A dedicated button turns off the microphones and any camera

Yes. For sure it does. Absolutely. Scout's honor.

Nah. Over 50 by quite a bit and still happily emacsing.

I remember in the early days, people said emacs stood for "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping". Eight megs... how quaint!

Since the pilot program was 38 employees , this advice fails implementation at the pilot stage, since the other half-million employees are making documents in Microsoft.

Again being the size it is the government Denmark can start with publishing all of its forms in ODF format, no more DOCX; also use open/free fonts. This makes it a MS problems if they do not render properly -- people will start blaming MS for errors not the other way round. Thus industry and people at home will start using LibreOffice (what is in Collabora).

Next they need to push schools & tech colleges to use ODF, too many of them train students to learn how to use Microsoft products, they graduate and expect to use MS in their jobs. Actually: it would be nice if schools were to train people properly, most teachers do not know how to use style sheets, etc, and, eg, will make columns line up by pressing spaces rather than setting tabs/whatever. Start by teaching teachers (harder than you think).

if it does not do what you want take the damned source and add what is missing and everyone will benefit. If you do not have the expertise then pay the developers or someone to do it for you. Yes: it will cost but to an entity the size of the Danish government the cost will be less than the cost of licensing MS Office for another year or so. Once this development cost is paid it does not need to be paid again next year - unlike a license fee.

If the various EU governments each pay to fix whatever itch scratches for them then you quickly end up with better packages; as well as regaining digital sovereignty etc. This must be obvious to almost everybody, or it is being used as an excuse to do nothing or maybe keep the brown envelopes coming ?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant.

Uh, no. Fresh water is abundant in some places and scarce in others. The reason it's cheap in the US in places where it's scarce like Arizona and Southern California is that the government subsidizes it, as well as drawing more water from aquifers than can be replenished in time. In a lot of places in the USA, water consumption is not sustainable. And yes, agriculture is the main culprit. Exporting oranges from California is just insane; you're sending out crates of 90% water from a desert.

I didn't call you unethical. I called the Generative AI industry unethical. And I never called you greedy. It's the AI oligarchs who are greedy.

There are (as you point out) many unethical industries and sometimes it's impractical not to use some of them, or perhaps we don't think they're all that unethical. I appreciate that your line is different from mine.

My links are admittedly a little old, but just today there was another story published on Slashdot saying that AI doesn't really make organizations any more productive. So I think the jury's still out on the productivity question.

Exactly.

I do like the craftsmanship of hand-written software. And being retired, I'm in no hurry, so a faster build/review/test cycle doesn't matter to me.

I would use the power tools except that I think the entire GenAI industry is unethical, so for that reason, I don't use the power tools.

I'm retired from software development, so I only work on hobby projects. I don't use AI by choice because it's a hobby and I enjoy all facets of software development. Getting an AI to do it would be completely contrary to my enjoyment of the hobby.

I have a friend still working in the field, though, and he says he hasn't hand-written code in over 6 months. He tells me the current models are really good and produce code, test-cases and documentation that's good enough for his company.

My friend has decades of software development experience. I agree with the concerns of others who wonder how new developers will ever learn the ropes if AI does everything.

If the visible light emitted is exactly the same intensity, color, and pattern as the background behing you, yes, you'd be very nearly invisible.

Only from one direction, though (unless the background is nearly featureless).

OK. Then I think Trump should be charged with conspiracy to commit hostile acts against the USA.

It's a little different when only one side has the nukes.

All of the diesel Trump purportedly wants to buy from Russia over the next 3 months amounts to less than one day's worth of world consumption. It won't make a rat's ass of difference to "expenses to US people."

You are either conned by the grifter, or conning on behalf of the grifter.

Cramer vs. The United States (1945) resulted in a ruling from SCOTUS that an "enemy" must be an actual recognized foreign power actively engaged in war with the USA.

I read the text of the ruling and could find nothing saying anything like that. Can you provide a quote from the actual ruling to support your contention?