Your words in Cthulhu's ears :) Here's hoping. Broadcom would destroy Intel as a serious player, and we need more alternatives in chip manufacturing, not fewer...

Patent portfolio, helps with suppressing competition, and I think it's safe to assume that the Trump administration will aggressively help with reducing competition and do its utmost to browbeat the EU and China regulators into accepting a competition-reducing buyout.

That being said, I'm concerned it's not Nvidia but Broadcom. Talk about the larger of two evils.

It's pretty obviously a trial balloon for future advertising, where your image is inserted in scenarios depicting shit they'd like you to buy. "This could be you at [tourism destination]!", or "Wouldn't it be nice to stand in a kitchen like this?", and so on.

There's no depth these people won't plumb.

On the other hand, it's fascinating to see our civilization so determined to speedrun every single cyberpunk trope while not exhibiting an ounce of awareness about cyberpunk being *a warning*.

The former, but it's a bit misleading as a metric given all its assumptions. Seagate isn't using MTBF for estimating failure probability any longer: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seagate.com%2Fgb%2Fen%2F...

Palantir, Anduril, Sauron... Gee. Peter Thiel has absolutely *no* creative imagination when it comes to naming things, isn't it. He could maybe at least read a new book some time.

Yeah, about that... You might want to take a look at /opt/vivaldi/vivaldi-sandbox, then.

There are tons of awesome image management apps and tons of awesome mail clients, most of which are free. Unfortunately (for you), few of these are available on Windows. The problem, as I see it, is your choice of operating systems: the one you're using limits your options. That doesn't mean it's a bad choice for you (for all I know, you're stuck with it due to software otherwise unavailable), but it does mean that, like all of us, you have to make trade-offs in life.

Sorry, but that's patently untrue. You can no longer acquire or activate new licenses, but your existing licensed installations definitely remain valid after you're no longer a student (see the license agreement paragraph 2a "End of Student Status". To quote from there:

Of course, the catch is that you're not allowed to use the software for commercial or entertainment purposes but only to "further your education" (i.e., to enlarge Microsoft's mindshare)--but that's the premise of the license in the first place, even while you're a student.

Sadly, that's how the proprietary software business has been working for years at this point, by tying the base to online services.

Unfortunately, you are factually wrong. Their Class 1 certs used to be free for commercial purposes up until 2012, but that policy changed back then. See StartCom Certificate Policy & Practice Statements (warning: PDF) section 3.1.2 "Classes of digital X.509 Certificates" paragraph 1. Quoting from there (emphasis mine):

Nope, it doesn't. Their interface for non-EV certs simply doesn't let you emit a new certificate if you already have emitted a non-expired non-revoked one for the same CN. You can easily get around this limitation, though, by emitting for another CN within the same domain and adding the old domain as a Subject Alternative Name in the extensions section.

No, they are not, if you're referring to their free Class 1 certificates. They used to be up until 2012, but that policy changed back then. Commercially using their Class 1 certificates is prohibited by StartCom. See StartCom Certificate Policy & Practice Statements (warning: PDF) section 3.1.2 "Classes of digital X.509 Certificates" paragraph 1. Quoting from there (emphasis mine):

No idea about trade since I never bother with it, but an account creation cooldown is out of the question: Many ISPs deploy transparent proxies or, worse yet, they NAT tons of their customers through the same public IPv4 address. A cooldown of this type would impact Valve's bottom line *and* piss off customers, so I don't think it can be done.

I completely agree with you that doing complex parsing in the kernel is stupid. And I'll make your day just that little bit worse:

Remember TTF and OTF which evolved into WOFF? Those flexible but very complex font file formats, optionally with bytecode that's actually JITted? That can be embedded into webpages therefore are interpreted by the underlying font rendering services regardless of browser used?

Windows parses them in the kernel.

It's on by default in 2008, 2008R2, Vista, 7. Quoth Enable Kernel Caching (IIS 7):

Note: By default, kernel caching is enabled in IIS 7.

Those patents disclose algorithms. Basically, applied math. Which should have never, ever been allowed as claims in a patent since they are antithetical to the compromise between the inventor's and society's benefit the patent system was designed to facilitate. So, yes, they are pretty much what one would call "software patents".

Whether or not they describe revolutionary ideas, and whether or not they required creative thought to invent is completely beside the point. Patenting algorithms runs against the very worldview that built the research scaffolding which allowed you to come up with these ideas (the old adage about standing on the shoulders of giants--and now imagine a world where those shoulders could only be visited if you paid the piper.) Math isn't invented, it's discovered.

That being said, under no circumstances would I recommend a client to hire you if I caught wind that you owned patents applicable to the field in which you would be working. That simply screams "conflict of interest", "subsequent lawsuit", and "humongous liability."