Outright hostility, you say? I can't imagine how that came about.

It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Why not boost the ISS instead of de-orbiting it? Is it because it's just too old to keep safe for human habitation, regardless of what orbit it's in?

This month: Everybody meet Paddy! He's going to use AI to rewrite all of our legacy software for practically free!
Next month: Our AI initiative has failed, entirely due to Paddy's incompetence. Please escort him from the building immediately and make sure he never works here again.

Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

Someone has already pointed this out, but it bears repeating. For that to actually be true, they would need to cost more from the budget than they add to it through both direct taxation, and the tax revenue generated through the effects of their labor and other economic activity on the GDP. Virtually all studies show that they're actually a net benefit there.

Perhaps for the LEGAL migrants...but not for the ILLEGAL migrants...they are a burden on the US taxpayer.....they're usually paid under the table, off the books and are the ones clogging up our ERs and classrooms.

Ellison's Paramount Skydance Warner Bros Discovery - and movies/TV can be very subtle in pushing a narrative or shaping public opinion.

As opposed to all the subtle (and lately not so subtle) narratives the current folks have been pushing for years now?

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.

Uncopyrightable just means public domain. Using public domain code doesn't make your whole work public domain.

We're running a business here. We need real software, not toys created as a fun weekend experiment with a chatbot or burning money to run an agent and get 50% (or more likely 5%) of the way there.

Well, dude did go ahead and do that. Whether it's a useful approach is certainly debatable, but since there's a working prototype, anyone can test it and find out.

The real world is more complicated than that. For example, we still have a Windows 7 machine in my office. It has some very expensive but still very useful software locked to it that has no direct replacement available on either Linux or Windows 11. Obviously we have to be careful about security and controlling access to a legacy OS like that.

Blunt statements about "forcing an upgrade" are worthless in this kind of situation. Chances are anyone who is still using a system like that has a good reason for it, at least if it's in use professionally. We buy these assets because they solve problems. Those problems might or might not have a useful and cost-effective solution available on a different platform. If there is no modern solution available and the original still works, your statement that "the old ways are obsolete" is by definition false.

What you do need to do is rationally assess the risks and the threats you face and provide other ways of mitigating the risks and protecting against the threats if you can't rely on, for example, a legacy OS that no longer gets security updates to be secure by itself. But then ideally you shouldn't be relying on any single device or piece of software being secure as your only line of defence anyway, and assuming you already have some degree of defence in depth, accommodating unusual requirements is more a redistribution of security responsibilities than a fundamental change of approach.