European e-waste campaigners are calling on EU leadership to force tech vendors to provide 15 years of software updates, using Microsoft’s plan to end Windows 10 support next month — which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete — as a textbook case of avoidable e-waste.

Windows 10 has already had 10 years of support. ESU extends this one extra year. If you have hardware that cannot meet Windows 11’s requirements, there are other OSes available that will happily run on that hardware. Which is what brings us to the real issue.

Microsoft’s near monopoly on consumer grade PCs and Apple’s vendor lock in. This is the core issue.

Companies can do this because there are no regulations to stop them. We call on European Commissioner Jessika Roswall to introduce EU Ecodesign requirements for laptops, guaranteeing at least 15 years of software updates. No more devices designed to break or become obsolete before their time

Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS. Apple does good to keep Macs made in the last five to seven years still able to run their newest OS. They are some of the worse offenders on this. But even with a different OS, there’s still a limit to how far you can take hardware. You could put the best optimized software on really old hardware and that won’t change that the underlying CPU is old.

The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

Ten year old machines are doing alright for the time being, but we have to move on. TLS 1.3 is here, has been here since 2018. The stricter requirements for security, require more advanced hardware.

And I just mention TLS as a single example of what we’re talking about here. Modern hardware advances and attackers and users get those at the same time. While software security schemes do ensure security long after the hardware has become dated, there’s a point where it won’t matter anymore what software you toss onto the machine. It’s just so out dated it doesn’t matter, no software is securing it. Now that’s usually a lot longer than ten years, but it’s not much longer.

You can take a very lightweight Linux distro and pop it onto a Pentium 3 machine. It will technically run. But you are lacking SSE2 and even if you recompiled to remove SSE2 optimizations and strictly held to 586 ISA, you’re not going to enjoy the performance on the machine. For even the most simple tasks like unpacking a 7-zip. You will fare very unwell to some attacker who has a modern Threadripper machine.

I love old machines but the rest of the world is moving forward. Yes, software could technically cover for more than ten years, but not much more. But it’s silly to think that a Athlon 64 (2003), the oldest CPU you can technically get working on Windows 10 because of the NX bit requirement, would be able to keep pace on today’s multi megabyte sized website. Hell even the X2 models that were the first to be “dual core” would have issues with how modern web browsers handle things because Athlon 64 X2’s model for multiple processors is vastly different than how modern CPUs do it. It wouldn’t take anything for someone to feed it a website that would bring the system to it’s knees.

The thing is 15 years a very long time in the world of technology that’s ever evolving. Software can only go so far. 15 years is absolutely you need a different OS if that’s your requirement territory. But when you start hitting 20 years, your going to see breakage no matter what software you throw at it. It might be very slight at the 20 year mark. but each year after that it’s going to become more pronounced.

Oh absolutely, it’s going to be a slam dunk W for Trump because the Supreme Court is just going to ignore everything Article I of the Constitution says.

If it was me being taking away I would tell the person “take the knowledge, build clean energy on this planet! Trust me, that’s totally worth one person! Especially if that person is my lazy ass!”

Are the voters in the room with us now?

Satan: Holy shit, we’re going to need to make some renovations to match this guy’s punishment. Tell the daemons in Cocytus we need something between Antenora and Ptolomaea.

That is specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here when something is painted black it gets even warmer and it will make it even harder for people to climb. So we are going to be painting the entire southern border wall black to make sure that we encourage individuals to not come into our country illegally

What happens when they have oven mits or you know, just gloves, or just wait until night when the metal is cooler and they have cover of night?

Whatever, I guess I shouldn’t care about that $500+ million that goes to put on a single coat that peels off six months later because they didn’t prime the surface.

The only way he’s halting the elections in 2028 is if he starts a Civil War.

The [Trump] administration claims to be pro-family, but is screwing a lot of people over – including ones with families, including ones who want to build a family

Yes, that is the point. This administration honestly believes there isn’t enough stupid people who will work for pennies in a factory. This is literally according to plan for them. This to them IS IN FACT being pro-family. This is literally how they see it.

You work a back breaking job, so you have to have a couple who work it just to survive, you have children who won’t go to school but instead will work in the factory as well. All your family forever working back breaking work. That’s what pro-family means to these people.

Like I grew up on a farm. I had to pull hands of tobacco, I had to pick blackberries, I had to setup cows for milking, I did things that I’m surprised I lived through. And my family honestly believes that all made me a better person and they didn’t like the fact that I left all nonsense when I could. They honest believe I’m a worse person now because I’m not having my third heat stroke like everyone ought to be at my age.

THIS IS WHAT PRO-FAMILY MEANS TO THEM. Suffering IS pro-family. Being under thumb and never being able to get ahead IS pro-family to them. It’s wild I know, but somewhere in their brains this is how you show you really, really, really love someone and care for them. By making them suffer.

This administration is indeed being exactly their version of pro-family. This is what they define as being pro-family. It’s insanity to say the least, but this is honest to goodness what they see as helping people. That “screwing a lot of people over” that is exactly what Trump and his voters see as being helpful, kind, caring, loving, and pro-family as it comes to them.

Screwing people over, fucking their lives up, and being completely shit, is this weird “tough love” mindset. Suffering is love to them. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it for people. But there are folks who honest to goodness believe that you have to suffer your entire life to know love. That, that suffering IS LOVE.

And those people are the ones running this place.

If my years have taught me anything, it’s the latter.

My favorite is SQuirreL SQL. Something about that 1990s Java look is always claiming to me.

Amazon makes the majority of its money from AWS. Literally using the Internet makes them buckets of money.

People can boycott it all they want. I just don’t use them, but none of that really hurts Amazon in the end.

If people want to actually hurt Amazon they need to call on the Government to break up AWS, Ma Bell style.

But once they do, notions like the filibuster also fall apart. Republicans have been pretty in favor of using the filibuster whenever Democrats are in power. So they would be torching a really handy tool they like to keep around.

Yes, this tweet is actually devoid of reality.

Nebraska is indeed facing a shortfall in their budget, but it is wholly of their own making. In 2023, lawmakers used the surplus to pass a personal and corporate income tax decrease. However, the surplus was largely due to one time Federal aid they received.

Now that the Federal aid has ended (and it ended because it was scheduled to end, not because Trump ended it), the tax revenues are not enough and the State is -$432M. They raided the rainy day fund for $150M, but all this does is delay the inevitable. The State was hoping that the decrease tax would spur growth and for the most part the State’s economy has been strong but steady, not exactly growing and nowhere near enough to cover this shortfall.

It’s very clear that the State has mismanaged the budget. You cannot use one time aid to fund long term tax cuts, that’s the intelligence of finding a lower paying job because you found a coupon. Nebraska’s Republican led State Legislature is pretty much the largest causer of harm to the State. Not to mention that they also passed LB 243 in 2023 which took a large amount of funding away from Schools, so outside of just ending public education, there’s not much more money they can extract from their favorite thing to extract money from.

But all that said, the State did it to themselves. No need for Trump to be involved.

Exactly. That’s the issue I keep trying to tell others about social media. It is insanely easy to run bot accounts with a very minimal amount of something like Python programming. And even if that’s not your cup of tea, you can just literally have a half dozen people very easily log in and out of six fold the number of actual humans accounts.

Like for six people, running 60 to 80 fake account manually is a piece of cake and if they’re really good and focused on task, that can easily be 150 to 200 accounts manually ran. Like running a bot army is incredibly easy for anyone.

This is why you have to take a lot of social media with a massive grain of salt. A lot of people are out there playing the algorithm, way more than I think people give credit for.

but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun

Wow, well that’s a take. It’s literally some shit you’d hear from Team America: World Police.

Mr. On again, Off again.

Total reset for good or just till the Chinese stop saying nice things.

Wants to stop mRNA. Which interestingly is being tested to cure AIDS, types of cancers, and other diseases.

All those wacks who thought that big pharma didn’t want to develop cures for these diseases, and the reality is it’s one of the wacks that didn’t want these cures.

How ironic.

The first wave of COVID deaths were clearly not enough.

Trump hates transparency. Hey Jeffrey, how’s that’s “donation” working for you?

Vindictive. Turkey feels better about themselves when the person is completely silenced.