Google says that patent expired in September of 2025, as it was filed in 2005. Yes, we are getting old.

Personally, I prefer the old rectangular Thinkpad charging connectors.

Tesco's - one of the UK's largest supermarkets - came out a few months ago and said "We've migrated off VMWare because of the licensing". They did it in months. On the major backends running every store in the country.

They had a massive dispute with VMWare and are suing them (they say they bought a perpetual licence, VMWare then cut them off), but while they did that... they just migrated their ENTIRE infrastructure.

Sure, it's a big thing to do. But it's not impossible, doesn't take years and - like Tesco - you don't need to wait to do it. If it's THAT business-critical? All the more reason to have an alternative ready to move to at a moment's notice.

Companies CHOOSE to get tied in, they CHOOSE to only ever run one system, they CHOOSE to make the migration painful, they CHOOSE to hold back on it in the hopes they can negotiate to carry on just as they are. And those are all DUMB from a business-continuity point of view and no substantial organisation should be allowing that to happen.

Pretending that huge organisations paying Broadcom millions are somehow powerless in this is actual complicity in the worthless side of IT where everything is just absent of any redundancy, resiliency, independence, failover, etc. etc. etc.

It depends on how the contributions were licensed. A lot of projects require either copyright grants to the project steward (for example, the FSF) or explicit permission for the steward to distribute the code under some other license. Occasionally there are good reasons to relicense code, like the transitions across GPL versions, but this is the obvious risk of giving those permissions.

That pretty directly disagrees with what you claimed the first time around. It privileges establishment sources rather than weighting all sources equally, and values safety and grounded answers over misinformation.

33% is more than enough to power the world without blanketing every inch in solar panels.

Love new technology, always have, but these kinds of advances pale in comparison to JUST PUTTING PANELS ON.

My house is a tiny, tiny (60sq m.... yes 60) house. My smart meter tells me - I pull at absolute max 10KW at any one time (and that rarely and briefly). I pull 8.5KWh / day, on average, over the last 4 years. My house is entirely electric so that's everything - that's heating, lighting, my computers, cooking, appliances, etc. etc. etc.

My roof space is ~30sq m (I have some extra panels on an outdoor shed, my front is NOT covered entirely in panels, I have about 8-10KW of panels). I can satisfy the above by covering my roof space at a less-than-ideal facing, tilted at a less-than-ideal angle, at a less-than-ideal latitude (the UK), and with less-than-ideal panels, having a battery pack consisting of less-than-ideal batteries.

In the summer, I'm constantly in excess (hell, I'm still in excess now and it's nearly October). In winter *sometimes* I have to fall back to grid (but my heating is entirely heatpumps, and they pull a maximum of 800W each, but more like 250W once the temperature is where it should be).

Oh and the above - is an entirely homemade system. I cut and crimped every cable, I lifted, railed and fixed every panel, I joined all the batteries together myself, I fused and RCD'd and MCB'd the entire thing. I operate them as entirely separate to my grid power system (though the new micro-inverters are about to change that as they've been approved in my country now).

If I can do that, so can much of the world, especially with professional deployment, and so SHOULD those portions of the world where it's viable be made to do this.

Learn to not be such an early triggered snowflake, Karen.

I didn't mock a suicide. I specifically said I hope this doesn't result in another suicide. Learn to read.

Are you so triggered by the fact that Cambridge was more proactive about plagiarism than OpenAI? Or just that I pointed that out?

This unreleased OpenAI model is absolutely unqualified to be a professor at Cambridge, even if it did create this proof when it was just weeks old (depending on how one counts). Let's just hope that it doesn't commit suicide, and that those who reported its apparent misconduct aren't punished for doing so.

Nothing will change until lots of people die (not just from the effects of such, but also things like "the boomer generation fuck off"), and/or the billionaires get hit in the wallet.

Same old story.

As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:

- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre direct into my house.
- They didn't remove a damn thing.

Took about 20 minutes, judging by the CCTV.

It would take about the same time just to pull down the copper from my house safely (the above did not require closing or working in the road, for instance), then isolating that from the dozens of others in the road on the pole, then removing that all the way back to the cabinet. Which I know goes underground because when I first moved in a few years ago, the BT guy had to remove that cable from, basically, a huge puddle which was cutting my DSL speed from 75Mbps to 20Mbps (DSL is amazing, though, that it still worked!).

Until everything's fibre, you can't remove those old lines, it's just not practical. And then are you really going to mobilise a bunch of people to remove a small run of copper from every street?

I once did some maths and the IT at the school I work in has something like tens of thousands of km+ of copper wiring that's unused. One room can have 30+ runs of nearly-100m. That's 3km for one room, from where a building was previously wired to have an IT suite, but then changed purpose, etc. We could, in theory, take that pure-copper cable out and recycle it. That one school likely has more copper in it than my entire village.

The fact is that it's just not worth the effort. There are huge thick bundles of it, and while it wouldn't take that long to pull it all out (much easier than putting it in because you can largely just cut and pull the entire bundle), it's not worth doing so in terms of the cost of the raw copper. We know that because honestly much of the time, rather than re-use the old copper runs which we know to be Cat5e, we just run a new Cat6a run alongside them if we do need to wire something. And Cat5e has far more metal in it than old telephone line.

I cut something like 200 cables this summer alone. And I mean I cut the last 2 metres of them because they were in my way in the cabinets. The actual RUN of cable is still in the walls and going all over the building, 50, 60, 70m runs all over the place.

I bet that a single office or school demolition recovers more copper (and steel and other stuff) than an entire village of old telephone lines, and while it may be a factor on the demolition companies finances, it's not a huge one. Scrap metal, which you have to de-sheath, transport, etc. isn't as valuable as people make out. It's why nobody arranges a regular scrap-metal collection at my local council to come and just grab anything of value that they could. No. They do that for paper. They don't do it for metal unless you arrange it with them. There's not much money in it. The only people making money are the guys lobbing some bits of lead, steel and alumium on the back of their van until they have enough to get a couple-of-hundred-quid free personal backhander as part of their work when it's all been moved at the expense of their company's fuel expense account.

Yeah, all you need is 200 years for them to book enough appointments to actually pull the stuff down, and you're golden! (or at least, copper-coloured).

Like an online bookseller turning into a global retail warehouse then renting out their datacenter services, producing talking home assistants, and launching rockets into space?

You are entirely correct. I took another look at what the law actually required and I am definitely crying wolf (at this point). Thanks for taking the time to point this out to me.

There is definitely a slippery slope there, but I agree with you, California is far enough away from the event horizon of that slope that my histrionics are not warranted. Not only that, but the carve out for Linux actually is helpful. Thanks once again.

The companies in question are going to get in serious legal trouble if they fail to comply in verifying the ages of their users. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all going to give these companies an API that will move that burden from themselves to the makers of the operating system. Discord, to use an example, will be able to say that they asked Microsoft, Google, and Apple to verify ages, and then that they relied on the information that they were given. What's more these companies actually want to know the age of their users. This information is valuable, and they will be able to use it to target their customers with advertising.

What's more, every bad actor is going to try and target this exception. Linux traffic will end up in the same bucket as bots, predators, and any other malicious traffic. There is nothing in the current exception that requires companies to work with Free Software. My guess is that if your operating system can't do age verification that is blessed by Microsoft, Google, or Apple that most sites will simply block your traffic.

This is going to end up being a huge step backwards for Free Software clients.