Because some stories sell better if you add "The First" somewhere in the title.

And yes, the HSR is under construction including my favorite part, the Dolly Parton Memorial Crossing.

It's a phrase made by religious people, and they often confuse atheism with agnosticism. The idea is that one who has some doubts about a god will suddenly want to start praying when the shells are dropping, but in actuality not really something that happens. Maybe they mutter "oh god oh god oh god" a lot but that's not the same thing.

Religous believers who have a focus on proselytizing often believe additional nonsense, that others will suddenly convert if only they listened. They may start a "logical" argument by assuming that the listener accepts the lemmas that this particular book is inerrant and full of truth, and that reciting scripture is all it takes to convince a listener of your argument. "Wait, they guy yesterday told me that his religious book was better than yours!" The most of what they do is convince some wishy-washy backsliders to recommit.

Not all metric countries are 100% metric. Possibly most have some alternate measurements that stick around for inertia reasons. Ie, UK still uses miles officially on all roads, and most commonwealth countries keep some imperial measurements around (not the British Imperial units are not identical to American Imperial units!). Never mind such things as kilderkins.

Metric is nice, but inertia and stubborness require a lot of force. Anyone in the US with even a small amount of science education will know a lot of metric units. All drug users are familiar with grams and kilos. Software developers are quite familiar with the two liter size of diet coke. The snag that is hard to get around with new measurement systems, even with those who regularly use them, is in estimating how much a measurement is. It's like a second language in that you have to stop and think about it. Ie, you walk for awhile and then think "I walked two miles" and it comes naturally to many, but then need to think about how many kilometers it is. And this alien nature is what slows the adoption.

On the other hand, if you're a (US) chemist you're used to grams because you use it al the time but rarely if ever deal with ounces on the job; most electrical work is all in metric; BTUs isn't used much except with natural gas but with electricity watt-hours gets used instead even though they measure the same thing. Inertia.

Time is still not metric. It was proposed in revolutionary France but utterly rejected. It's one thing to tell farmers to use meters and try to overcome that resistance, but the entire public is used to 24 hours a day and 365 days in a year and seven days in a week, to try and make them switch over is futile. Other measurements are used much less often, many are only used in trade and science where common measurements are very important and so adoption there is easier.

Perl was great in the early days. Still is great but the sheen might be off, as it's always been an obtuse language. But at the start it was great, and I described it to my professor boss as "I can take the shell, awk, and sed scripts and put them into a single file." It sort of broke the Unix paradigm of having each tool do just one job well, by doing multiple jobs well.

ARexx was great, but it was mostly an IBM tool that got ported. I felt it did things the right way, as opposed to how Tcl did things the wrong way in my view (integrating Tcl into your applications means you make Tcl the main loop and it's in charge, whereas with ARexx you could retrofit it into an existing application without redesigning it).

It saves some money with some jobs, but it raises costs in other areas in ways that aren't immediately obvious to middle managment (or IT management who often don't care about the other departments). Slower service, slower development time, prices that rise because the initial tier of cloud service wasn't sufficient, higher prices for expanded network bandwidth needed for the cloud, etc.

You still need local IT people for basic support needs. And those numbers dwindle when the cloud is used and they decide they want outsourced IT as well. Operating on a shoestring budget is fine, but you also get shoestring service.

Downtimes are often completely out of your control. In-house, you can still use servers even when the internet isn't accessible to the outside world. I have seen more downtime with Microsoft Azure DevOps than I have with the previous in-house environment. An outage at a major cloud supplier affects you, but probably hundreds of other companies. at the same time. You also still want local backups, or backups at a third location - don't trust your cloud provider to do it properly or to restore in a timely manner (no matter how important you think you are, the cloud provider doesn't care). At times latency is just awful as well.

Sometimes bare metal is needed - not often, but when it's needed it should not be dismissed merely because the cloud won't do it cheaply. If you've got overallocated usage of the real hardware, some tasks won't work well in either a container or VM. Ie, a simulation that could run reliably on a PC with 32or 64 GB but bogs everything down in a VM. Cloud services are not very flexible, you don't get custom solutions.

I have seen that with IT abandoning their own ownership of servers, that departments and divisions sometimes create their own internal IT teams to run and manage servers (with hardware security modules, or for building, testing, etc). I don't know how common this is, since cloud services are designed around the common case. Having separate IT teams is expensive, but when the central guys are 100% Microsoft toadies who are 8 time zones away...

I didn't even know they had operations in Massachusetts.

(try "en masse")

"More affordable" and "high end" don't typically play in the same space.

For some jobs, I can see this, if there are no rules. I want 20 year olds as my ditch diggers, not 65 year olds. But the law says no you can't do this. It seems like perhaps these Chinese bosses are treating their workers like manual labor. Long term job prospects are probably better as a factory worker than as a software engineer... For engineering, software or otherwise, I agree with your view that diversity is important - if you're going to create excellent products. But that's a long term viewpoint, for those with short term get-rich-quick viewpoints they probably just want a workforce to work long hours and produce mediocre crap as fast as possible.

There ARE rules against the age discrimination in China. But just like US companies, the Chinese companies often ignore the rules. They often get away with ignoring the rules until a kindergarten collapses and token executions take place.

But, it's China. It may promote the idea of being a socialist country but it regularly ignores worker welfare and safety. Outwardly, China seems like a country that rigidly controls its population with a tight fist with a very strong central government, but in practice the central government is weak and provincial bosses are often corrupt. Just like the US, the lure of money makes officials look the other way.

Even after giving a cut to affiliate groups that helped, $22M can be used to murder quite a few Ukrainians. Because, while in the past their criminals used to be somewhat independent, after the full-scale war erupted, most of these bastards went under semi-official employ of the government.

I am shocked. SHOCKED!

Good thing I was sitting down...

But, with any Facebook product, I have a pretty good idea what they're selling to offset the ongoing costs - we're back back to the old saw "if you're not paying, you're not the customer".

I assume someone high up *cough*Zuckerberg*cough* believes that, somehow, having to repeat that asinine phrase somehow increases brand awareness in a positive way.

If I were stupid enough to purchase such a thing, I'd probably try to get it to use a different term there during the initial training - "Hey Melitta", "Hey Mentat" etc.

There were plenty of hospitals in Dresden and other German cities, too. But unlike us during WW2, Israelis don't do eradication of whole cities.

So please give me any reasonable metric (ie, not "has more letters in its name"), by which:
* Islam wouldn't be worse that national socialism (# of kills, hateful lines per page of their holy book, delta of world's science, etc)
* Israel wouldn't be better than our handling of nazis during WW2

Both are a pox on the face of this planet that needs to be eradicated (so are christianity and communism -- together they're the big four, there's no other ideology that achieved even 5M kills, Leopold's actions in Congo being the next contender).

Off-site, though not really off-shore. The concept is the same - don't deal with the problem locally with local experts, let someone else deal with it.

Also, when there has been UN action that wasn't vetoed, the UN forces mostly did nothing. Certainly they didn't protect the peace in Rwanda.