And that underlies the reality of WYSIWYG, that there are limits to what any word processor can actually do to guarantee formatting and fixed placement. It's why Tex/LaTeX and PDF were invented to begin with, and why there's really a point at which trying to force any WYSIWYG word processor to behave that way is going to lead to fragile misbehaving documents that fall apart. As a very good example, the use of tables and frames in documents (both docx and odt) to guarantee the positioning of various elements creates can quickly lead to documents so fragile that any attempt to update styles causes havoc.

I'm working my way through some biology and general science courses right now in my spare time, and I'm seriously looking at re-familiarizing myself with LaTeX to produce reports and papers, because the amount of work I've had to do to get diagrams and images to stay put, and to break my cardinal rule relying solely on styles for formatting makes me think the kind of work I'm doing is much more in typesetting than in word processing.

Selecting office software so that you aren't held digitally hostage to a government that is, say, threatening to annex a significant proportion of your territory, is both eminently defensible for operational, security AND political reasons.

Providing you have control of your DNS, it means using DKIM , SPF or similar measures. I've been self-hosting email for three decades, and it ain't complicated.

"Likes long romantic walks in the park, binging Buffy the Vampire, pasta, and overthrowing the US government by lynching the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House."

I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.

You cannot die, McLeod. Accept it.

Also Sean Connery.

Although outsourcing is definitely a thing, a lot of companies are just not hiring, even at the expense of shipping new products. Do not discount enshittification and stagnation. Why build a new thing, when you can put lipstick on the old thing.

It's going into the oceans, just so the combination of pH fuckery and increased warming turns the world's oceans into an tepid acidic brine.

Actually, the warning was first sounded the warning was Svante Arrhenius in 1896, when he determined the UV absorption properties of CO2 and came to the pretty fucking obvious conclusion, based on chemistry and thermodynamics, that if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you will inevitably, as a basic function of physics, increase energy absorption.

So we can add chemistry to the list of things you're deliberately ignorant of.

Fuck, is stupidity and willful ignorance now viewed as a virtue? Or is it just sociopathy?

And we have the steam deck, which does this thing already without inviting MS into the home.

I'd wager very damned few apps are ever distributed via sideloading. meta makes Facebook and Messenger available via sideloading, mainly to get around some locked-down non-Alphabet Android devices, but for the vast majority of users, if it's not on the default app store on their device, it might as well not exist.

That is a half-truth. China is 100% guilty of everything they are accused of, and more. That's not proaganda.

But yes, we've given them too much money and allowed their fetid mass of government to be a threat. There is propaganda sold to the west by our own oligarchs, with the notion that by allowing them to exploit the cheap labor market of China, we would all be uplifted into the intellectual and cultural elite. Obviously that doesn't work, toilets need cleaning too. However by our having invested so much money into China, rather than dominating them and cracking them open, we instead started to get infected with their rot, and yes, they now have the power to be dangerous to our oligarchs. That doesn't change the equation any, they need to be shut down.

Of course we do also need to shut our oligarchs down too.

If they drop the whole CCP thing and murder their ruling class in the streets, we'd all probably do business with them again. Maybe even to the point where we flee our oligarch hell-holes in pursuit of a better life.

The reasons to force the phone ecosystems to open continue to mount, and itâ(TM)s pretty clear governments are benefiting greatly from our lack of control over our devices