I've heard it said that the horse is man's best slave.

Remember the leadership “vote” he recently passed was based on the votes of people who paid ~$1500 to be there

Also worth noting it was held in Calgary and all voters had to physically be there. So voters were Calgarians with enough money to get in, and people from the rest of Canada with enough money to get in and enough money/time to travel there.

There is way too much sensationalism around this law. All this law calls for is an OS-level "Are you over 18?" button, the kind that's been all over the internet for decades. See the Ubuntu mailing list discussion for a possible technical approach. There does not appear to be any requirement for age verification beyond that of the system administrator, and reporting is by a total of four age brackets, so even the privacy impact is limited.

The benefit of something like this is that age can be enforced by the system administrator rather than the user, so parents can set their kids' computers with an accurate age bracket. Meanwhile, all of us with just a single user can set the highest age brackets and move on with our lives. Now, as the CEO of System76 says, kids will find ways around it, and we shouldn't discourage kids from controlling their own computers, but he says "If there is any solace in these two laws, it’s that they don’t have any real restrictions".

But that same article notes that New York has a proposed bill S8102A that is much more draconian. California's law is a minor nuisance, while New York's bill sounds like an outright danger. Please focus on a real threat, especially considering it's much easier to change laws while they're still only bills.

Downvotes are to show that the content does not contribute to discussion. This comment is not related to the top-level post, and looks to be low-effort trolling, so it is not contributing to discussion, and deserves downvotes.

everyone should know how to read/write/type the capital omega because of electrical resistance

Relevant XKCD. Humans have always been able to lie. Having a single form of irrefutable proof is the historical exception, not the rule.

Why not? Toddlers do things like point out clocks all the time. The "passive agressive" part is the parent's interpretation. The actual action that is described is so very normal.

According to Wikipedia, John Riccitiello was CEO from 2014 to 2023. So I think your facts are off, unless Unity was planning layoffs and fee changes nine years in advance.

Instead, note that Unity went public in 2020. I expect Riccitiello was pushed by the board to improve profitability, then left with a golden parachute for being the scapegoat.

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?

From the article:

The researchers have so far been unable to determine precisely how Krasue gets installed.

So no one knows yet. But I feel that the existence of malware in the wild is newsworthy, even if we don't know how it got there. Regardless, you and I probably don't have to worry about it unless you're a Thai telecom.

From a quick search, a MATLAB student license is $50 (USD, probably), which is less than most textbooks but still not nothing. Whether piracy is justified or not, I just want to point out that this is how they get you. Microsoft gives cheap Office licenses to schools and Adobe turns a blind eye to amateur piracy of Photoshop because they know that getting you comfortable with their software early means you're more likely to pay to keep using it professionally later. I don't know if MathWorks had a hand in the MATLAB requirement (I would bet it was just a prof who wants to stick with what they know), but good on you for trying to push for alternatives and testing against Octave.

Funny coincidence: Fairphone has a blog post titled exactly that. And they say the same thing on their shop page. You're going to replace your phone eventually, but Fairphone is the only phone company I know trying to stretch that out.