And what stops you from making a seperate license to play on the servers provided by the company that is based on good behaviour and/or monthly subscription fees?

This is what the Stop Killing Games movement is also about: Sure, we understand that eventually you wind down the online servers, no problem. But if I paid for a game, why should you have the right to disable it? With no other things I buy can you at any time later come to my house and take them back or disable them. Not with my microwave, not with my shower, not with my lights.

There are no large sources of waste, unless you count "money spend for things we don't agree with". That said, I think you underestimate how much waste results from people doing things that computers could do, but which nobody has spend the money to automate.

I see so many names in the commit logs, but some standouts include: Blum, Cook, Torvalds, Solodai, Tyragu, Stitt, Bergmann, Wysocki, Panda, de Mello, and no doubt some I missed who have a large number of commits fixing this problem.

Thank to all who undertook this Herculean chore!

Why would you do that? If you're using it for non-strings, you'd never have used strncpy, you'd have used memcpy. Which is the same thing without the null termination rules of strncpy. You'd never use the str versions unless actually working on strings.

We can't let China get access to our chip technologies! Sure, we'll upload all of the documents necessary to manufacture these chips to a Taiwanese company, but once that company manufactures those chips we should spend millions of dollars making sure they're not directly shipped to China.

Cringe-y doesn't have a single brain. Where does he purport to have found the other two?

Big-Brother-NIMBYism: "Spy on those other people*, not ME!"

* Who have less political bribing power

After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years.

Why the hell five years?

What, the best you can do is bring up a show that went off the air fifty year ago?

And even then, when Robert Young did TV commercials for coffee, he was identified as "Robert Young," not as Doctor Marcus Welby, and they didn't pretend it was real. (In fact, the line from a series of advertisement of around that era, "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV," is still a meme today.)

Buy indie games.

It's only the big players who have these delusions.

I'm not saying the right answer is to get a refund. The right answer is to not make the license revokable.

For the theater comparison: If the theatre would invalidate my ticket and throw me out mid-movie, you can be sure that I'd ask for a refund. And in any sane jurisdiction, I'd get it.

Mostly, the difference is some legales, but the kicker is: "revocable". That is an insane difference. I'm quite sure it doesn't say you get a refund if they revoke your license.

It's more than just the right of first sale; with software that is licensed via server-side communication, nothing prevents the company from terminating your authorization for any reason, and you have basically no recourse at that point, other than to sue.

There's a lot wrong with software in the modern era.

The original guy got to keep using it. There was someone else hired for a brief time.

I remember the author's name but he really doesn't want to use it, so that's OK to respect. He's given me a lot to think about over the years. I remember when he wrote on his PBS site about unicast becoming cheaper than radio broadcast for TV, predicting that it would overtake by 2012 (IIRC). Youtube became huge around then. We were smart folks around the water cooler in the late 90's who could follow the math but had nagging skepticism. He wss right.

I think I have one of his science writing books under his real name about atomic energy somewhere. You can find it if necessary.

Nice to see Bob back on the Dot.

Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.