I make the argument because I understand the law in the US (from which my reference point is - perhaps Swedish customers would have different recourse for example) and prioritize that over emotion.

Now of course we don't know from the linked article what the arrangement was between the entities involved in the sale or even where the sale occurred (which could affect what law is applied).

For example, when a company goes bankrupt and is liquidated in the US, the trademarks are sometimes sold - but that in no way obligates the purchaser of those trademarks to provide warranty service on products the bankrupt company had commitments to provide (the customers can queue up with the other creditors for compensation based on loss of such service options). However the acquiring company certainly can provide such warranty service if they choose to (perhaps to protect the value of the trademark they just purchased).

they acquired the customers and continued accepting payment and providing the service under the same public trade name

It sounds like they were weren't billing or receiving payment ("consideration") from the "lifetime" subscribers so no "consideration".

It's not uncommon for a trademark to be sold and the acquiring company does not assume liability for the actions of the original company. This sometimes happens in bankruptcy in particular.

It's true that laws are different in different countries. I was speaking from the standpoint of the US. If they continued to demand payment from a "non-lifetime" subscriber, that subscriber and VPNSecure may have a contract. However presumably "lifetime" subscribers were not paying or being asked to (until now) so I suspect the courts in the US would not consider consider those subscribers as having formed a contract with VPNSecure as there was no consideration demanded or provided.

In the US anyone can also send a cease-and-desist letter (or a birthday card) to anyone they want. Of course the recipient can ignore it - then the sender may choose to file a lawsuit against the recipient for whatever grievance they have.

They also acquired the customer lists.

The details are not clear, but it's certainly possible to acquire a customer base and a subset of customer subscription contracts without acquiring all of them.

Not necessarily.

One can acquire, for example, just the patents of a business, or their patents and a trademark, or just one of their manufacturing buildings.

In this case, the acquiring company claims they acquired “the technology, domain, and customer database—but not the liabilities” from VPNSecure. If true, the "lifetime subscribers" beef and remedy is with the owners of VPNSecure (which is probably devoid of assets).

PIPs are always stacked against you. Management will move the goalposts or kill your project.

That's only true for bad managers. Good managers initially set the goalposts so far away that the clock will run out before they can be reached by the PIPed employee.

This does, however, require some management skill and understanding of the employee being PIPed. The initial position of the goalposts has to seem reasonable to outside observers while being something that the targeted employee can't get close to in time.

If the manager locates the goalposts correctly, the PIPed employee gets so demoralized from day one that they make almost no progress on moving towards the goalposts so if they challenge the location of the goalposts at the end of the period management can dismiss them with "Even if you are correct in asserting that the goalposts were set too far away, you didn't even gain five yards in the sixty days you were given and there's no question setting the goalposts far beyond where you reached would have been reasonable".

And you'll likely end up with a horribly architected and poorly structured solution - but it will be in Java, Rust, or Go or the hot language of the hour instead of COBOL - but by the time it's done, that language will no longer be the hot language of the hour and they will have to hire people out of retirement to fix it.

Giving AI the existing system even as a primary source of direction would probably be a mistake. Better to give it the statutes, regulations, policy manuals and, to a lesser extent, training materials for the current system. Perhaps during the validation phase AI might probe the existing system to create test cases to run on the replacement system. If AI can't do that, the "I" is missing in AI (and it is).

No matter what, given the apparent schedule (even with infinite resources - see The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering published around the time I was in college), the whole idea is nuts unless the scope of the project magically gets redefined to be trivial (perhaps a field office app will get rewritten and DOGE will declare victory). Sort of like "Tesla 'Full Self Driving'" or "ventilators" or Hyperloop, or "much more efficient tunneling" done by The Boring Company (which has every large tunneling project beating down their door to get The Boring Company to do the job - NOT).

Of course 240 months is, technically, "months" but I don't think it qualifies as a "few" months.

Musk has already demonstrated that he has no idea how legacy systems work or the risk of assuming they are "obvious" - such as when he seems to have assumed that because the "Dead" flag for a SSN holder in one of the SS databases wasn't set and the person was over 70 they must be receiving benefits even if they were now over the impossible age of 150 years. Then he kept doubling down on that apparently unwilling to learn or just figuring that if he repeated a lie enough times, the facts would get lost in the chaos and he could claim that he was "never wrong".

If the product you're working on includes the word "Classic" in its name or is referred to internally as "Classic", you'd be wise to be looking for a job.

If there is a similar product in the company which doesn't have the word "Classic" associated with it, you'd be wise to immediately take all the PTO you can get and spend ten hours a day searching for a new job.

WRT two+ heads on one arm (or even one "big" head with multiple read/write units), if one head is tracking its track is it guaranteed the other is right on its track - even in varying temps and therefore expansion of disks/heads/arms - all of which are made of different materials and are of different structures? The tracks are very close together so positioning needs to be pretty precise.

The two synced arms would add to the drive cost and probably somewhat reduce its reliability. About all spinning rust has now over SSDs is cost/TB so cost increases due to adding more mechanical parts probably requires firm justification. Perhaps the reliability issue isn't a big deal given reliability of drives now in real life.

No, I'm not making "excuses". I simply prefer not to expend my time and other resources on things that don't benefit me enough to justify the resource expenditure.

I'm an atheist - and that includes not being religious about Windows vs. Linux. In my experience Windows is more stable (less likely to be broken by an upgrade) than Linux (Ubuntu) and substantially easier to manage. The days of Windows being reasonably likely to blue screen after an upgrade are long gone. I run Linux on other machines and I run Linux in VirtualBox on my Windows PC when appropriate.

I have an OEM Windows Pro license on a machine I built and it's my understanding that I can't (legally) use that license in a VM.

I built my primary machine in the mid/upper-mid range over 12 years ago (and added some memory and some SSD storage since) and it's still plenty powerful for my needs for small development projects and for use as a "daily driver" for productivity apps (LibreOffice, Quicken, HR Block Tax, Postgres, etc). I have no desire to impose on the environment or myself the cost of a new system just because my Windows machine is not "new and shiny" anymore. It is Microsoft's hardware restrictions on Windows 11 (and ending support on Windows 10) that would cause me to abandon Windows if I could, not a religious dislike of Windows.

Unfortunately, Linux hasn't become popular enough with end users to motivate most software developers of consumer software to provide a Linux version.

I'd be "Windows Free" if two consumer products provided Linux versions: Quicken and HR Block Tax software.

Could I run them under WINE? Probably (they at least sort of work in that environment). However that's not a supported configuration and the last thing I need on April 14th is to find that the last update to HR Block caused it not to work under WINE and then it's "my" problem to figure out.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Until Linux becomes much more common among end consumers, software vendors won't provide a version of their software for Linux. Until more software vendors provide a version of their software for Linux, most end consumers won't switch to Linux. As more consumers are switching to doing everything on their phones, there's likely to be little progress made on this.

State and local jurisdictions' building codes often start with standards such as those published by the NFPA but adopt amended versions of them that eliminate some requirements and/or add additional requirements.

In the Bay Area we call such a "home" a "storage unit" or "shed".

You are missing the fact that there are many competitors in the auto insurance market in most places.

Everyone has to eat so eating is "required". Yet grocery stores don't raise their prices to "80% of what people can afford" because a competitor would take their business by charging less. Walmart, for example, completes in many, many markets and they compete almost entirely on price rather than selection or quality with chains like Albertsons and Kroger. Auto insurance is little different - in fact it such a generic product (in part due to state regulation) that they compete almost entirely on price and how engaging their ads are (Geckos, cavemen, ducks, known actors, etc).

The distinction, as I understood it, was between public UBI and Social Security (and other earned benefits) - not between differing sorts of retirement plans of which Social Security is one (and one which every worker is required to participate in).

If one never worked and were not eligible on someone else's earning record (such as by being the spouse of someone who worked), one will receive zero Social Security old age benefits. This is very, very different than UBI which completely ignores both an individual's contributions to the system (as well as the individual's need for the system's benefits).

It is true that one can't rely on the government to fulfill their implied obligation to pay full Social Security benefits in retirement because the government has no such obligation. In theory Congress could cancel all future Social Security benefits from next month on, retain the payroll taxes, and spend the rest of the ever dwindling OASDI trust fund and the revenue from the ongoing payroll taxes on something else - such as an expanded defense budget. However, the odds of something this extreme happening is very remote (as it would likely result in no member of Congress who voted for this being reelected and them being replaced by candidates who pledged to restore benefit payments). It is, however, entirely possible that SS retirement benefits will be cut across the board when the OASDI trust fund runs dry (that date varies from year to year based on the economy and resulting projections, but the 2024 trustee's report projects that will happen in 2033 - sooner than the 2034 date projected in their 2022 report).

The Social Security OASDI Trust Fund was supposed to be weakly similar to the "capitalization model" you describe - that's why it was allowed to grow, at its maximum point, to $2.91T in 2020 rather than the program being strictly "Pay As You Go". However the failure of Congress to act decisively and consistently in the past to keep this model solvent (Social Security being described as "The Third Rail" in politics) will likely result in benefit cuts in the future (the form of those cuts remains the "trillion dollar question").

However a private annuity company, public pension fund, or private pension fund can also become insolvent and, if enough did, the government and quasi-government agencies, such as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and the various state guaranty associations, may be unable to backstop the programs.