linux.... ... but that was in the issue 6/94, from 1994.

Windows, in the real world, has been on a steady decline since then, only propped up by OEM sales and it's lower use of ad-blockers boosting up statistics based on that data.

Yeah, but there has been an intense concentration on one thing alone, cars. And that industry is failing. Other industries were killed off deliberately. (think of the wind turbine industry or the solar industry)

Adding to that the current breed of politicians often is post-WWII, people who haven't learned that gift that the constitution is. For them values like Democracy are not as important.

It's getting harder and harder not to.

There's the CDU which has one part that's just corrupt and the other part that wants to erect a pseudo Christian God-state. The differences in opinion to the right-most party are actually very small.

Minister of economy Reiche does her best to to stop the move to renevable spouting nonsense like "'the sun doesn't charge money' is nonsense". The same party essentially killed the wind industry in Germany some years back.

It may not yet be that they shoot civilians on the street like in the US, but it's still rather right-wing.

What we are seeing now is that more and more households with solar are also installing batteries. About 80% of all grid battery storage is now in private households (at least in Germany)... and that's just the part we have data from, many households are probably just to lazy to register their batteries.

Those households then will store their self-harvested energy in the batteries, using it, particulary, when dynamic electricity prices are high, thus lowering the demand at times when supply is low.

Commercial battery storage is mostly held back by the government with their pro-fossil agenda, but we'll likely see more storage at power plants and consumers like office buildings, also stabilizing the grid. In fact there are calls to demand a bit of storage on every big plant, so that they can momentarily (for seconds) feed in more power. This is supposed to emulate the "rotating masses" phenomenon of classical power plants.

Probably the main problem today are right-wing governments (at least in Germany) who, increasingly, want this all to fail, sabotaging it where ever they can.

How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

Typically Microsoft opens offices in order to foster "Government Relations". For example when Munich worked on ditching Windows in favor of their "Limux" project, Microsoft opened an office in Munich... and quickly there was political pressure to close down that project, moving to Windows again.... ... maybe that strategy didn't work in China. Maybe government officials are less corrupt than they are here.

They shouldn't be trying such a desperate solution without trying chlorox and ivermectin first.

Just don't leave the country after you participate.

For that matter, you may suffer remote retaliation even if you stay home. I would leave this to the military or other government branch.

Also there is the question of legality, government operation or not. It sounds to me like vigilante justice. And countries who like their anti-American cybercriminals will certainly treat it as illegal. (Hence the advice not to leave the country.)

We certainly need a way to stop cybercrime, international or otherwise. But this doesn't strike me as a good way to go about it.

Finally a prediction: in the not too distant future, one or more offshoots from this will turn into unmanageable domestic criminal organizations.

Even Batman's job is threatened by AI.

It's just ET trying to phone home. Probably dialed the wrong number.

Well but for normal distributions there are two big advantages compared to commercial updates.

1. You can turn it off at any time
2. It's designed to make it _very_ hard to specifically provide special update for a special target, since the process is transparent, and mirrors are something that's encouraged.

Particularly part 2 is relevant in an age where an US-president could just force a company to send a special version of program X to person Y.