Throw up a cursive CAPTCHA.

Despite MS's installer claiming otherwise, only TPM 1.2 or newer is required by Windows 11. Also I'm running Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine an older server that has zero support for TPM of any kind, using an emulated TPM. Seems to me to run on older hardware, MS could have provided a light-weight hyperV shim that could provide the TPMv2 to windows. Assuming that the implementation of the emulated TPM would be completely inaccessible to the VM itself, enough security remains against malware, etc.

Meanwhile promoting full-disk encryption using the TPM is a sure-fire way for average windows users to lose data. Yes MS has ways of backing up the key to your MS Account (yeah that's secure), and locally, but if someone drops off their dead computer and wants me to pull data off the drive, I simply can't do it easily. I've already seen more than a few people lose all their pictures on their iPhone because of encryption and getting locked out of their device. I'm sure avoidable if they had only taken the right steps. But I digress.

Installing Windows or *any* OS is IMPOSSIBLE for the standard Windows user. Using a word processor and browser, on the other hand, is about the same on either platform. As anecdotal evidence I offer my neighbor who is 80 years old and computer illiterate. Has just as much success (and trouble) navigating Cinnamon on Linux Mint as he did on Windows. So far he's been running Mint for five years and I have to drop by about once a year usually to provide some assistance, but I used to have to do more than that when he ran Windows anyway.

Supporting Windows 10 costs MS money, and that money has to come from somewhere. And it's surely not going to come out of the CEO's salary!

I was 100% C=64 before I transitioned to Apple ][ before I went IBM-PC DOS, briefly Windows/OS2 Warp, then MacOS, then 100% linux, and added Android later.

(sprinkle in some brief CP/M, BeOS, and NetBSD sidequests)

I'll deal with the shift to the next phone platform OK, I think.

I should probably dust off my Pine64 and try the latest builds again. It's been a few years since they were unusable as a daily driver.

Folks, this might be a huge opportunity if you correctly pick the successor and are the first developers.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

Sure but we expect those kinds of things in Russia, China, Burma, etc. But a modern, western, democratic state, not so much. The fact Netanyahu is targeting and killing journalists is a huge red flag, and not something a liberal democracy does. Two wrongs don't make a right. Taking the moral high ground will always be the right thing to do and the only way to truly combat evil. Netanyahu wants war, and wants a bigger war, and to drag the US into it as well. Hard to fathom that kind of thinking.

That's why it's a mutual fund investing in multiple ventures, not individual investors putting their money into individual start-ups.

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

"USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it" - it also died a bit when deja-news was bought by google, turning it into google groups. ISPs were now thinking (incorrectly, of course) that they were paying for some Google branded service...that was coincidentally getting less use directly because Google was offering a web page interface to the same data.

So it was a gradual fade-out at the ISPs initially as people started trying web-bb's (never totally caught on, and survivers like SJGames' illuminati board have really low participation for the readership, really). The fadeout accelerated when Google replaced the usage of the service AND the impression it was an open, distributed system into Google one that Google alone should be paying for.

I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.

I love these retro stories from 2012.

What a blast from the past!

This is a retro story from 2012, right?

What's up with ads on Slashdot getting past uBlock in Firefox? 'Block Element' isn't working. If this keeps up, I'm done

It's the scourge of a new breed of mal/adware from html-load.com. More and more sites are using it, and it very much is malware, integrating like a virus into the page loading using javascript. It uses deceptive practices such as the domains html-load and css-load.

If you don't use chrome, I find the following filters added to ublock origin seem to block it completely on slashdot and most other sites:

||html-load.com^$all
 
||css-load.com^$all
 
||content-loader.com^$all
 
||07c225f3.online/loader.min.js
 
||error-report.com^$all

No, because experience isn't a protected category. Age is, but only in certain cases mostly dealing with existing employees. Youth isn't protected at all:

https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr...

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older."