There was quite a lag between the variable-rate mortgage rates going up and everything noticeably exploding, so lots of people who were aware there was a real risk of things going tits up decided that it hadn’t and therefore wasn’t going to and had stopped looking for signs by the time they started to appear.
The discussion on the talk page was basically nuh uh, loads of reputable sources like the Israeli and German governments say there’s no evidence of genocide, and even if they’re biased, anti-genocide NGOs are more biased because they have to accuse nations of genocide to justify their existence, with people responding to point out that’s not how Wikipedia’s rules work, and if it were, they’d have to rename the pages on various other genocides because there are very few that no nations deny.
In principle, copyright law doesn’t stop there being a system that lets you redeem the same key from Steam, Epic and Gog as long as it’s the same person behind all three acounts. There’s already a degree of precedent for this - when a publisher generates Steam keys to sell at other retailers (whether they’re codes-in-a-box at a physical shop or an online retailer like Humble Bundle), they don’t have to pay Valve a fee, but the keys can be redeemed on Steam and work just like if you’d bought the game from the Steam store where Valve would take a 30% cut. Valve probably don’t think it’s in their interest to make libraries transferrable/sharable between Steam and not-Steam, but if they change their mind, and the competitors that they’re building the transfer/sharing system with also thought it was in their interests (which is unlikely to happen at the same time), there’s nothing stopping them building it.
If you trust Adam Smith, an efficient market would quickly make new goods and services available for the lowest possible price. People are supposed to be incentivised to sell things, and competition is supposed to stop an excessive amount of money being diverted to profits instead of reinvestment and price cuts. There are supposed to be systems in place that ensure that there are always opportunities for competition, but the wealthiest have the most power to erode those mechanisms and the most interest in eroding them, and neoliberals think an Ayn Rand novel is the definitive text on how capitalism works rather than Adam Smith’s work, so even if you land in the capitalism makes everyone better off mode, it doesn’t last for long before it falls back into fuedalism with extra steps mode.
It’s pretty obviously both things that were a problem. A mediocre prebuilt with a $200 premium over other mediocre prebuilts was unattractive, but plenty of people do buy overpriced mediocre prebuilts. The killer feature being that nearly no games were compatible was going to kill it even if the price was right, though.
Now we’re in the era of Proton, and games just work, if the price is fair, it’ll sell. If the price is you cannot get anything like this without spending much more like the Deck or how consoles used to be priced when the hardware made a loss and the profits came from games, then it’ll sell really well.
Plenty of bank apps work just fine. None of the ones I’ve tried had problems, except Santander, which works perfectly after changing a setting.
The scary dystopian part is the ability to work out that the account belonged to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade rather than just that they could see what had been posted. The Internet Archive doesn’t let you ask it what someone’s Digg username was.
Lower emissions, and natural gas is cheaper than diesel. Also, the lead time is much shorter, as there aren’t many manufacturers of large diesel generators that could keep up with AI datacentre demand, whereas there are lots of airliner turbofans being retired that could be refurbished to become these generators.
America’s first amendment doesn’t grant a total right to free speech. Conspiracy to commit murder is just speech, but is very much illegal, and so is copyright infringement.
If you saw a fruit stand and it had a sign saying you were allowed to try one grape without committing to buy a bunch, and the owner noticed you were doing anything with grapes other than buying them or trying one, they’d be allowed to ban you from their stand or if they really wanted to be a dick about it, take you to small claims court to recover the cost of any stolen grapes. If the local police wanted to be dicks about it rather than just not show up over something so petty, they could treat it like any other kind of low-value shoplifting and arrest you. The owner letting you have a free evaluation grape doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with grapes, whether or not you invent loopholes like claiming you’re a different customer if you walk away from the grapes and come back again or that it’s fine as long as you ony take one grape from each bunch or that it should be fine as long as you pretend you’re evaluating the grapes even though it’s obvious that you were never going to actually buy grapes. They are not your grapes until you’ve paid for them, and while they’re not your grapes, what the shopkeeper says is allowed is what’s allowed, and it’s up to their sole discretion whether you’re taking the piss and need to stop.
If you ask a random person off the street or on social media, they might well agree with you that making a link publicly available means it’s legal to download the linked thing, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. If you read the text of the DMCA (or equivalent in another country), ask a lawyer, or read a summery in plain English of the DMCA written by a lawyer, it’s really clear that, barring some very specific exceptions, you have no rights to do anything with anything unless either you’re the copyright holder, you’ve been granted a licence to do specific things by the copyright holder, or you’ve bought a copy from the copyright holder and have implicit rights to do things with the copy you’ve bought (which is why, typically, software is sold as a licence, not a copy, as that stops you getting your implicit First Sale Doctrine rights). A lawyer would tell you that Microsoft haven’t granted you, as someone who is not evaluating whether to deploy Windows 11 IoT LTSC for a specific project, permission to download the ISO, so you don’t have permission to download the ISO.
The fact that you mention DMCA takedown requests here shows a serious misconception about what the DMCA is and how it works, because they’re a very specific and minor part of the DMCA that has no relevance to normal people. Takedown requests are a mechanism between copyright holders and online service providers when the service provider is hosting infringing content on behalf of someone else, without necessarily knowing that it’s infringing, and the DMCA introduced them because previously your ISP and any websites you visited were also liable for any crimes you comitted using their services. The person downloading the Windows ISO isn’t an online service provider, so the consequences for them wouldn’t be a takedown request. There are much more exciting consequences for normal people, like unlimited fines and jail sentences.
The fact that the DMCA is so broadly overreaching and draconian that it’s impossible to enforce, and that therefore you don’t need to worry about only breaking the law a little bit as no one’s going to care doesn’t mean that what it says isn’t the law. Plenty of people who’ve ended up in trouble for something else have ended up prosecuted for various copyright offences that were easier to make stick than whatever painted a target on their back in the first place.
Despite it not being a problem for normal people, if you’re a big company with enough money to be worth going after, minor things like getting a Windows ISO from the wrong link can cause trouble. Generally, companies have learned that it’s bad for business to sue their customers, but it’s still worth their while to add on extra fees and charges for breaches of contract as long as they’re not so big that the customer bothers disputing them. To avoid these problems, large companies have compliance departments, and they’ll absolutely discipline employees for doing things like downloading things from the wrong link that wouldn’t matter at all for a home user.
I’m still replying because you keep responding with misconceptions and general nonsense and asserting that it’s factual. That’s enough of a reason on its own when the topic’s something as objective as what the law as written is. It should be obvious from the number of times I’ve said that the law is dumb, draconian and overreaching that I’m in favour of it changing, and that would require more people to know that the law is dumb and makes things illegal that no one would expect to be legal. However, a lot of your last few posts has basically been that if anyone makes any of their property freely available to certain people under certain conditions, in the eyes of the law, it’s okay for anyone else to take it, too, which is obviously bogus in any society with the concept of property. The rest seems to be that somehow, all the lawyers working for the multibillion dollar intellectual property holders that lobbied for world governments to implement current copyright law managed not to notice obvious and easily-exploitable loopholes, and then the lawyers working at those companies today left links up that make the loopholes exploitable, which is a really naive viewpoint. In battles against millions of dollars worth of legal advice, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Copyright law is written as if magically duplicating the fruit is the same thing as stealing it. In a discussion about what the law is rather than what it should be in a sensible society, the analogy is fine. As Microsoft is the copyright holder, you only have the right to do anything with their files that they have deigned to grant you, and anything else is legally piracy. In the case of this specific link, they’ve granted the public the right to use it for evaluation purposes, but they’ve not granted any other rights, so it is legal to use the link to download the file for evaluation purposes, and illegal to use it for anything else.
If you want a slightly different analogy, it’s a little like how if Disney put on a free screening of the latest Marvel film for disabled children at a cinema, and didn’t check at the door, an able bodied adult could wander in, past signs saying that the screening was for disabled children only, and watch the film for free, but the fact that they could physically gain access doesn’t mean they had any legal right to be there. They could be ejected from the cinema and/or sued for the cost of a ticket and any legal costs. You do not have a legal right to click link on Microsoft’s website next to some text saying that it’s for evaluation purposes only unless you’re clicking it for evaluation purposes only. Just because you’ve made it to the link, it doesn’t mean you can ignore the text saying who is and isn’t allowed to click it.
It’s freely available for evaluation purposes (from that link - it’s freely available for other purposes from other links, too, and so are other editions of Windows), but that doesn’t mean you’re legally allowed to use those public links however you want. If the copyright holder says they’re for evaluation purposes only, then if you know you aren’t intending to pay even if you like it, then you’re not evaluating whether or not the download link is public, so it still counts as piracy. It’s still stealing to take produce from a roadside stall with an honesty box if you don’t pay even though the produce was just sitting out in the open.
No, they’re illegal several times over as you’ve got to pirate the thing in the first place to end up in a situation where you need one, and then they’re inherently a DRM circumvention device, which are illegal to possess, and then using them circumvents DRM, which is illegal to do. The upside is that you’re unlikely to be caught.
Legally, it isn’t. The DMCA (and compatible laws in non-US countries, which those countries have to have or they’re not allowed a trade deal, and not having a trade deal with the US is devastating for an economy) doesn’t require copyright holders to do anything to defend their copyright. It does make it illegal to do (nearly) anything with copyrighted media that you don’t have explicit permission to do from the copyright holder (there are some exceptions, but people generally think they go further than they really do). It also makes it illegal to do (nearly) anything to circumvent DRM, even if you have a legal right to use the thing that the DRM is protecting, no matter how crappy the DRM is and how easily it can be bypassed.
You’re allowed to think that the law is stupid (it’s the DMCA - everyone who looks at it and isn’t a multibillion dollar publishing company thinks it’s stupid), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not the law, and for legal terms like piracy, you can’t just substitute your own definition based on what should be legal if it conflicts with the definition that says what really is legal.
The reason why non-crap DRM exists when there’s no legal reason to make it not crap is the same reason why DRM exists at all when there’s no legal reason to have DRM at all when piracy of DRM-free stuff is already a crime. It’s that publishers think that the more of a hassle it is to pirate things, the more likely people are to buy things legally. Technically, a shareholder could sue a company for using crap DRM that failed to protect their IP, but the company has a decent defence by saying that they felt that intrusive DRM would hurt their reputation with legitimate customers, so not using strong DRM is not grounds to say a company’s been negligent and liable for any losses they make due to piracy.
Circumventing DRM by any means, whether that’s by modifying it so it doesn’t work or just clicking buttons that the DRM provider doesn’t want you to click, is legally considered piracy in most of the world. If you didn’t get the activation code from Microsoft (or someone Microsoft authorised to give it to you), it’s pirated.
When AMD’s biggest market was Litecoin (and derivatives like Dogecoin) mining and Nvidia’s hardware was pants at mining, they initially couldn’t increase production of the HD 7000 series quickly enough, so the initial glut of money went to scalpers. They responded by making huge volumes for the Rx 200 series, but shortly after it launched, Litecoin mining ASICs became available and GPU mining stopped being viable. That meant that:
This wasn’t the only time ATi/AMD took a calculated risk and it backfired horribly, so with their history of bad luck, chasing the AI bubble in any way that involves risk instead of just selling things for money might be a bad idea.
Instead of git history, you get a git fairy tale. Practically, the merge conflicts and their resolutions get spread across one or more commits on the branch that was rebased, and the history makes it look like all the work was done after the upstream commit(s) that there was a conflict with. This can be much tidier, but also loses the context of changes. E.g. you can no longer see that something is done differently to everywhere else that does the same thing not because it needs to do it differently, but because it copied and pasted something from ten lines above and the thing ten lines above received a bug fix on another branch which the feature branch was rebased onto. Based on my experience working on large projects that used both approaches, I’d rather scroll past extra commits and squiggly branch lines than try to reconstruct what someone was thinking when they made a mistake without access to the original commit they made the mistake in. If I had to allow history-rewriting operations in git, the one I’d pick would be rewriting the history of Earth so that when history rewriting operations were implemented in git, they defaulted to adding some metadata to the rewritten commits making the operations reversible so I could decide I wanted the real history back.
In this case, the product was free to OSS developers not because they were the product, but because they’re influencers likely to end up encouraging their users and/or employers to buy the paid version, so it was the marketing that those people could do that was the product.
This change with the data harvesting makes those developers the product, though.
Technically it’s even a ToS violation to install extensions from the VS Code marketplace (or whatever it’s called) if you’re using VS Codium. Many are also available somewhere else like the code forge where they’re developed and are under open source or free software licenses, but quite a few important ones are only available through the one distribution channel you’re not allowed to use, and contain proprietary components that can’t be forked to lift this restriction.
Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.