It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.

> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.

Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving LibreOffice forward.

I think Munich has switched back and forth a few times. They kept finding that FOSS was ultimately more expensive because of training and compatibility issues.

> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.

Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections to go via API over HTTPS.

> Moving off of MS Word doesn't hurt their budget if you still need a license to MS 365 to get your email.

You can get less expensive licenses that give access to email. The F-series licenses give only web versions of Office access, though Outlook (which comes with Windows now) works just fine.

The reason that we have M365 E5 licenses, though, isn't so much the Office suite. It's everything else that comes with it: OneDrive, SharePoint (which we use almost entirely for file storage, not internal websites), PowerBI, and the security and compliance features. On top of that, we don't have to manage any of the patching or uptime of the services. They (mostly) just work. That Office comes with it is almost a bonus. For a small company, it's a godsend. For a medium-sized company like ours, that's a significant savings, probably several million dollars that would have gone to IT above and beyond what we already spend with Microsoft. Larger enterprises may have a different view, which is why so many are moving back on-prem for some services.

I would love to see some alternatives that could be run on-prem. LibreOffice Online development was stopped five years ago. Collabora Online offers its development edition that can be run locally, but support is limited. Realistically, almost any company is going to use Microsoft, Google, or (distant third?) AWS WorkDocs, and it will be that way unless and until open-source can come up with something that is relatively easy to set up and covers at least what M365 Business Premium or Google Workspaces provides.

It wasn't lawfare against Trump. The man is guilty of multiple felonies that would have landed anyone else in prison for decades.

Trump, on the other hand, has engaged in lawfare, going after people purely because they didn't like him or because they did something that annoyed him, like providing legal counsel to someone he doesn't like. So far, he is mostly losing. How long that matters is still up in the air.

Monica Cellio was reportedly fired when she asked if it was OK if she used gender-neutral language that does not use pronouns at all, since that can help avoid misgendering situations. She also said that use of preferred pronouns was the right thing to do, and that knowingly misgendering someone is wrong. She said that she was told by other moderators that avoiding third-person singular pronouns was itself misgendering. It's not clear from what she wrote if she was fired for asking the question, or fired preemptively for potentially not following in the future a policy that was still under development, and she may not have known at the time. From what I've read, I'm not sure if that was ever entirely established.

Stack Overflow later posted a very legalese response "regretting" how it all turned out and any damage to Monica's reputation, while also offering to allow her to apply for reinstatement. Monica stated in the same thread that she could not say anything for legal reasons, suggesting that there was a settlement. She did not attempt to get reinstated, and left SO entirely a few months later.

I've flown plenty of times since 9/11. I'm aware of the identity requirements (though there are ways around them, if you're willing to budget the lead time). As for Amtrak, while TSA talked about it, that never happened, and you don't need an ID when crossing a land border, which is what people who are against it claim to fear.

I'm not one of those opposed to a national ID. I think a lot of fraud could be eliminated by going the route that Estonia did. It would be a lot easier to get employment by just providing the federal ID and validating the certificate. But the reactionaries refuse to even discuss it, so it never goes anywhere.

Trump isn't a Russian agent, but he is very likely a Russian asset. An agent is one who acts on behalf of another at their direction, and Trump isn't quite that. An asset is one who provides information, services, or influence for another, whether controlled directly through payments or other tangible benefits or indirectly through manipulation, and Trump is very much in the latter camp. Those controlled through manipulation are often preferred because they may not even know it's happening. Trump is convinced that he is running the show, even though it's clear to most people that Putin is pulling the strings.

The courts have started pushing back, and the administration is complying where they're unable to string out or play with the decisions. And they're quickly running out of room to do that, as the judges are catching on to their methods and closing any real or perceived loopholes in their decisions. One judge wrote a 137-page decision for a temporary restraining order, not only ripping apart the government's position but taking pains to close out every opening she could find for the government to slip past it. The administration is also demanding expedited appeals, and Trump himself is demanding that SCOTUS take up appeals more or less directly, but the system isn't rushing the government appeals where it is taking up appeals by plaintiffs rather more quickly.

That's not to say that Trump won't decide to ignore them at some point, but that doesn't seem to quite be happening so far, and while Trump himself might ignore orders, there are thousands of people below him who might not.

Almost no one anywhere declares war anymore because declared wars trigger webs of complicated responses. Since the end of WW2, there have been only eight declared wars:

- The Arab-Israeli War in 1948
- Mauritania declared war on Israel during the Six-Day War as a show of support for the Arab League
- The Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977-1978
- The Uganda-Tanzania War in 1978-1979
- The Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988
- The Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon against a breakaway state in 2017
- The Second Western Sahara War between the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic that claims Western Sahara against Morocco in 2020

Two of those (Mauritania's declaration and the Second Western Sahara War) are basically wars in name only, with no notable fighting taking place. None of the other notable wars of the latter half of the twentieth century were declared. Not the French-Indochina War, not Korea, not the Angolan War, not the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, not the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. I could go on with many others, and none of them directly involved the US. All were undoubtedly wars.

War declarations trigger mandatory legal responses by other nations. Countries have to stop supplying declarant countries with goods that could be used in war, most clearly munitions but sometimes civilian goods with dual purposes. They have to intern troops and materiel of declarant nations. They may have to take certain internal actions that can be economically painful. To get around this, most countries simply don't declare war. It's an absurdly simple way to game the system that everyone plays, because anyone who does play it ends up at a disadvantage.

The US didn't charge anyone with treason for activities that took place during the Cold War. Even Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen didn't get treason charges despite inflicting catastrophic damage to US intelligence efforts.

SSN assignments were randomized starting June 2011. While the 999-99-9999 format is the same, nothing else is. My kids were born 16 months apart in the same hospital after that date, and there is zero similarity between their SSNs.

SSNs are used because there's a massive backlash to anything else that could replace it and fulfill the same functions. SSNs are as close as we get to a national ID system, and any proposals to implement a national ID are met with paranoia, with many asking when "Papers, please?" will become the standard mantra when trying to go anywhere. It gets especially bad when proposals include embedding a government-signed certificate in a chip (similar to how Estonia does it), which invariably gets certain religious groups up in arms over "mark of the beast" claims.

I'm also a history buff. And I used to be a JFK assassination conspiracist, so I know about most of the claims that are out there. I am not aware of anyone who has offered up significant evidence that the wounds were "obviously" from steel-jacketed rounds. And even if they were, the audio is very strong evidence that Hickey did not fire his weapon. The audio doesn't necessarily rule out a second shooter (there has long been a claim that there was a shooter in another building), but it does eliminate Hickey's weapon as the source of any of the shots.

Reducing overhead for sake of reducing overhead is never a good idea. Some overhead is unnecessary, I agree. But cutting all of it wholesale despite the presence of useful overhead isn't the answer.

That's not a solution. That's giving up.

They're chasing this because they don't know what dark energy is. Scientists didn't stop trying to understand gravity after Newton's description, and they didn't stop after Einstein produced a better one. And for whomever figures out dark energy (if anyone does), scientists aren't going to stop with that.