That is not how it is though.

You're ignoring all the lost time in the economy while people spend getting their IT to install someone other client so they can attend an online meeting with a bureaucrat or vice versa.

All the lost revenue from people who might have attended some French companies webinar but said 'screw it I am not installing software just so I can listen to a pitch' and so on.

It would be interesting, maybe if there were some consumer protection rules that required ISPs to make these things available at no extra cost upon request. I am actually not sure this is a sane default though. Remember what the internet was like when everyone had a public address and usually there was no home NAT involved?

Sure maybe software is a little better now, but the WinNuke like drive-by attacks were pretty damn irritating. Everyone trying to learn python and starting a local http server that is rapidly picked up by some scanner and then pwned will suck. People will work out various web sockets tricks etc to abuse things like UPNP get by firewall rules on naively configured home routers...

Oh and we'd probably see the return of the botnets, one big enough to overwhelm even the AT&Ts and Cloudflare of the world again.

I am actually not sure people that want to facebook, email, stream tv and radio, and surf the web, use office 365 etc, but are not interested in the computer beyond the appliance use case are actually welled served by being directly addressable, down the host vs the household.

Us nerds have been decrying the loss of real internet host peering for so long that I think we often ignore how things have evolved in the mean time, since our beige colored PCs were first being forced behind NAT. I have lot more IP enabled things now and no I don't know the real security state of all of them. So I have segmented network with a lot of thoughtful choices around rules and deliberative exceptions to enable things like MDNS and airplay over subnets etc, but that isn't happening most peoples homes anytime soon. The fact is NAT means pwning Joe Blow's smart-TV means either some kind of MTIM attack at the routing or DNS layer, an prior successful attack on one the motherships its software calls back to, or first pwning Joe's laptop isn't a terrible thing.

If the issue is security concerns it would be easy enough to see that "old fashioned" h323 or SIP solutions do or don't send media streams anywhere but where you expect them to. Similarly if you are worried about even the toll record content, you could stand up your own gateways and federation, keep it all on official national government infrastructure or with a domestic provider that is trusteded etc.

So there would be not need to obsess over who the vendor is. Color me conspiratorial but I rather think these formerly open-ish peer to peer options were crippled by technology choices pushed for by greed from companies like Microsoft and more shadowy actors like the NSA, and five-eyes community types who did not like the idea of organizations having telecom networks that would have left little for outside observers to access.

Corporate, NGOs, the maffia, etc could have sneaker netted some certificates and URLs around to their membership and everyone could have been on truly private, truly e2e, communications networks, and the metadata/toll records would be incontrol of the organization not the likes of 'Meta' or whoever owns Zoom etc, as we see with the early whatsapp story.

Now that mutual distrust is breaking down the intel community, and big tech, its going to be an expensive and painful decoupling process. Its not like they were not warned. All of us older folks around here spent the late 90s and early 2000s decrying death of interoperable open standard for messaging specifically and warned the cloud and PAAS/SAAS was never going to be trustworthy past first national security letter, or diplomatic tiff. This is just the last example where we can say 'told you so'

Not every nation state needs their own software but they need at least the ability to control the environment where that software runs and what/who it talks with.

The Auzre security model around private endpoints and stuff scares the shit out of me. Oh it can only connect to your own stuff, we totally pinky swear... For all enterpris-y options with bringing your own HSM and managing your own keys, there is still a lot of you have to take it on faith Azure does what is on the Tin.

I don't know about the first part. There has never been a shortage of luxury goods on offer most people can't afford, or at least could never justify the expense to own. I expect most slashdot posters could easily find $2900 to buy a phone. Now I also expect most of us could find a whole lot of things we'd rather buy first. Look what a lot of guys spend on a Golf Clubs, a boat, (sports car vs basic reliable/safe transportation), classic car, theater room, gold plated ridding mower, gaming PC, watches, other jewelry, stereo equipment, high end televisions...They are all luxury items that maybe only 10-20% of people can afford but the persons in the group that believe they can and can't might live on the same street with about the same income, similar assets, similar liabilities, and the same number of dependents. It is just priorities.

The own nothing part is a lot more interesting a lot more disturbing. That said while it is easy to go omg omg, people are spending all this money on things they just renting well... Consider this you might have poured a lot of money into that 95 Celica GT, but what can get for it now in inflation adjusted terms? Even if it is in great condition, you'd hardly call it a family heirloom. Ditto for your $2900 gaming rig from 2016, a decade on what can you get for, do your kids want it or care? Maybe you're still enjoying it (I am) and even running a current-ish title or two, that's good but think you'll be able to say that in 5 more years?

Yes Samsung or Apple or whoever can decide to abandon a product whenever you're SOL, I don't like it either. *I* should decide when I am done with something I purchased, but in the grand scheme of things people have been spending considerable amounts of money on luxury items that will more or less depreciate to $0 on relatively short time horizons long before electronic-lockin.

Even the arguments about physical media don't always hold up. I have sizeable collection of DVDs, but I have run into a few that will no longer play, when I happened to pull them off the shelf, I bought a lot of them off the sale racks real cheap, thinking they'd be fun to pull out and watch as my kids get old enough to see them. It is except they don't always work. So much for 'I own the disk, I can watch it as often as I want when I wan't theory of movie purchases vs streaming...' Of course I could have ripped them all and migrated them to some other archive and maintained that but...comes back to priorities.

React or any other windows clone that isn't nearly in lock step with the UI and feature sets of Win10/11 is change. That was my point.

I think they even demo'ed it for Putin once. Even the budget constrained Russian state could afford to give React all the patronage they require if that was really the issue and they haven't. They have had plenty enough reason to want to be off US IT platforms going back to at least 2014.

Microsoft isn't going to go after companies unless maybe you are a fourtune 500 or something. Because like consumers it isn't worth the trouble. Chances are pretty good the old PC attached to that press has a OEM sticker on it. Reality anyone running such a piece of equipment probably does have a license/entitlement, they may have lost their copy along they way when the disk had to get replaced a decade ago, and installed some copy from Winworld or something but odds are even if they did pirate it they did not really pirate it. Even if MS could prove their case what would damages be? Right not worth the hourly rate of even their internal legal department to spend their time on. We are not talking 100s of PCs across departments here we are talking about ONE. Do you really imagine Microsoft going after a company with 10 to 500 employees for running a single copy of software product that has been out of press for 20 years, that retailed for $250 bucks? That does not happen!

Not really, Microsoft's driver model isn't as stable as it was across the 90s - 2010s. You can't always install some Vista driver into Windows 11. When you can it may disable integrity features etc. People have created drive compatibility layers for Linux before, for a while it was quite popular to use NDIS driver for certain wifi cards on Linux. Which returns to my point that someone with the motivation to replace Windows would probably write a driver bridge/adapter for whatever classes of drivers they need and pickup the advantages of getting the GNU/Linux or BSD platform suite rather than the other way around. One is narrow project where once your wrapper works and the drivers you need load, the ioctls test, etc you're done the other is the unending effort of developing and maintaining an entire operating system. Sure you might have to update it occasional as the kernel changes, but that's on your time table, you can always stay on an LTS kernel until you are ready to jump to the next LTS branch.

The problem is ReactOS is a clone of XP more or less. XP is literally so far in the rear view mirror that adults graduating college and entering the workforce were still breast feeding and in a way nobody would get judgmental about when it was released. Its been so long since older workers used it for the most part that any system vaguely similar will be just as familiar or thought about the other way have no more or less learning curve. Slap XFCE or really even KDE on some Linux distro and it will be as usable for day to day desktop work with a prescribed set of applications as React would be. For the personal / home user Ubuntu or something like it is probably no better or worse in terms of 'gotcha' and 'how do I' for someone coming from Windows 10/11 that wasn't a 'power user'.

So this leaves us with compatibility...At the application layer its not better than WINE on a Linux based OS because mostly it is WINE. At the kernel/driver layer at one point there was an argument for a NT clone, but now contemporary drivers don't target NT5 and Reacts support for modern drivers is lacking, all and all hardware support on a Linux based OS is probably better. For older hardware you are probably still better off with a light weight Linux distro of some kind at least that way you'll enjoy some commercial support like Google making Widevine availible etc.

If it is about keeping your cica 1995 punch press running on the shop floor, well just pirate Win98, Microsoft probably really does not care or you can find license on ebay if that is really your IT/Legal departments issue. Reality is you are going to want to fence off ReactOS anyway with firewalls, jumpbox etc because if its that valuable an important to your operation you don't want the ransomware getting to it, and most of the security considerations should not rely on the platform integrity of the control box. Sure it'd nice if it was something with fewer known exploits than Win98 but ultimately not really the security model there.

In short I think the real market for a Open Source Windows clone is probably pretty small, precisely because it is already largely filled. To the degree a market maker like another Valve might want one, well they do what Valve did and extend/customize/invest in getting WINE and few kernel patches for Linux or *BSD to make it do what they need.

This should tell you all you need to know about not only Trump administrations view of law and administrative procedure but law in general.

So very very much of it exists not because its good, needed, or even makes sense but for its own sake and to be purposefully vague so that it can be twisted to mean whatever the hell bureaucrats in charge want to mean at any given time.

Honestly no free society should tolerate this. We should create a constitutional amendment that requires fines and penalties vary inversely with the length of the statue assocated with them.

Write a short law, like: "No Shoplifting" you can execute offenders, write a thousand pages of rules on emissions requirements, government is restrict to giving you the stink eye as a penalty.

The problem inst copyright it is the cartel pricing and nearly forever terms around a lot of classes of works.

Why should I still have to pay 3.99 more if I want it in HD for a movie made in 1969? None of that long tail revenue was figured into the cost / revenue analysis when the picture was made. Many, maybe most of the people involved directly are 6 feet under.

Heck even to think we should refund the people who watched it 40 years ago, many of them are not even alive. They got what they paid for / agreed to at the time, if they did not want to pay to see it they might have chosen not to do so.

You can argue the same is true for me today objecting to the 3.99, I likely will decide to go for something new even though I might have otherwise just revisiting a classic. Not incidentally if I could find physical copy someplace it would probably be in a bin marked $1 probably closer to the real market value. That what it is really about now at least when it comes to entertainment products including software like games. The industry is bigger than it needs to be. Its only as big as it is because its able to keep the prices on and access to the back catalog artificially high and limited.

I don't think a lot of folks even on this forum are really opposed the guys and gals writing novels, making movies or games, or webUI libraries earning a living from their work. I am not really against copyright, but I do think it ought to have limits the original 14 years concept seems pretty reasonable. I don't see what so radical about saying you know what Microsoft if you want to sell people Windows 11, yes you do need to compete on features/reliability/whatever with Windows 7 which (would have) passed into the public domain now. Why is it unfair to say you made your money off that software, you now need to convince people to buy those parts that are actually new/improved?

Arguably yes; Without it you'd see everything locked up behind various DRM, signed code only, and other schemes.

You'd have the source but it would be nearly useless because no manufacturer would make any contemporary hardware that can run code that has not been blessed. Good luck getting TSMC to fab your FOSS hardware on a useful process.

I would not bet on that. In the 50, 60, 70s lots of small European makes managed to sell in the American market, it was not about scale because they were still only doing 3 and 4 digit volumes. If in an era before CAD they could come up with US spec bumpers, different intakes and PCV systems to meet US emissions rules that came on in in the late 60s; BYD can slap whatever Canada needs in terms of bumper height, rear camera, etc and crank out enough parts for CA spec versions of their existing models.

Carney sold you out! He needed to show he could do something about your economic dependence on the US and he chose the quick route of giving more influence to China rather then dealing with the inflationary consequences and political fall out of trying to find ways to make CA industry less vertical and more balanced. It feels good right now but this will prove to have been a big mistake a decade or so from now. When the 'great sucking sound' the American industry has heard over the last 30 years comes to CA.

I don't think it is that people go the ballot box wanting to 'vote for the winner' or 'support the under dog' etc.

It is more a function of if they vote at all. If you think your guy/gal does not stand a chance maybe you just stay home. Similarly if you think they got it in the bag maybe you don't bother to show up.

I doubt this is as impactful as it used to be though, given early voting and mail in voting. I still believe both of those things actually undermine the democratic process and encourage lazy voting a party line ticket, vs actually evaluating the candidates and possibly crossing the party line even occasionally; to say nothing of the doors they kick open to vote selling, vote swapping, domestic intimidation, and more.

The correct answer is to ignore this poly market bs, its just gambling and if it drives voter behavior shame on them. Make absentee ballots for people who truly cannot go to their polling place for serious health, or other irreconcilable conflicts (military deployment, etc). Make election day a federal holiday, take Columbus or Presidents day away to do it if you have to.

Vibe coding is just another RAD solution. There is nothing wrong with RAD, being able to try stuff out with minimal investment is fantastic.

The problem is now as it has always been when the RAD output is judged 'good enough' by someone not really equipped to make that judgement and shoved into some key business process where it does not really meet reliability, scale-ability, security, and other requirements in ways that might not be immediately apparent because the requirements gathering and design validation processes was shotcut.

Nothing about this is 'new' other than the name, having some LLM that does not really of C#/Java/etc for you isn't different than having some drag and drop designer generating a bunch of code for you - these things still don't have a full understanding what real needs are, they don't recognize corner cases, they don't know your safety, policy, regulatory, IP, etc concerns. They can't see the future like 'what if we have to hand this to 3rd party reseller', because they don't know the business.

Again these are not bad tools, vibe coding is not a bad idea, just sawsall isn't a bad tool, but it can become the problem when the goal morphs into let's make some fine furniture.

Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes their corporate masters to make them square their policy with their marketing efforts like stuffing co-pilot everywhere they can?

I honestly don't think Trump's policy has much to do with it at all. The big drop from 2005-20[12][1-4] has everything to do with around 1998 being when people started taking carbon reduction seriously. That period saw a lot of the low hanging fruit and low costs to address emissions sources handled. You continue to see improvements in the 2020-2024 range due to massive economic contraction related to covid policy.

Nobody wants to pollute, generally speaking more carbon emissions means more energy from non-free sources so there is still plenty of incentive to 'do better' maybe not as much as different policy choices would force but nobody is going to go tear out the new high efficiency windows and put their old single panes back, nor is anyone building something new going to chose poorly performing systems when better affordable alternatives exist.

Really the USA and the rest of the western world has been on a virtuous path since Kyoto as much as economics will allow anyway, industry is leading, public sentiment and desire to be green is leading, government policy has been basically irrelevant.

Trump has plenty of will to follow thru once Hegseth, Miller, or Rubio determine who/what they could drop a bomb on Trump will gleefully give the order to let fly.

The challenge for the war department right now is to support an urban uprising with an air/missile campaign.