Youkay's "right wing" "Conservative" government passed this law.

Youkay's "left wing" "Labour" party wanted the law to be even more oppressive and now they're the government.

Two cheeks of the same ass.

The, uh, $400-ish cost of buying two new copies of Windows 11 Pro which are only needed because Microsoft decided to refuse to run on perfectly good older hardware?

We have two Windows 10 PCs which run TurboTax (ours and the mother-in-law's). They run Windows 10 fine, their performance is OK, there's no reason they couldn't continue to run Windows.

Except Microsoft says they can't because Muh TPM.

So our Windows 11 upgrade is going to cost about $2,000 to buy two new PCs. Running Windows 11 Pro just so we can reliably turn off the AI crap.

And yes, we have Linux machines too but those two run Windows because they need to run some Windows software which may or may not work in Wine.

Hopefully these will be the last Windows PCs we ever buy.

> you now have to upgrade$$ your membership to 'gold star' or 'executive'

you're historically backwards.

the business membership is the base membership. they added the less expensive membership, but held back some hours for the business folks to partially placate them.

the business members' purchases are what keep the place going; the cheap membership is just a bit of gravy.

>if you ignore that number of animals they have that want to kill you.

so you're saying that the solution is to import hostile wildlife from Australia? :_)

hawks

That doesn't stop me for Pining for them, though.

We've long been accustomed to France surrendering to Germans, spear throwing tribesmen, and the occasional Boy Scout troupe.

But, really, come on now. Surrendering to jellyfish is a new low . . .

hawk

Again, when the Tories' bill was being debated in Parliament Labour wanted to make it more authoritarian, not less.

To be fair, anyone who had lived under a previous Labour government (at least since they abandoned the working classes in 1997) knew exactly what to expect. And while, as you say, the Tories passed this law... Labour's main complaint when it was passed was that it wasn't authoritarian enough.

>But what if I want to drive from New York to Las Vegas all in one
>go on a Coke fueled journey of self-discovery and action?

If you're going straight to the tables from that, we'll happily comp the room for when you crash, along with more drinks and meal! :)

>It's been on my desktop since 1997.

which is the year I took it *off* my primary desktop, iirc!

At that point, FreeBSD supported my hardware.

Linux still ended up on some laptops when I was in a hurry.

I couldn't tell you whether either FreeBSD or Linux can play nicely with the other's filesystem, though--back then they both did enough intermittent damages to the other's filesystem that I had do uses a DOS partition to share between them.

This led to my having to ask for a replacement windows CD from the university. It's not like I used it more than a time or two ago. year, being on FreeBSD, but sometimes it was needed for some screwball stuff.

I'd looked high and low before giving up and asking. It isn't a big deal, as the university had a master licensee, but still.

And then, a few months later, I found it.

My fire had put it into coaster duty!

Err, why?

"well you said . . ."

[eyeroll]

the tech guy and I got a good laugh out of it, though.

>It's really not the same, for a number of reasons.

OK, make it a dam with a huge stopcock, or half a nuclear plant that defies the laws of physics by switching suddenly on and off, and to partial power.

They'll just need to have a contract with the people whose content they use which allows them to legally use it.

Doesn't Microsoft make people on github agree to allow them to use all their code to train AIs, for examople?

"Look, $150K per work × 7 million potential claimants = over $1 trillion in damages. That's not justice, that's basically a kill switch for the entire industry."

Maybe an industry based on stealing everyone else's stuff and pretending it's theirs because 'muh training' should be killed?

Particularly given the reports of AI companies ignoring robots.txt to steal web content after being denied permission to access it.