Make the fine for paying ransomware 3x any ransom paid. If a company is really set one paying the ransom, it will come with a much higher price, and use that money to fight cybercrime and protect infrastructure.

If you found a company -- any company -- not just in tech, you probably put in a lot more than 40 hours a week, especially for the first few years. But the founders also expect to reap large rewards for that hard work. They are "all in". The same is not true for the average employee. They don't stand to reap a large reward if the company is successful. They could get fired at any moment. It's unrealistic to ask for that much time and dedication without the same reward potential. Some companies do stock options that let employees share in potential gains, but that's not true for most employees.

Companies refuse, time and time again, to train employees in the skills they value, and shift blame back on employees.

They are trying to invent digital cocaine.

It's the hard-to-remove bloatware and background processes that make older PCs slow on Windows 11. A PC that worked reasonably well on Windows 7 with a HDD is painfully slow with Windows 11, for very little end-user benefit. I wish MS would release a bloatware-free SKU of Windows 11 that would run on Windows 7 hardware.

This. Most people have no respect for copyright anymore because of the ludicrous terms. The bargain that is copyright was protection for a relatively short time. If something really sparked my imagination as a child, I could write a derivative work as a young adult. Now it would be more like my great grand children.

A long time ago I read that around the time Linux was getting started, the BSD/UNIX wars were putting a legal cloud around any BSD derivative. IIRC, Linux started a year or two before FreeBSD. This gave Linux an early first-mover advantage, which proves to be quite important. I would also say the Linux had a bit more desktop/multi-media support, which helped adoption. FreeBSD also had low-cost competition from Wind River or something like that, that had a BSD derivative.

Oracle was just one more company to use Linux, to most people. It was Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other internet 1.0 companies that were household names and "Tech-darlings" that gave it credibility and associated it with innovative start-up culture. Oracle was more of a me-too. Linux was a huge behind-the-scenes part of the internet boom.

That's my point exactly. The developers would demand better "Development systems / IDEs, compilers, database engines, and so on". They would spend that time they are waiting for compiles to finish devising better development toolchains and writing tighter code. The exact specs I mention are just an example, but the least they could do is test on more realistic spec'd machines.

I grew up in the 640k RAM DOS days. It forced people to write tight code. Constraints force people to be frugal. Look at how great the Norton Utilities for DOS were.

As long as developers keep getting the fastest computers, with much more resources than the average consumer PC, programs will be bloated. If you gave all programmers I3's with 8GB of RAM, you would see a massive reduction in code bloat and a huge increase in efficiency -- but at the cost of developer time. They are simply not feeling the pain that normal people with average or older computers feel.

I was thinking about getting a new cell phone but was perplexed by the choices. With Motorola phones off the table, it makes the decision easier. Perplexity is already making my life better and I've never even used it!

In my state, the speed limit it 80 and the flow of traffic is sometimes about 90. It's wide open spaces, relatively straight roads and light traffic, until it snows and the prudent speed is closer to 35.

That said, I'm amazed that it's legal to sell cars that go over 100mph on public roads. There just is no lawful purpose, outside of police cars and maybe ambulances.

This reminds me of two modems negotiating the fasted protocol both support.

The warrant would need particularized suspicion and probable cause, but this was a fishing expedition. And the business record exception is a joke.

It would be so easy to safeguard this with a switch that's a hardware disconnect for the mic, but I'll bet that won't be included.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that the "purchaser" already bought a license to listen to the songs, which is the lion's share of the cost of physical media. Content Shifting from one physical media format to another, for personal use, is already protected under Fair Use, though companies try to block that with DRM.

For what you write to make sense, the music companies would have had to give a steep discount on purchasing a different format, because the individual already owned a license for in-home use. There is no reason but greed to charge a person three times for something they already bought a license for.

You used to see this with software where once you bought a license, you could buy replacement physical media for a nominal fee. It was the license that counted.
The one time I bought a CD on Amazon years ago, I was immediately given access to all of the mp3's on the CD, proving that it's possible to do this in a cost effective manner and the main thing was the license.