It's also being used to exploit enshittification by "you won't own anything" because all you'll be able to afford for computing devices are basically terminals accessing cloud services. And those cloud services will have the raw power you need.

I think you're right. They should be able to charge what they wish. But if you agree to that, you should also agree that Microsoft should be able to take a 30% cut of any Windows application. And charge developers a fee to have the privilege of writing code on Windows. And prevent any application from accepting payment in any other form than the Windows Store payment system. And prevent you from displaying other payment options.

After all, it's their OS. They don't owe anyone access to their ecosystem.

In the early days, to develop for MS-DOS or Windows, you had to pay for development languages - which Microsoft sold for $300 in the early days for MS-DOS and likewise same for Windows.

Heck, you know what the first GNU software project was? GCC. Why? Because if you bought a Sun, HP, SGI or other Unix workstation, it didn't come with a compiler. You had to buy the compiler package at many thousands of dollars. GCC wasn't the best compiler, but it was available free, and all you needed was someone to compile it for you.

Anyhow, also consider what the market would do. Had Microsoft done this, perhaps we'd see a more vibrant desktop OS marketplace, instead of a complete domination by Microsoft in the end.

Fair point. I could have been clearer though. My biggest concern is EVs being disabled en masse as an act of war. If Chinese EVs reach even 10% of the cars on the road, suddenly disabling them all at once would lead to a lot of chaos. Add that to the other backdoors that the Chinese inevitably have in key tech products, and you have a pretty effective opening salvo in a war.

Thee BYD Dolphin have no connectivity options in the car. They're just too discounted to afford the cellular modem and service for it, so they're rather basic on the infotainment side. They do have CarPlay, though.

I mean, this thing does not even have good download-numbers. And a download is not a user.

The entire place is a swampy echo chamber.

Paid for by taxpayer dollars. Oh, and the public funding drives.
(which of these is "the most important" depends on who's begging in front of whom) ...oh and $2.5 million per state? So a flat $125 mill annually?

"The commission's decision to drop PBS membership is a blow to Arkansans who will lose free, over the air access to quality PBS programming they know and love,"
IT'S CLEARLY NOT FREE.

And than you look at the US doing this crap for far, far longer. Bug-planting by law-enforcement has a long, long tradition in the US. The difference is that in Germany, so far, this was completely illegal for law enforcement. Whether this will stand in Berlin remains to be seen, but I doubt it.

There will be for sure a review by the Bundesverfassungsgericht. So far, the surveillance-fascists always lost.

Do you have trouble with reading comprehension? I specifically answered to "How many countries have banks the size of Credit Suisse?", nothing else. And, as it turns out, that insinuation was complete and utter nonsense.

You are just an asshole trying to move goalposts when your bullshit gets called out. How repulsive.

Why should I follow your cheap manipulation strategy? After I have pointed out your 2nd core argument is bullshit and manipulative, you want me to ignore that one?

You are a complete asshole, nothing else.

USA: 4,453,908 Muslims. Funny. Incidentally, Germany has more Muslims per capita than Switzerland.

And what does LGBTQ rights have to do with whether "Islam has always been an integral part of the Swiss experience"? Are you mentally challenged?

All I see here is that you are full of shit.

Yes. And when the "think of the children" lie has run its course, they will just continue with one of the other horsemen: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

These are malicious people, plain and simple. They want everybody monitored and dislike anybody having freedoms. And they will stop short of nothing to get there.

I'm sure this doesn't align with Microsoft's long-term agenda. They're trying to eliminate on-premises and private infrastructure in favor of everyone running their workloads in their cloud. If I were switching from VMware, I'd be really cautious about switching to Hyper-V as well. What is stopping Microsoft from pulling the same style licensing switcheroo with Hyper-V in the future?

You're actually closer than you think. VMware's tagline of late is "bringing the cloud on premises". As in you use their tools to bring the cloud in-house. That's the completely opposite for Microsoft which wants to push you into the cloud and not on-prem.

They're basically working opposite ends of the spectrum - VMWare to sell you stuff to bring the cloud in-house via expensive subscriptions. And Microsoft to bring your stuff to the cloud via subscriptions.

Help me understand this math, how does 3 computers value out to $46,855? That's more than 15k per computer, which TBH, I've never seen a normal computer cost that much. Servers? yea, I've racked servers that have cost a quarter of a million... but not normal computers. What are these students working on?

Back in the day, Sun workstations were popular because they were relatively cheap - after all $20,000 would get you a fairly nice workstation (in an era where a kick-ass PC would be running around $5000). Most other workstations would start at $20K for the base model, and go over $100K easily. Of course, universities were often the target and got pretty nice educational discounts plus grants from those companies so students could easily have access to machines that would've cost the downpayment of a house.

These days, an AI chip like the H200 go for $40,000 or so. Lower end units can probably be had for $10K or so. A few National Instruments cards in a computer can easily cost $20K or more.

Depending on your area of research, you might be sitting on what is commercially very expensive high end pieces of equipment that get donated

It is a lot of historic reputation. But I actually know 3 (!) Swiss numbered account systems personally (don't ask). They used to be anonymous a long time ago. They are not these days. The identity of the account holders has to be verified carefully in each case and has to be given to the government. The reputation of the Swiss banks refers to a situation that does not exist anymore and has not existed for quite a while.