e.g. it's probably a security vuln if loading a Game Boy ROM reads arbitrary paths on your local filesystem determined by the ROM's code, not so much with Wine.

Someone made a cute demonstration that I think usefully encapsulates this a while ago. [1]

[1] - https://gpfault.net/posts/drunk-exe.html

Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."

Various enterprise boards with BMCs can flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked.

You might even be able to do that with Intel AMT, but I've never had occasion to try.

At least, it has been the case on several boards of mine, including an X10SDV which bricked itself, as far as I can tell, just from bad luck somehow.

You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.

If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.

(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)

"This is a platform you can build on", software and hardware specs included, is still a much nicer thing to iterate on than "it's commodity parts to slap together" for someone without familiarity with the processes involved at scale, and going from "this is an opaque piece of hardware that responds on guaranteed timing" to "this responds on guaranteed timing but also has more complex features" is still a substantial jump, since "building software that meets realtime timing requirements" is not a thing in a lot of people's wheelhouse.

Plus, on a human level, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams working on mouse development were annoyed they couldn't show their past work in the same way...

I agree that what you need here is someone(s) with leverage and respect in your life to interfere with systemic bad behaviors if they exist, but that takes community, government merely gets leverage, and churches are often not a welcoming place to many people's eyes, rightly or wrongly, around the US.

As I get older, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the best you can do is unconditional support from the government (because it's the only kind you can rely on no humans in the chain acting in bad faith to condition), and well funded local support structures for people to subsist while fucking up their lives and also help them get out of that spiral if they want to.

Not because I believe in some fundamental good in man or something, but because I think that's the only way you can design this that isn't subject to people's bad faith manipulation, and I've personally seen too many cases go wildly differently for "objective" criteria where the main difference seemed to be whether the person reading it went into it assuming you were lying or not.

Of course, since there are lots of ways to describe things in bad faith without ever breaking that rule, it can ring hollow once you lose trust...

Enter Knoppix and persisting any state I cared about on a thumb drive.

Of course, since RAM was so limited on devices, just installing packages and leaving the modifications taking up valuable RAM was inconvenient to do, so I went down a rabbit hole of customizing the image builds with various nonsense.

Useful dozens of other times before Ubuntu popularized live images just being a thing you supplied as table stakes, but that window of going down a customization rabbit hole and running a diskless laptop is what I remember.

Employers past a certain scale are not really using degrees as anything other than a low pass filter, and the people judging how qualified hires were in practice are not the ones deciding the minimum requirements, so there's no avenue for feedback on that point.

There's no one-size-fits-all pitch, but my starting point would probably be time limits per day on a smart device, killing all notifications on it, and telling them that these things are because it has bad consequences if they don't have limits, so if you catch them getting around the limits, the privileges of such things will be temporarily or permanently removed.

I don't love it, but unless someone comes up with a wonder drug to dampen addictive effects of things in humans and we're all somehow convinced this is a great idea to give to everyone, all you can do is avoid the parts that are a race to the bottom of gamified attention and focus, until they're old enough that they hopefully have an informed opinion and are the ones making the choice to drink the poison chalice or not.

So it's quite possible they were doing the same with TSME, and either made a rude marketing decision that the people using it on consumer chips would probably pay for PRO chips if they were prevented from doing so, or kept getting people attempting to RMA the chips for a feature they never said worked on them not working, or there's some systemic flaw in the consumer chip's implementation that they didn't feel like trying to qualify fixing versus just killing the not-guaranteed support.

Hard to guess without more data than just them going silent about it.

[1] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

I can't imagine the logic involved in "this is implemented, let's toss it in the dumpster" for that.

[1] - https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zludas-third-life/