There is such a thing as a hands-free kit. Fix that phone someplace accessible with such a kit, and you're good to go. But hold it to your ear for phoning, and you'll get fined. At least, that's pretty much it for most, if not all of Europe.

Those are claims. What's the actual reality of the facts?

Hartmut Zohm, a german plasma physicist who's deep into fusion research, regularly provides updates on the status of fusion research. While not saying it in so many words, he is quite clearly giving impression that the claims by all those fusion startups are overly optimistic and basically a "give me all your venture money" call. They may have specific partial solutions for certain problems, but are nowhere near a full-scale operation.

That's certainly right, but only up to a point. When you're e.g. running a mainframe platform and losing the last people that still know it, and all the code running there, to retirement, and even the maker of that (non-IBM) platform obviously has less and less people who know how to keep that platform running, it's definitely time to move on. Unlike Elon / DOGE want to make you believe, no, it's not a 5 month job to migrate, even 5 years won't suffice to do it properly. It's not simply about knowing COBOL.

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!