It's like there are at least two layers of funny money accounting going on here.

First, you have the strange way that people equate market cap with value. There's no guarantee that holding shares with a current market value of $X will eventually return $X or more in dividend payments plus maybe some eventual disposal of assets, and these are usually the only tangible values involved. A market cap based on ludicrously high P/E ratio will be high, but trading those shares is like trading Bitcoin: it starts to look more like a Ponzi scheme than a genuine value-based investment.

Second, even the market cap is mostly theoretical here, because any shares held can't be freely traded on an open market. The asset is almost completely illiquid other than occasional anomalies like the secondary sale we're talking about. The first IPO of an AI unicorn could be the pin that bursts the bubble.

It's the difference between being one of the AI unicorns that doesn't actually make any real profit yet and is largely funded based on hype and hope, and being a supplier like Nvidia that is actually being paid real money (funded by all the AI investment) and has a P/E ratio that is high but not off-the-charts stupid.

SR-71. But yea. And huge exhibits on the rest of the space program, the Cold War arms race, etc. The Dulles annex is a national treasure.

It's the name of an insect. A type of beetle. And, just like other beetles, there are male and female ones!

No, that's not true - at least, according to those involved (I have no way of verifying): the GitHub repos did not belong to the organisation - the organisation decided that it wanted to own them, so it persuaded someone who had sufficient access to give them the access and remove it from the people who did legitimately own them.

Well damn. Yes. Though, now that I stop to think about it, the Pacific is kind of crazy in that the Western Pacific is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the Eastern Pacific is in the Western Hemisphere.

And now I have a headache.

This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

Is that ironical in some way? I know only about Apple's A4-19, with the A4 being a 32 bit 2010(?) or so CPU.

TSMC makes chips for NVidia, Intel, and AMD.

... and Qualcomm. We've had the semiconductor shortage a few years back for 1970 technology that probably 50 underdeveloped countries can build, imagine now all the top silicone coming from a single company in Taiwan.

If only that were true! Unfortunately there's nothing to stop a manufacturer putting a USB-C port on a laptop, and having it only support (say) USB-3.1 downwards. And so some of them do this - because it's cheaper. Maybe there's one USB C port that also supports TB/DisplayPort, with a tiny little logo next to it to let you know which one it is. If you're lucky...

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!