I'm sure that the average Mac user who just wants to do pointy-pointy-clicky-clicky is going to go to the command line and start typing stuff to install a program that he expects to just show up on his screen.

The mere fact that it doesn't just show up that way tends to delegitimize it in his eyes, plus the fact that even the command "brew" (as in "homebrew" or "witches brew, perhaps?) would add a dash of skepticism.

So yes, it's likely possible to install a program on your Mac without going through the Apple ecosystem. You say it is, I'll take your word for it.

But it's a hurdle that many users won't cross, due to a lack of knowledge or a lack of confidence, neither of which is exactly their fault since Macs are sold and advertised as a kind of an appliance rather than a general purpose computer.

"Best answer here would have been Don Ho doing a Mac port of Notepad++ himself. I mean, why not?"

There could be a number of reasons.

Two examples are:

1. He may not be interested in Mac programming and/or supporting Apple's closed ecosystem.

2. He may not be prepared to purchase a Mac and pay Apple their ongoing fees for development and distribution of Mac applications.

I'm sure you can think of others.

Compute magazine used to print program listings (as did a lot of the old computer magazines) and they had a program called MLX for entering Commodore 64 programs.

You entered the numbers from the magazine line by line and the last number on each line was a checksum for that line.

It worked really well. I remember typing in pages and pages of numbers and eventually ending up with the Speedscript word processor.

Is this AI that will run locally on your own hardware (like llama-ccp and so on) or is it a way to sell you time on someone else's AI?

Not all.

I edit my business's webpage with vim. It's plain html and has only two graphics (stored in the same directory).

And I get people complimenting me on its design, which I find amazing.

So it really was baited, then, and you took it.

So "only" 334 people/companies have had their data stolen through this exploit?

Somehow that doesn't that make me feel all that much better...

Even more than that.

Someone goes into alt-coin crypto with DONALD TRUMP and expects not to get screwed?

There's reality, there's fantasy and make-believe, and then there's... whatever this is?

The justification is simple.

The government collected money from these companies illegally.

Therefore, they must return the illegally collected money to the companies they collected it from.

I see no problem with that. In fact, any other action would be unjustifiable.

Why?

If something is good, it's good. Movies, pictures, books, what-have-you. The tool used to create something is irrelevant, be it a paintbrush, a chainsaw or a computer. The chef who cooked your steak probably didn't butcher the cow himself either.

Do you also want a visible watermark on all films that use green screen backgrounds and computerized special effects?

" Some people live in towns where the job market absolutely sucks. If your choice was watching your own children starve or taking a job at ICE, what would you do?"

Move to a town where jobs are available.

Can you reprogram that key to do something more useful?

On Linux you could use xev to see if it has a keycode; if it does you can assign it to another function. I have one of the "special keys" on my keyboard assigned to automatically type my email address, for example, which is very convenient for filling out forms.

I don't know much (read: anything at all) about kindles other than the name and that they're Amazon's own ebook reader.

My question is, can or could you (still) load epub files that you have downloaded elsewhere onto one of these things?

If so then perhaps there isn't much lost other than direct access to Amazon's bookstore and if that's the case then isn't this more Amazon's loss than the end users?

For enhanced security.

Is this less obvious than I assumed it was, or do you just not understand what it does?

Microsoft issues the secure boot keys that are used by all Linux distributions.

If they can just arbitrarily yank someone's keys like this, apparently without explanation or appeal, then what does that mean for those Linux keys? Are they subject to withdrawal for no reason as well?