Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

For those keeping score at home, 8500 hours is just over 354 days.

Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

He unintentionally used Signal? How drunk was he?

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

It's more entertaining than the original! No cat torturing, for one.

That kind of thinking got us stuck with COBOL ;-)

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

When you look at all of Europe, it's more like a weekly thing, and sometimes a daily thing. The ones that make the news are the bigger bombs like the thousand-pound bomb mentioned in TFS or the rare ones that cannot be made safe and have to be detonated in place, which can mean a lot of new business for window installers even with dampening.

You can't be the "baddest kick ass person on the block" without having an effective ability to fight. That means weapons, and it means training on how to use them most effectively. When going up against the Soviet Union, that means a nuclear arsenal. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we also helped ensure through deterrence that the Soviets never moved on Western Europe, and we helped ensure through diplomacy that World War III never broke out.

War is dumb, but giving bullies free reign is dumber.

Yes, Iran and Vietnam were probably mistakes, but nobody said conflicts are easy nor clear.

> There is no exception here. Teachers are to teach what is in the published curriculum

If the curriculum limits answers to certain questions for religious reasons than it's in violation of the separation clause.

> It can be a matter of health,

I'm sure the evil GOP will try to twist their argument into being about health or the like, but underlying it's religion trying to camouflage itself, like how Intelligent Design tried to disguise creationism as science. It's bearing False Witness and thus should be punished via an elevator to Hell. Jesus can read GOP's evil minds.

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.