First of all, I was referring to the use of CodeWeaver to run Windows apps on non-Windows OS but still with Intel processor. No instruction translation involved. Secondly, in terms of translating, clearly you have not used systems like Apple's Rosetta. It does translation ahead of time (AOT) and Intel apps can run at almost native speeds on Apple Silicon. They did quite a remarkable job.

Meh, it looked so promising but, I tried it last year on a couple of regular windows apps and it seemed to work fine so I bought it. Found out pretty quickly that it’s not really that reliable beyond the few standard apps and a bunch of games. It failed miserably when I threw some real apps that I really needed, even after all the configuration options I tweaked wguided by their support. Given the price of Crossover, it would have been significantly cheaper to just buy an Intel NUC and access it remotely.

They don’t, anymore. Remember when the format of a Word document was not available. Then later MS went (had to go) to an XML format.

More relevant these days is that a satellite system would be subject to the whims of Elon Musk and this fiber system to the whims of Zuckerberg Neither of these feels particularly appealing

I think that is just a silly argument. You might as well argue that nobody should use rules to differentiate equations and instead do it from first principles every time. A GUI can be thought of elevating the level of abstraction for many tasks allowing one to ignore unnecessary details, just like a biologist can explain behaviors and work with models without having to invoke particle physics, for example. With apologies to Newton, it's just another example of standing on the shoulders of giants. As developers or managers of developers, we want everyone to be as efficient as possible and focus on the added value developers bring to the project at hand. For example, when we switched to git some years ago, we were able to be instantly productive by installing a GUI that wrapped all the underlying git commands and provided a decent visual representation, a nice visual diff view and so forth. Similarly, if we need to administer one of our Linux or BSD machines as well as the daemons and other background servers (file server, web server, MySQL (Maria), etc) we can use Webmin, click on the appropriate boxes, etc and I'm done. Same for firewalls - why futz with iptables and configuration files when there are tools like pfSense (yes, running on BSD machines) that significantly decrease the time and effort needed. Sure, over the last 8 years or so on one project, once or twice, I have had to look up the appropriate git command to address a really obscure problem that the GUI tool (or an older version of such a tool) doesn't handle properly but that is extremely rare. And these days, with some of the really usable AI tools out there, fixing such problems when they occur becomes really trivial.

“all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expect”

It’s only libel if the information is wrong, but opportunities for discrimination? Absolutely. Given the current political crap in the US, I don’t know how this gets fixed, .the racists encourage it!

We have had MX cards since 1986 and I have never gotten a call from them to pay a bill early. Something fishy about your experience. While I’m aware that their fees are higher, the other side of that equation is that MX customer support is much better than Visa/mastercard. In particular, if there is a dispute, Visa and Mastercard force the customer to prove that the payment is wrong. MX forces the merchant to prove that they’re legit. From a consumer perspective, that’s much better

Many high end restaurants in big cities provide take out via delivery services, it can be very good food.

Please spare me the nomenclature. I’m on my fourth electric car (three Teslas over nine years and now a non-Tesla because Musk) and I don’t really give a damn if the technical term is not level 3. The point is that you need 350kWh (say) charging to change cars at a rate of 500-1000 miles per hour to be practical. That gets you up to 80% of a full charge in 15-20 minutes or so which is not too bad. Right now the only real game is Tesla superchargers, there are pitifully low numbers of level 3 (sorry, high capacity) non-Tesla chargers out there. Why Musk fired the supercharger team is bizarre but not helping.

Unless they are level 3 chargers, they’re useless. A level 2 charger will only add about 30 miles for ever hour plugged in. That is fine for overnight charging but completely impractical if you’re on a trip.

VMWare for Linux and VMWare Fusion for Mac have been rock solid and work far better than VirtualBox, particularly when it comes to supporting hardware. It is also a hell of a lot easier to deal with installs and updates. That said, I am not looking forward to being forced into a subscription model.

No, the inability for a large number of people to keep something secret is simply one of the tools one can use to argue that a conspiracy theory is PROBABLY wrong. But that's still different from making a claim in the first place without any evidence to support it. And in particular, making a claim that the CIA did it in secret is a very typical example of a conspiracy theory. If he wants to call it a hypothesis, fine -- the rest of us can continue to ignore it for lack of any evidence to even consider it as a hypothesis.

Yeah, sorry but no! A theory requires evidence to support the theory. You're making a claim for which you have ZERO actual evidence. That's basically a conspiracy theory.

Again, Hitchen's Razor ("What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence")

I can’t tell if you’re joking but if you’re not, you’re just regurgitating a conspiracy theory that showed up in 2013. Hitchen’s Razor applies!