Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

"It uses less electricity than a modern frig"

So that seemed incredible; but after doing some research it is plausible (with caveats). I have a few questions:

1) What 'modern' fridge are you using for comparison? There is a substantial difference between 1982, 2002 and 2022.
2) What are the volumes of the two fridges being compared?

The average 1940s fridge looks to be only 6-8 cu ft; while the average 2000s fridge is 20+ cu ft. Even if it slightly beats the modern fridge on total electricity, it's probably only cooling 1/3 to 1/4 the volume

For example in the 1940s you might be around 400kWh; but if its 7cu ft, its only getting 57kWh/cu ft/year; and comparing it to a 550kWh fridge from 2002 cooling 21 cu ft for 26kWh/cu ft/year. (And that's a 20 year old not particularly efficient "modern" fridge... you could get that down to 300kWh annually on a new fridge if you buy specifically for efficiency)

Sure the 1940s fridge might beat that not particularly modern or efficient "modern fridge" on total use but it's still not really a win unless you only need 7 cu ft. And if all you need is 7 cu fit, in 2025 you can get 8 cu ft for 167kWh year. (60% less electricity)

cites: some data on 2025 fridges
https://shrinkthatfootprint.co...

data on refrigeration energy usage and capacity over time:
https://www.researchgate.net/f...
https://appliance-standards.or...

Fair comment, but the point stands that it's in there and sooner or later it will.

That's such an arbitrary calculation. The big turning point was in the 70s energy crisis when energy star became a thing. And there is a huge efficiency jump from 1970 to 1980; sure 2020s appliances are significantly more efficient than 1980s appliances but is a logarithmic improvement curve and there's no justification to buy one every 10 years.

I bet it uses 4-5x the electricity of a modern one and is slowly leaking Freon too. Nice flex!

You probably could pay for a new basic fridge in a couple years with what you are wasting in electricity to run that old one.

Get a new one without an ice maker and just use ice trays and it'll be rock solid too. (The vast majority of the reliability issues across ALL brands are in the ice makers.)

Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

I've been using it to write grant applications, and I share your opinion. It frequently makes mistakes (and 5 is worse in many ways than 4o). While it can certainly be used to create a rough draft of a document, the result is similar to what you would expect from a junior associate, with the same kinds of mistakes that create an, "OMG, no," response in the reader when it starts to make things up.

There was a lot of talk about how rapidly it would accelerate in performance. That progress seems to have stalled this year. I have a hard time thinking that we've started to see the ultimate asymptote of performance, but it seems like we've hit a region where the easy, early gains have all been made.

What difference does the age of the iceberg have in relation to where the ice in it came from. The fact that we weren't talking about climate change when this iceberg broke is irrelevant.

EBay is your friend. Plenty of them available there!

The source of the ice in the iceberg under discussion is Antarctica. You didn't even have to RTFA, this was even mentioned in the summary.

That aged well.

It depends. There's nothing wrong with these industrial devices pushing warnings or alarms to some "central" aggregator (the same way a security alarm signals ADT for an intrusion or fire.)

So, egress signals are ok. The problem is ingress - they can't be wide open. And updates must be roll-back'able. I've worked with platforms that have partitioned hardware to hold multiple firmware/app-ware to allow a transparent rollback if an upgrade fails.

There is a technical and business case to have these systems connected to the Internet. But those cases must demand and design security upfront, assume everything is hostile, expose the minimum required and tighten that shit down.