You say you're independent, but you refer to far-right propaganda as fact, which suggests you're not as independent as you believe yourself to be.

Furthermore, the aspect of you referring to Biden's center-right policies as being "radical left" and "extremist" suggests you're more accurately positioned somewhere between the hard-right and the far-right. Sure, the center-right, seen from the perspective of the hard-right, is to their left. But being to the left of the hard-right is very different from being on the left.

It's quite telling how immensely to the right the whole Overton window of American politics is when a lame party such as the DEM, with its grand total of zero left-wing policies, is considered as not only "the" left, but even as the "extreme" left. Go figure...

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Ah! A GB News regular, I see!

Are they still following the old trick of taking one single isolated event, and talking about that one single isolated event non-stop for ten years straight to give the gullible the impression that one single isolated event happened twenty thousand times?

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Nope, see Alexandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

They don't want to, but they want to cause the impression they want to. The more afraid individual NATO countries are they're going to be invaded, the more the invest in their own military strength, and refuse to share their stockpile of weapons and ammunitions with Ukraine, after all, what if they need those stockpiles? Better to hard them in fear a future hypothetical war, than to spend it on the current real war that, if won, would stop the future potential aggressor cold.

Hence, threatening NATO countries is an extremely effective psy-op for Russia. And European leaders are quite the idiots for not perceiving that's what's going on.

Ah! Another American whose history lessons were limited to learning that, I dunno, George Washington once cut a tree and that the US saved the world all alone twice! Nice!

Me, I'm quite amused when I see the US doing such things for roughly the same reason I'm amused when I see its pseudo-conservatives destroying its welfare system. The result will be, respectively, what happened to the British Empire and to China after WW2. As the old saying goes, never interrupt your adversary when he's doing something stupid! ;-)

It's not hard to understand. Three things have been happening all at the same time in Europe, and each one of these are, all by itself, of the kind that prompts governments to go into authoritarian mode. All three put together make this exponentially more the case:

a) Risk of Russian invasion.

Russia has already been attacking NATO countries via invasion of their airspace via drone fleets and military aircraft, plus several cases of cutting oceanic data cables, and other forms of harassment, including explicit verbal threats against several members.

Preparing for war requires managing citizens morale. Completely free flow of information is detrimental to this effect, since either true of false (propaganda) content telling citizens the war is going bad can become a self-fulling prophecy. Hence, governments see the need to start implementing all the technology needed for effective control of information flow right before and during a war if it happens.

b) Rise of internal threats.

First and foremost, the far-right parties on those countries have been growing in popularity and power, being financed as a 5th column by Russia. If victorious, they will fracture the EU, weakening them all against aggressors. Additionally, European leaders fear losing power and, in the extreme, losing their lives and freedom to far-right extremists.

As such the see the curbing of those propaganda efforts as absolutely necessary for the survival of their, well, everything.

b) Betrayal by a former major ally.

The US has sided with the enemy of Europe, Russia, on a number of fronts, having been undermining the European effort in the buffer zone between Europe and Russia (aka Ukraine), helping to fund the above internal threats, relentlessly pressuring European countries on all economic fronts, and actively threatening to invade and conquer European territories, meaning what was a risk of a war on a single front has grown into a serious risk of a two-fronts war. Additionally, the US controls most of the information exchange technology Europe uses, meaning it can advance the propaganda mentioned above way more effectively than Russia alone could, and get intelligence on Europe at levels Russia alone absolutely wouldn't be able to.

As such, transferring control of information channels from US national security associates to European ones became urgent, with an immediate need to reduce as much as possible the power the US has to advance those contrary goals, which again requires controlling information flows.

Hence the recent push.

Notice I don't agree with any of the above. I'm of the "the best counter to bad speech is more speech" school of thought myself. But that's what I see as the core motivations behind this movement.

As for the US, it's trying to implement a Fascist political regime. As any such movement, it uses the tools of freedom to raise, then once in power destroys those tools. As such, what we're observing over there is much simpler than what's going on Europe, even if the end result, if it arrives at its goal, is pretty much the same.

And other countries are following so many variations of the same issues.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

no problem.

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

Perhaps you should just grow up.