You're obviously joking, but...

With the way Trump is alienating the classic US allies, they are indeed turning away from everything american. We've seen the signs in Canada, e.g. with US Whisky being pulled from the shelves, I also see it over here in Europe. Now, both Apple and MS are american too, so they'll also end up in the crosshairs. I do see more GNU/Linux in our future - and I'll say, good riddance for the proprietary vendors.

I can see Germany retracting the contract for F35 in favour of Eurofighters, Tesla sales have already cratered, Trump may want to activate the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, but no-one in their right minds will buy russian gas coming through there. And that's only a very small part of what's happening. Face it, Trump is running the US right into the ground - it doesn't even matter whether he actually is a russian agent "Krasnov" or not, the result is the same.

I guess you missed the news about the one house that's still standing amid the smoking ruins of its neighbors... yes, brick & mortar, specifically designed to be earthquake-proof, and obviously much less flammable than classic constructions.
You have the winner right there.

My own biggest gripe with 11 is the "group by" in windows explorer and file dialogs. Who the f* at MS thought it would be a good idea to have such a thing turned on by default and no setting anywhere to turn it off globally? That's an extreme time-waster.

Yeah, there is a third-party "WinSetView" tool that does the trick, but seriously?

Good thing I don't need to use 11 much, I've been mostly on GNU/Linux including desktop since 1995 - yay, 30 years now!

"x64-only Itanium line" - NO! That was called IA64. It had nothing to do with x86, relied heavily on compiler optimization for decent performance, and was to provide compatibility to x86 using emulation only.

I do recall an early IA64 system with a Linux distro (probably RedHat) on there, it was godawfully slow compared to the x86 systems we were used to, let alone Alpha systems. Much of that slowness was probably due to suboptimal optimizations, but still... I'm not unhappy I never saw another IA64 system, and curse the decision to discontinue Alpha in favor of Itanic.Then again, some of those former DEC engineers working on Alpha ended up with AMD and created x86-64.

Remember fractint? It allowed computing a bunch of different types of fractals, using integer operations, making it extremely quicker than classic implementations in floating point. Way back when a naive implementation of the Mandelbrot fractal took 2h on a 286, fractint got a pretty immediate response.

I specifically addressed the exploding pagers. No more, no less. I also added "I'm not condoning using these tactics". Why do you try to bait me into extending this into anything else? No, don't answer that. I'm done here.

"wholesale", "lack of concern for collateral damage"?

They specifically intercepted a shipment of pagers for a terrorist organization. The members of that organization were targeted. Most victims were the targeted members. To me, that sounds a lot more specific than downing an entire building with possibly hundreds of people to get at one specific person.

I'm not condoning using these tactics, but they do seem a hell of a lot more legit than e.g. the Hamas attacks of october 7. Especially if it turns out that indeed Hizbollah planned a similar attack on northern Israel.

Also, IIRC, at least a libanse airline has banned pagers and such from their flights, for obvious reasons.

(x^y)^z = x^(y*z)
"adding one dimension" would be an increase by 1 of the exponent.

Seriously, how would they even come up with such a ludicrous argument? How the TOS for a streaming service would in any way relate to obligations regarding food safety... Not only should the judge chew them out, but get them disbarred for contempt of pretty much everybody. Over here in Europe, allergens MUST be listed on the menu, failure to disclose such risks can get establishments fined or closed. I'd guess in cases like this, criminal prosecution for getting someone killed should be the least consequence.

By far my biggest gripe with Windows 11 has been the "group by" active by default in Explorer, including in all the file dialog boxes.

If you turn it off, it will find a way to re-enable itself, and that's just horrible design.

Sure, there's this "WinSetView" utility, but seriously, MS should provide a global off switch by themselves or at least have the "feature" off by default.

Thankfully, at the office we're still on Win10 without "group by", and my normal home environment is Linux - but I do need to use Windows there too, for some applications I don't have a FOSS alternative.

Sounds like a modern windtrap (think Dune by Frank Herbert).

Or if you prefer a Star Wars ref: It's a (wind-)trap!

I do remember my first contact. Back at university (in Switzerland), in a computer room full of Macintosh systems, a fellow student introduced me to Mosaic, surfing to the CERN website. Only later did we get Netscape on the typical SPARC Solaris systems there. Even there on the LAN, images (tiny GIFs or JPGs) took a bit to load. Back then, no web-based fora, discussions took place on usenet. PCs were still pretty handicapped, as you had to install Trumpet WinSock to get a TCP/IP stack. And only after AOL came onto Internet did it all go down the drain - before, the Internet was from scientists for scientists.
Linux then could be had by downloading a number of floppy images from your favorite FTP mirror (Switch in my case) or, at some point, by buying a specialized magazine that came with Slackware on a couple of CDs.

Whatever means Facebook uses to check reports are utterly failing.

I regularly see obvious scams - sales of "lost packets" or whatever in contexts where that is both utterly unthinkable and illegal (from the local airport, postal services etc.), or ads featuring our political leaders (geez, as if they'd stoop that low - we're not MAGA USA over here). When I see such, I report them. The result, without fail, comes a couple of days later with "we didn't remove the ad" as they didn't see any issue. Are they effing blind or so naive and credulous? Whether it's AI or actual people, this is simply ridiculous.

I sure wouldn't mind for the law to come down hard on them, forcing them to improve this situation.

No, just go "space junk removal" by latching on to your high-value target and then deorbit the thing. No kessler effect or dramatic explosions required.

I guess the strategic implications of "space junk removal" tech is what made them all back off it for so long. Especially when it might be treated as an offense in the "strike back with nuclear weapons" category, depending on the target.