I think the claim is that "You don't have a support contract with us but you are using (patched) releases of our software that were only available after your contract expired. You are not licensed to use these versions, so you must have obtained those newer versions illegally, knock it off."

I am not trying to apologize for Broadcom, and I think what they are doing to VMWare sucks, but you asked "how can they claim this?", and I think this is how.

While I like and use Proxmox as well, there are features it doesn't have that VCenter does. A prime example would be the ability to automatically power down and up nodes in a cluster as needed depending on load, as well as dynamically moving VMs around within the cluster to "even out" the load.

And yes, I agree that VMWare should be a considered a dead end product that everyone should avoid if possible, but it still has enterprise features that don't seem to be available elsewhere yet.

Any chance they decided to "save money" and use AI for moderation?

From this comment and your others, I see we significantly disagree, and that's okay. I am curious however, if you don't feel that the cost for road maintenance should be proportionality paid for by those causing use/damage to the roads, how do you feel road maintenance should be paid for?

Since usage damage to roads is directly connected to vehicle weight, why not eliminate the fuel tax and replace it with a pure weight mile tax? Meaning that you pay a cost per mile driven, per pound of gross vehicle weight. Odometers would be checked during annual or biannual vehicle inspections, and the tax would be assessed as part of vehicle registration.

The state of Oregon has a version of this for EVs currently. You can either pay an EV registration surcharge or you can opt to pay per mile. Last time I checked, if you drive less than about 6,000 miles a year, the pay per mile option was cheaper. If you only drive in Oregon, you can use the odometer, if you drive out of state and don't want to pay for non-Oregon miles, you sign up with a tracking service that monitors if you are driving in or out of state.

We already do a version of this for big trucks

Yes, there would be privacy concerns with various implementations of a weight mile tax in cases where the tax rate might vary based on where you were -- such system would require tracking. But if you drive around with a cell phone, you are being currently being tracked, and many (most?) modern cars are already collecting and reporting location information.

A weight mile tax (as a replacement for all other fuel or other "special" vehicle class based taxes), would be fair and appropriately spread the cost of road maintenance out to those who use the roads. It eliminates politics about fuel sources (at least with respect to taxing for road maintenance).

It depends on if we end up also using Chinese produced chips in our infrastructure, business, and personal systems. I am not enthusiastic about the possibility of Chinese controlled backdoors in those chips. I am also not thrilled about potential backdoors in our chips, but if there is going to be a backdoor, I would prefer domestic over foreign.

They could, but then they would not be following RFC 5280 with regard to what defines a certificate's validity period.

Being pedantic, but I assume you mean no reason for internal use of publicly trusted certificates. From a security point of view, it's a bad idea not to validate certificates on internal systems -- you need to validate them against your internal CA of course, but failure to validate would open you up to internal threats.

It's generally not the browser that limits certificate lifetime -- the lifetime is embedded into the certificate and the browser enforces the expiration date baked into the certificate. If you run your own internal CA, you can issue certificates for whatever lifetime you want. You will have to add your internal CA's certificate to the browser's list of "trusted CAs" though. Depending on the browser, the list of trusted CAs may be configured within the browser install itself, or may be delegated to the operating system's list of trusted CAs.

Compromise and set clocks forward half an hour year round. It's the best kind of compromise when everyone is slightly unhappy but can deal with it. Time zones don't have to be hour aligned and there are several examples where they are not.

In human conversation milliseconds matter. There are specific periods of time that are appropriate and not appropriate between when people start and stop talking that make conversation work (or not). Conversations with people over a latent network (as is common for international calls) are bad enough. If we add the lag of "real time" translation that isn't actually real time, I have a hard time imagining how it would work.

And of course a book

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Well that's one way to get rid of Trump...

No mod points today, so I can't tag informative or insightful. Thank you for this post. I learned a lot.