How much has your government money grown in that time?

Let me continue. If the market supports it, you can take a high-value home, do good work in it with quality and care, and sell it for a profit. If the market doesn't support it, you don't actually buy the house to start with. You let somebody else get suckered into trying to do it cheap. Yes, lowball flippers exist, but they're not the only part of the market.

Having been in the house-flipping business, I can tell you your observations are not always true. If the

If you think the PE is intended to strip SUSE clean, pick the bones, and leave it a memory, cling to that. But I suspect that's not the motivation. Likewise, these layoffs can serve more than one purpose.

I doubt you understand 'private equity'. You have seen examples of how it can operate, that is obvious. Other examples include successfully infesting, managing, and improving businesses that were in trouble.

If you do not know of any, you've just not read the reporting. Reading only one side of the argument is beneath a 7-digit.

I was probably posting my second comment above when you were posting yours. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But to be clear, I didn't say that x number was equal to the print run. And even then, if you were looking at ads, you were generally looking for a specific thing. In my case, going back years and years, my eyes would hunt for a coupon or sale price on particular soda - not naming brands. But my eyes were looking for that picture, and skipping everything else. Passing through the optic nerve is different than paying attention. I looked at sports pages too, but couldn't have told you anything that was on them because I was simply passing over them to get to something useful. And yes, I'll admit that there was perhaps some tiny percentage was retained about a brand. But I was never - oh that looks good - let's try that.

And I do agree that ad viewing has changed in print and in digital, and agree with all of your complaints about the intrusiveness of digital ads. Regardless of the causes, people's relationship to ad reading has changed. Being mad at ad blockers is simply not a rational position anymore. And the advertisers can totally blame themselves for that fact. And really, even though we hate ads in general, it is more that we hate the slowdown on the page due to serving the ads and risk in clicking on something that might be malware that we detest. Time is more valuable than the best "deal" an ad might suggest. Serve the ads in-line from your own server and take responsibility for making sure they are legit. This again goes to reputation.

I suppose it depended on the paper, but most cultural events I saw promoted were in their own arts section. That whole section is an ad and is outside the scope of what I was referring to.

The death of the classified ad section in the paper due to Strider-'s comments about Craigslist and eBay are also spot on. I was never in a position where they were particularly relevant to me, but I am probably an outlier there.

I don't have a problem with digital distribution of news. I subscribed to the print WSJ for a very long time. But with our wonderful US mail service, the print edition would arrive in batches, days late. It became worthless. So I switched to digital once monitors got a high enough resolution that I could read the print edition in digital format. I still skip the ads. It's even faster to right arrow over full page ads now than to turn a page manually, and it's available first thing in the morning instead of when I get off work and already stale by a day or more depending on the US mail. So I'm a fan of digital news.

But the WSJ exists because of their content and price points. A bloomberg terminal is out of my price range. The WSJ is okay for budget conscious people. If it had a comics page I'd be even happier. And I suspect that providing some of their content to the world - say a few articles a month - doesn't hurt them much. A bundle with IBD and Barron's is pretty reasonable.

But I gave up on the local paper quite a while ago. Too little local news coverage, and anything important was going to be in the WSJ anyway. And their subscription price for a year was higher than WSJ.

I suppose there are a few columnists in the NYT or daily that people don't think they can live without, but it is really about content for every newspaper. If you provide timely content that is unique and worthwhile, people will pay for a subscription. If you don't, or are just one of many AP or other news feed suppliers, you shouldn't be surprised when nobody wants to subscribe. But it is also largely about reputation. People aren't going to sign up for a subscription or expose an e-mail address just to view an article. If you are worthwhile, people will subscribe on their own. But they aren't likely to subscribe to some unknown paper (or even a well known paper like the NYT) if they don't need it for local news. I live a long way from NYC. I might read an article if it was free, but I have no interest in paying a subscription price for all the NYC local content that doesn't matter to me.

Most of them are probably doomed. There are a few where content makes it worthwhile - the Wall Street Journal, perhaps Barrons and a few other financial papers where people are willing to pay for a subscription that is cheaper than a dedicated terminal but still allow you easily spot new information about financial instruments of interest to you. There are a few magazines whose content is also sufficiently unique that a subscription might be of interest to enough to keep things afloat.

But most general newspapers are going to have to find a different funding model all together. Many local papers bit the bullet a long time ago. If they haven't been bought out or folded, hey have little local content, and what local content they have is just repeated column inches of upcoming events that doesn't vary by day. And if you are just going to repeat the AP news feed, people can go there directly. Just because you are in a large metropolitan area, you aren't going to survive because people just aren't reading anything much anymore.

Brave has a news feed.

I didn't look at ads when print was a thing either. Digital is no different. They sold advertising space on the make believe notion that x number of eyeballs saw every ad. It was always bogus. It's just that it's easier to prove the lies now.

Local access can be very tough to beat from a security standpoint. Air gapping solves your network access problem, but we're talking about an edge case for sitting down at the console and doing bad things. Mostly we're concerned about network access because that's where the action is, unless you have a special case in which case you're working hard.

"The only defense is secure software engineering"

There is no 'only' defense. Indeed, programming skill and attention to detail will, by itself, fail. The reality of Internet, computer, and software security is that it requires significant and continuous research and testing, not just programming skill and code quality. And it starts at the hardware level.

And, in closing, I predict we will never achieve mostly total security. Too many risks, too many bad actors. We will, perhaps, raise the bar so that the bad actors will require resources beyond the reach of even dedicated individuals. What's that saying, there's always someone faster than you on the road...

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Think back to 2+ years ago. January 2024. What sort of government did we have? What Administration was in office?

From the Wikipedia:

" and the Bureau of Land Management extended the auction to January 25, 2024 to allow for increased bids.[14] In 2024 the remaining reserve was sold to the highest bidder, Messer Group.[15] "

And, perhaps, you begin the effort by 0) migrating the documents, all of them, even archival docs, to earlier and earlier versions - reducing dependency on features perhaps not supported in your POA platform, and 1) testing against the POA and refining.

Drop-in replacements for Office do not exist. Nothing out there. So downgrade and find a POD that can be supported.\

Seems pretty basic, just costs in the preparation.