Iran has shown a willingness to do these things through proxies regardless of anyone else before.
Furthermore, if they want to deal with the US or Israel, then they should target American or Israeli assets. Not third party ships manned by citizens of neutral nations who just want to get to port and remit cash to their families back home.
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
The entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
Then I don't want to hear sob stories about how someone nuked half of the public repo, or how someone managed to put a backdoor in some low-level dependency that half of the world's servers rely on. I also don't want them to expect to be taken seriously, either.
It's not the 00s anymore. You are not special if you can post code that compiles to a central repository where people can duplicate and modify it. There are entire colleges in most developed nations that have 18-year-olds who can do the same thing now. The key to being taken seriously is figuring out how to do that sustainably and responsibly.
I wouldn't say that there's an organized attempt to "paint Linux distros as dangerous". It's just what happens when you have people being people (as we see here) and there are structural vulnerabilities to software supply chains.
It's a juicy target, and it's being exploited. We can either learn from it or continue to suffer.
This isn't even new. Hell, I remember when Linux Mint was hacked a decade or more ago. They compromised the forums, the disk image downloads, the whole shebang. I haven't used it since.
> It just sounds like the Mandriva maintainers are trusting and good folk who may be overworked running an open source project and that led to a bad apple entering the bunch. It's hard for me to be mad in that kind of situation.
It's hard to be mad, but people in FLOSS need to start taking this sort of cautionary tale to heart, particularly when it comes to Linux distros.
If you don't have a good way to sustain maintenance and development of a software project in the current era - one with LLM spam, social engineering, and apparently, jackass contributors - you need to start looking into ways to wrap the project up and focus your energies on more established projects that might need help.
I know that sounds mean, but this isn't just a hobby project anymore. This is an operating system. People put their entire lives on their computers. It's not a failure, you can do everything right and end up in a situation like we see here.
I agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever.
Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.
At least in today's world, there are things like alimony that are supposed to go to the prevention of that issue. It's not perfect, but it's at least something.
There's also an increase in the number of women who are able to independently support themselves.
People are also less likely to get married now for that exact reason.
If there were some sort of alimony for employment, even if just for a year, and a public health insurance option to fall back on, you probably don't see that much outrage from the people who have lost their jobs. But then, you'd also, at least in the minds of certain employers, see less willingness on the behalf of employees to throw their whole lives into the production of value for the business, and I think that's part of why you don't see guaranteed severance and public health insurance in the US.
The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met.
I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
The problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.
The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
> The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?