Don't worry, Microsoft has you covered. In a couple of months, Windows 10 will also be EOL. And there are millions of computers that could run Windows 7 or Windows 10 but can't run Windows 11.

The UK Govt is considered right wing by the UK.

The ultra right Tories went halfway to banning protest (and broke the country).

The right only want free speech for themselves..
  to lie and say the N-word.

I also make a living from creative work and it annoys me as well to see someone blatantly trying to rip us off. But I think you and I both know that it's unlikely measures like this will prevent piracy for very long even if they are initially successful. The only thing you can truly control is the systems that don't belong to your user, so that's where you need to put anything you don't want them messing with.

Meanwhile as someone who is also a user and also doing other things than playing games on my devices - including some things where security matters much more than it does for anti-cheat measures in some random game - requiring any kind of intrusive access to my system just to play a game is a 100% reliable way or ensuring that I will never be buying that game.

Fortunately there is now more entertainment produced than I could possibly experience in a lifetime so even if it's the best game in the world I won't be too sorry to miss it while I'm playing something else that doesn't think it should have more control of my equipment than I do.

The other thing I don't get is using apps for everything.

I mean, I get it from the manufacturer's point of view. It means they can update things as they please retrospectively and possibly add new charges for functionality or services and/or implement spyware after the sale.

But from a user's point of view, why would I ever want my new home solar power and battery installation that has an expected working life of at least 20-30 years to be dependent on some random phone app to configure it? How many people had smartphones 20-30 years ago? How many people will still have them in 20-30 years? Exactly.

Nothing wrong with providing an app as well for the convenience of those who want it. But anything that is a permanent appliance or fixture in my home and doesn't fundamentally require external connectivity to do its job still needs to have 100% of its functionality available locally as well, without relying on external connectivity or any separate hardware or software platform for the UI.

When there is functionality that really does need remote connectivity, like say a power system that integrates with my electricity provider that offers flexible, demand-based pricing, there should be open standards for how these remote interactions work and it should still be possible to see and do everything else locally.

The world would be a much better place if governments and regulators promoted this kind of future-proof approach but sadly the public sector tends to lag so far behind in its awareness and understand of tech issues that it's not very effective at dealing with them.

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

I like the 34 time convicted felon angle a lot. Not because I'm particularly pro Trump or anti Trump. I just like that depending on which judge is doing the talking he's either a 34 time convicted felon or a man who had 34 convictions thrown out on appeal. So is he or isn't he? With the mix of judges in this country and their various loyalties the world may never know.

Using cars?

Marketers generally don't know what they're doing and it's gotten more difficult with video, shorter attention spans and anti-capitalism.

Thing is though, the tiny proportion who do know, and get it right can make a company like Apple $hundreds of billions. It's almost like a lottery.

Some are. I work more with smaller businesses than Big Tech and I don't think we've ever had more interest in our software development services.

There is a rational concern that technical people will understand the benefits and limitations of generative AI but management and executive leadership will fall for the hype because it was in the right Gartner quad or something and that will lead to restructuring and job losses. Businesses that get that wrong will probably be making a very expensive mistake and personally I'm quite looking forward to bumping our rates very significantly when they come crying to people who actually know what they're doing to clean up the mess later. It's not nice for anyone whose livelihood is being toyed with in the meantime, obviously, but I don't buy the arguments that this isn't fundamentally an economic inevitability as the comment I replied to was implying.

Historically and economically, it is far from certain that your hypothetical 20% increase in productivity would actually result in a proportionate decrease in employment. Indeed, the opposite effect is sometimes observed. Increased efficiency makes each employee more productive/valuable, which in turn makes newer and harder problems cost-effective to solve.

Personally, I question whether any AI coding experiment I have yet performed myself resulted in as much as a 20% productivity gain anyway. I have seen plenty of first-hand evidence to support the theory that seems to be shared by most of the senior+ devs I've talked with, that AI code generators are basically performing on the level of a broadly- but shallowly-experienced junior dev and not showing much qualitative improvement over time.

Whenever yet another tech CEO trots out some random stat about how AI is now writing 105% of the new code in their org, I am reminded of the observation by another former tech CEO, Bill Gates, that measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.