Despite MS's installer claiming otherwise, only TPM 1.2 or newer is required by Windows 11. Also I'm running Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine an older server that has zero support for TPM of any kind, using an emulated TPM. Seems to me to run on older hardware, MS could have provided a light-weight hyperV shim that could provide the TPMv2 to windows. Assuming that the implementation of the emulated TPM would be completely inaccessible to the VM itself, enough security remains against malware, etc.

Meanwhile promoting full-disk encryption using the TPM is a sure-fire way for average windows users to lose data. Yes MS has ways of backing up the key to your MS Account (yeah that's secure), and locally, but if someone drops off their dead computer and wants me to pull data off the drive, I simply can't do it easily. I've already seen more than a few people lose all their pictures on their iPhone because of encryption and getting locked out of their device. I'm sure avoidable if they had only taken the right steps. But I digress.

Installing Windows or *any* OS is IMPOSSIBLE for the standard Windows user. Using a word processor and browser, on the other hand, is about the same on either platform. As anecdotal evidence I offer my neighbor who is 80 years old and computer illiterate. Has just as much success (and trouble) navigating Cinnamon on Linux Mint as he did on Windows. So far he's been running Mint for five years and I have to drop by about once a year usually to provide some assistance, but I used to have to do more than that when he ran Windows anyway.

Supporting Windows 10 costs MS money, and that money has to come from somewhere. And it's surely not going to come out of the CEO's salary!

Sure but we expect those kinds of things in Russia, China, Burma, etc. But a modern, western, democratic state, not so much. The fact Netanyahu is targeting and killing journalists is a huge red flag, and not something a liberal democracy does. Two wrongs don't make a right. Taking the moral high ground will always be the right thing to do and the only way to truly combat evil. Netanyahu wants war, and wants a bigger war, and to drag the US into it as well. Hard to fathom that kind of thinking.

What's up with ads on Slashdot getting past uBlock in Firefox? 'Block Element' isn't working. If this keeps up, I'm done

It's the scourge of a new breed of mal/adware from html-load.com. More and more sites are using it, and it very much is malware, integrating like a virus into the page loading using javascript. It uses deceptive practices such as the domains html-load and css-load.

If you don't use chrome, I find the following filters added to ublock origin seem to block it completely on slashdot and most other sites:

||html-load.com^$all
 
||css-load.com^$all
 
||content-loader.com^$all
 
||07c225f3.online/loader.min.js
 
||error-report.com^$all

In both the US and Canada, this sort of non-discrimination rule was thrown out a few years ago, and rightly so. With fancy credit card fees being over 3%, it makes sense to not force other consumers and businesses to subsidize the users of those expensive credit cards. Business owners have long complained about these high fees that credit card companies expected the business owners would simply eat. So now many business can and do charge extra for credit cards.

In Canada, many people still use cash, but for a lot of things e-transfers are now done, although they do have a several dollar per transaction fee.

Well it's blatantly obvious. Any news outlet that doesn't openly praise the dear leader is liberal. Critical stories are unpatriotic and unamerican. It's quite a different world, especially looking at it from the outside. So really Fox and Newsmax are the only news outlets that are "unbiased" if you can say that with straight face. I wouldn't call them conservative. Very little about the right wing is conservative these days.

Honestly I see little difference between Putin, Xi, and Trump. They are all sides of the same coin (yes a three-sided coin. haha). Now that the GOP no longer cares about the constitution at all, have relinquished all congressional power to the president, and kicked out anyone that had the gall to stand up for what was right, they are no different than the CCP or Putin's party, even if their preferred economic system varies. Putin and Trump are happy to let the oligarchs own things provided they pay tribute. Xi of course wants his fingers in all the pies. But in the end it's the same thing. Companies pay their tributes to the king.

To put all this in another way, what you would you think and say if the exact same things Trump is doing (flouting the constitution and the law, ruling by fiat executive orders) were done by Biden or Obama? Surely you would protest would you not? Whoever my guy happens to be I do not want him doing things that I would never want my adversary to do if they were in power.

That is why I say what I say.

A good chunk of that $100 is inflation, some of which predates tariffs.

Interesting points. I had not thought of that before. In my experience, people on the "left" and the politicians in the Democrat party come by their positions honestly. I may disagree with them viahamently, but I cannot doubt their sincerity. They really do want people to be treated equally and really do feel that the rights of certain segments of society are being trampled on. All the woke stuff they really deeply believe, including systemic racism etc. In general they want to make things better for these people and are not actively out to demonize others who don't share their views. Most of them aren't really trying to drag the white man down, even if many policies would have that effect (reverse racism as it were).

Contrast that with the right wing and far right. They *are* trying to actively demonize others. They are trying to remove rights from others. They are knowingly acting as hypocrites. As a very conservative person I reserve my harshest criticisms for those that claim to be conservative. I feel like most GOP politicians these days are just lying to me all of the time. They berate the meek and humble. And when a GOP governor stands up in public and says he was praying about how to gerrymander his state, I have to wonder what Bible he's reading because I sure don't see anything Christian going on there. They've got more in common with the Pharisees than with Christ.

Oh and lest you bring up the judges who refused to unseal the grand jury testimony, two things. First one of the judges was a republican-appointed judge. Second the judges have no authority to release the transcripts by law. It's pure hypocrisy Trump even asked the judges to release the transcripts when he and the DOJ knew all along they couldn't be unsealed. They did it just to cloud the issue of them releasing their files that contain actual evidence.

You mean the activist Democrat-appointed judges who are upholding the constitution and checking Trump's power and illegal and unconstitutional actions?

The bizarre thing about this child abuser stuff is that for years right-wingers have been asking for Epstein files to be released because they were sure these files would indict many prominent Democrats of horrific child abuse. Possibly the Clintons, hopefully Obama, etc. Trump pandered to those people and promised he would release the files. But he lied now calls it all a Democrat hoax. And many of his MAGA supporters are okay with that. It's like, wat? Release the dang files and people on both sides of the aisle will be named and shamed (and hopefully prosecuted). No party has a monopoly on child abuse. Bring it all out in the open and deal with it. Come on MAGA people. Get some spine and call Trump on it.

And that is getting to the crux of the problem with our modern, post-capitalist system. How would you value things? With what would humans buy the production of this AI robotic machine? If labor is worthless then so is everything else too. I mean why bother with keeping humans around at all?

Once labor was seen as a liability instead of an asset, our economic system began to crack. Just the other day I read this interesting quote from an old novel, "Perry Mason and the Case of the Perjured Parrot." It's Marxist in a way, but I have a very hard time arguing against it:

You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possible---that too many men were trying to get lots of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.

Yes but pastel colors! Surely you want those. That and low-contrast text.

There are also tons of AI-generated, feel-good, tear-jerker, -type stories. Sometimes about famous people helping a sick kid or something. In most cases as near as I can tell these stories are completely fabricated.