Well also Ford and everyone else that spent a decade or more saying “nobody wants EVs”, saw Teslas’ success, and various government invcentaves and says “we are all in on EVs!”, and then when the incentives went away said “nobody wants EVs!”, is after the last week or so seeing record EV sales about to swing back to: “Yes EVs!”

So I won’t really take their opinions on the future with a lot of faith.

”only” about 20% of the world oil passes through it, so if we cut oil needs by 20% that’ll take a significant amount of the problem away. Which I know takes more then say filling half a desert with solar panels, we also have to buffer that energy for non-productive times, and convert things like oil burning heating systems into heat pumps and/or resistive heat systems, or regular cars into EVs (which mostly come with their own solution to the buffering issues). Very little of that is an engineering issue, it is mostly a “pay money and it can be done” problem. Which is the boring kind to fix because it is so “easy", but also frequently doesn’t get fixed (want to end homelessness? Buy everyone a home! End world hunger? Move the food from where it is currently rotting to where the hungry people are! We know how to move food (and people!), we just don’t do it!).

Do you often use VeraCrypt on a company-managed device? I'm sure if you do then it's with the knowledge and consent of your IT department and they'll be responsible for managing any consequences of the VeraCrypt issue according to their official policy as well.

You may be right, but there are definitely PC vender executives who claim to be very worried about the Neo. Maybe foolishly, or maybe for once they are seeing a bigger picture, Apple is hitting one narrow slice here but in ways they can’t counter. They may be legit worried about other configurations taking other slices with no real counter.

I think Windows will provide an extremely large area for that market to “retreat” into though where Apple won’t really follow. I mean with some serious compatibility systems maybe, but this isn’t an x86 Mac, I don’t think BootCamp or any sort of windows emulation systems are going to take large chunks of the market...and then I remember SteamOS. So yes, Apple could embrace something like that, and that would take a big chunk out of the traditional laptop market...

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

You might have intended it as a joke, but semiconductor supplies go through the SoH, and while I don’t believe production has been interrupted due to a lack yet the supplies are being drawn down and will eventually run out resulting in increased cost for RAM, CPUs and GPUs and possibly even shortages. About a third of the helium supply goes via SoH and without it you ain’t getting more RAM, nor am I. Or MRI scans. Fortunately there are a few months of supply, more or less. Maybe less.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.