And we have no obligation to assume he is a better person than those at "Echelon" who decided to "perfectly legally" diddle their customers for profit.

That was exactly my first thought when reading this, too. Someone with truly altruistic motives would have many possibilities to spread such software without publicly taking credit for it. And to leave the political activism for a true right to repair to others.

... and a pretty much "too late" reaction as well. Plus, COLT as an SaaS provider themselves should have been able to host their own file repository, and known better than to trust "SharePoint".

Also, if you look at articles about the involved, like here or there, everything but "big drama" in their common workplace would be a big surprise.

Pharmacologists do, but they can at least objectively define that property.

As explained so clearly at https://www.gov.uk/government/...

So the reason for the water shortage must be those damn email hoarders. (Of course, the GCHQ will retain a copy of all your emails, too.)

... and reminded us that with The Last One the last program ever required has already been written in 1980.

AFAIR the TIOBE index is computed based on how frequently questions regarding the different programming languages are observed. With the advent of LLMs, such questions will be placed less and less to classical search engines, but will be answered by LLMs. I wonder whether the companies hosting LLMs-as-a-service will let the makers of TIOBE look into the question statistics of their users.

The currency is not the problem here, and crypto-currencies are usually controlled by far shadier (and not elected) tiny groups that set up rules as they please. And I for one would not like to perform daily payments using a mechanism that allows transfers to fraudsters that cannot possibly be reversed, even if there is enough evidence against the fraudsters for winning a case in court.

... which needs to be replaced and regulated. Just like the printing of cash, it should not be left as a playground for companies and their arbitrary opinions on what should or should not be payable.

Both the model (a) of a developer taking part in the risk of a "flop" but also profiting from a "hit" and the model (b) of a developer working just N hours on video games for an agreed upon wage of X can be fair, depending on the exact conditions. And some developers will prefer (a) and some will prefer (b). I don't see anything being fundamentally wrong with either. But I agree that it is unlikely of all people an "ex PlayStation Boss" would be one to offer fair conditions to developers in either model.

What I find more problematic is that these days even pure Investors, who would traditionally be the ones to take risks for possible profits, appear to shy away from anything "original", and therefore new games copy the same concepts over and over again, ad nauseam.

Especially when you consider that for driving each 100km distance they require 12.1 kWh of energy, which is equal to 43.56 MJoule, which is equivalent to the energy that a human body receives from digesting about 20 pieces of 100g chocolate bars. You need to eat an order of magnitude less extra to compensate for riding 100km on a bicycle.

Most computers back then were not connected unnecessarily to the entire world, so criminals would need to put in the effort to physically travel to the computer to attack it, which excludes pretty much 99% of all cyber-criminals from attempting intrusion.
Also, attacks back then required at least some technical understanding of computers, while prompt injection or access to public cloud databases works even for people who could not write a 3 line function.

"Dear Investors, we sank billions in research on quantum computers, but we do not believe them ever to become workable, which is consistent with our success so far. But of course we will keep on trying, so keep investing in us! Thanks for your understanding, yours truly Google & IBM."

Would anyone expect them to publish a statement like the above, even if it was their honest opinion?

... was a blatant lie to begin with. The US government knows very well that the Chinese can build their own AI chips, and a few percent more or less performance per Watt will not make a difference to any "security" question. So now we see the reason for this setup lie was to create some extra tax without calling it a tax.