Hopefully Google won't hamstring this by forcing you to enable "install apps from any source" setting to use non-Google app stores. If I use an alternate app store I don't want to let apps from just anywhere be installed, I only want apps from that app store to be installed. Apps from anywhere else I want to continue to block.

That's actual stock, not options. Incentive stock options (the kind executives receive) don't count as income until you sell the stock after exercising the options. Take out a loan against that stock and you've got dollars in your bank account you can spend but no income to report. Now, suppose the loan's structured so that, as long as the stock is worth enough to cover the principal plus accumulated interest, you don't have to make payments on the loan. Do this through a trust so your heirs don't have to worry about repayment either. Every year now you get the full dollar value of your stock awards in cash without having to declare any income. Possibly even without having to exercise the options, depending on how friendly you are with the lender.

Any router running SNMP or a web interface configured to listen on the external (WAN) port should be considered defective and replaced (or reflashed to sane non-braindead firmware). Home networks don't need SNMP at all, and business networks not using enterprise-grade equipment probably don't need it with write enabled. The only access to the router from the WAN side should be SSH using public-key authentication, and that only if you absolutely need it (you probably don't). That solves the vast majority of problems.

Russia, China and Iran trying to inflame the AI data-center debate is like pouring 5 gallons of gasoline on an oil-refinery fire: technically you did make it worse but by such a small amount nobody's going to notice.

If businesses were having problems hiring people in these fields, you'd think that they'd be a) offering higher pay and better benefits to make themselves more attractive to workers, and b) scrupulously avoiding filtering out qualified candidates for no good reason. Yet we don't see them doing either one. Tells me they want to use "shortage" as an excuse to move work overseas or bring in cheap labor from elsewhere.

We pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers and such crap wages, overwork them, force them to deal with idiotic gig-app scheduling, is it any wonder nobody wants to go into those fields? You have ICE showing up at construction sites arresting or scaring off half or more of the crew, pay them crap wages, and wonder why you can't get construction laborers? You outsource aircraft maintenance to the cheapest firm around and wonder why nobody wants to be an aircraft mechanic? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

"The notion that there is a shortage of physicians is preposterous - the residency programs will continue to be filled every single year."

How on earth are those two things contradictory? The problem is there are too few residencies for how many physicians we need.

That works short-term, but then they become a non-resident with CA-based income which means they have to file CA taxes under non-resident rules. Much less favorable, and leaves them open to CA doing any number of things to tax rules. One would be considering loans secured by stock options (not actual shares) to be income.

Sure the billionaires can leave CA. No loss there, because their money will stay there. That's where the businesses they want to fund are. That's where the talent they want to attract is. And billionaires themselves pay jack shit in taxes, it's the businesses that the money's in that matter. And for that matter, where are the billionaires going to move? Manhattan, Kansas?

"Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal." --John Carmack

I had never thought about games in this way before. When I fell in love with Doom (and gaming) as a teenager, I didn't have any social media & smartphones competing for my time, because they didn't exist. Lots more time for gaming. The games back then were made to reward you for investing more time in the game itself. There was a joy in it, discovering all the hidden places that rewarded you with power-ups. Finish a level only to find out you found 87% of the secrets? That's when the OCD in your brain kicks in, you re-load the level, and hit spacebar on every inch of wall space you can can muster until you find that hidden BFG-9000.

Today's "games" don't try to reward you in that classic sense anymore. They've turned gameplay into a casino, where you grind away for six hours hoping for that rare-item drop. They can't beat the addictive components that make up social media, so instead they incorporated some of them into the gameplay...If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. The only winning move is not to play.

The launch pads are not in outer space.

Seems kind of premature, the knuckleheads that are trying to do orbital datacenters have about as much chance of developing a feasible, economic orbital data center as I do in being crowned Miss America.

None of the middlemen are in a position to do that. It's all done by the manufacturer to name-brand specs. All the OEM does is add 25% to the production runs and sell the excess to the dropshippers. Changing the internals in any way would involve setting up a different production line, and that's too expensive compared to increasing capacity on an existing line. The economics are what made it appealing to buy grey-market electronics from Asia.

Other consumer goods, though, the economics are different. True cheap knock-offs are feasible, and you have to watch out for them. With the plethora of brands schlepping them, you need to be careful not to buy too much until you've actually seen the product. OTOH, if you do find a good one, the weird name doesn't have to be a negative. Just pay attention and be prepared to dump an order in the trash if it's not up to par (and don't buy from that brand again).

That's what most of those brands seem to be: dropshippers carrying OEM versions of products made for larger and more well-known brands. I'm used to dealing with that, techies have after all been getting OEM products from China et. al. since forever since they're often exactly the same thing as the name brands just without the branding on the case. The explosion of different "brands" on Amazon just highlights the same problem we had back then: distinguishing the reliable ones (who sold the OEM version of the name-brand product) from the unreliable (who sold completely different and usually inferior items with visually-identical cases).

This was already decided during the original trial. Two things will prevent Xinuos from succeeding:

1. SCO never had a license to the code they claim to own. They had a license to distribute it, but Novell owned the copyrights (such as they were).

2. The code SCO claimed was copied from Project Monterey wasn't in fact copied from there. It was original code IBM wrote and contributed to Monterey (while retaining the copyrights) and then subsequently contributed to Linux (which they had every right to do because the license granted to Monterey wasn't exclusive).

The only reason the lawsuit ended with a settlement was that SCO had lost on every argument and gone bankrupt, so there was no money to pay any judgement against them. I suspect some of the terms of that settlement are going to come back to bite Xinuos, because SCO had managed what everyone had considered impossible: they'd not only angered IBM enough they were out for blood, they'd managed to get IBM's law firm (Cravath, Swaine and Moore, who are a big name) personally angry at them too. I'm fairly sure there's terms in that settlement expressly to make sure that dead horse stays dead and buried. Given that Xinuos isn't bankrupt, and some of the figures behind SCO and the original lawsuit were involved with them last I heard, I expect IBM's attorneys to make great white sharks look cute and cuddly by comparison.