Trump will be making the announcement on Wednesday that by 2035, walking will be totally banned in America. Only cars and mobility scooters are allowed.

Even in the US the only homogeneity is if your education background uses Websters as its standard reference, which I suspect is above 99% of US schools.
The dictionary situation in Canada has historically been less one-sided. Depending on province is the most common dictionary, with Gage being the only truly Canadian dictionary I ever saw growing up. But I suspect OUP Canada is the dominate one now (I haven't been over there in decades).

Years ago, at least in the northern US, metre and meter were both common to see in print. And metre was preferred if ambiguity was possible, which is rarely the case. But hey, I'm from a part of the US that teaches children to sing in French. So perhaps not an ordinary sample of USian lifestyle.

A combination of arrogance and denial will lead to this century being known as the Chinese Century. Western style democracies are unlikely to retain the geopolitical dominance they once enjoyed, and neither the US or EU are prepared culturally or materially for this eventuality.

Memorising a bunch of spelling in order to read some 18th and 19th century documents that are otherwise modern English seems inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as teaching millions of children and English as a second language students a bunch of spelling variations that should otherwise be obsolete.

None of us can read Old English without significant training. And even Middle English (~400-500 years) is troublesome for a layperson without an annotated student book for the text you want to tackle.

I don't agree that the job of dictionary compilers would be any different. Each one attempts to establish their own vision of the English language for their region. And they will continue to do so, perhaps selling a lot more material if we have to transition between new spell (and possibly new alphabet) and old spelling. Most of us that already know the old system would end up buying reference material for the new version.

Mechanical analysis would be easier, not harder. And with LLMs most of the expert systems for this are obsolete precisely because they are inflexible.

The number one reason not to do this is: Interia.
Nobody likes having to learn new things or change the way they've been doing things. If grouping numbers together in multiplication for "common core math" causes a row with parents, imagine if we added some letters for the various forms of TH ? People would lose their minds that they can't sing the Alphabet Song anymore!

Both are inconsistent and irritating, and by preserving spellings through linguistic shifts, they make it essentially impossible to generalize a phonetic system. Add to that the Latin alphabet, even with various digraphs, is insufficient to cover English's phonemes.

And at once instance we'll spell something with a letter we no longer pronounce, out of tradition. And another we'll swap HW in the beginning of all Old English words and start pronouncing them like "white" or "whey". Absolutely ridiculous language.

Underground? You'll have to pump air in there or your staff will die.

And you'll need to send the waste heat somewhere, maybe into the walls but the square-cube law indicates that this is not scalable. A really big data center will need to pump waste heat out through a medium, liquid or gas. Water is the obvious choice. So your underground data center ought to have a hyperboloid cooling tower sitting above it. Seems kind of pointless to have dug that big hole after all that.

Most of the range anxiety goes away once you see how effective overnight charging is.

If, in fact, you are one of those lucky enough to be able to park offstreet and charge at home overnight....

Depends where in the world you live. For the hundreds of millions of people living in Europe or countries like Singapore or Malaysia, thereâ(TM)s no need for a second car. People take the train for longer journeys. I was 43, married, with two kids aged 9 and 11, before I got a first car ten years ago - and it only had a range of 90 miles. I live in north London, and we just didnâ(TM)t have much need for a car up to that point. When we went to see my parents in Manchester, it was easier to get the train.

We're talking the US...and here it's hard to get by with only 1 car per family, although it can be done.

But in most middle class and up families, eventually everyone in the household has their own car.

Exactly this. People are not buying these large EVs without mandates or subsidies

This is the US.

The govt is supposed to be answerable to the people, not the other way around.

If the EVs can't compete on price and convenience without subsidies or even worse..."mandates", then they deserve to rot and it is not the governments business to step in and force people to to buy what they don't want, or is not ready for the market to compete for the consumers money....

The implication of course being that a substantial fraction on the entire country, after their weekly 9-5 grind and school run lines to kick back, have a few beers and haul trailers all weekend!

LOTS of boats down here where I live....lots of folks haut their boats to the launches and drop/pick them up over any given weekend...and often during the weeks for some people....

Originally I wasn't making a serious argument and more of just a funny quip. But I'll bite:

Per machine licensing, service contracts, certification programs, a large suite of costly add-on applications, different licensing for VMs, licensing limits on number of CPU sockets, etc.

I'm going to guess that a Microsoft-based deployment is going to be quite a bit more costly than OpenBSD. Especially in data center and SOHO server where a relatively barebones OS is going to be able to meet the mission requirements. Like why put your authoritative DNS server on Windows, that's just asking for trouble with added expense.

A very long time ago, I setup a Windows network for a company; it used NFS and RADIUS and a little bit of Samba for the initial login scripts. Doubtful it's the way someone would approach the problem of providing a non-Microsoft way to bring Windows clients into their network, but the tools we had were different back then. (and NFS support was a bit more wide spread)

This whole story is about CCTV, therefore NVR or cloud keys as these are where CCTV is hosted.

Having to use a different device in addition to the NVR defeats the point, especially considering a lot of users are on networks where they're forced to use the ISP-supplied gateway.

Even if the gateway does DDNS that's not relevant on a modern IPv6 network as the actual NVR device will have its own address rather than forwarding a port from the gateway address. Keep in mind that a good percentage of the world is stuck behind CGNAT so the gateway has an unreachable legacy address and home devices are only reachable over IPv6 (or not at all if the ISP is so lousy that they've not deployed v6 yet).

Myopic to the point of sociopathy.

It's only sociopathic IF you believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that through action or inaction to go EV only...that the world willl end soon. I'm not chicken little in mentality....so,.....

However, there's no convincing you that you might be wrong or just off a bit, Your ego won't allow it....your extreme view is the ONLY view....right?

So why pay more to get less with Microsoft?

That may explain it. I have a Qrevo S, which is from 2024, while yours is from 2022. The only thing that it ever gets stuck at is one spot where, from under the couch, it can see out the ground-level window, and get stuck between the couch and window ledge (not actually stuck, just confused), because the LiDAR sees out the window. And I fixed that just by setting a small exclusion zone there. It never "gets lost" - maybe your house has some vast open spaces that it can't handle? But the LiDAR seems to see pretty far. The only other issues I've had are things like where I'll have a loose cord on the floor or some large piece of debris or whatnot, and even then, it's usually good at not getting stock on them. I'm also impressed with how well it deals with doors vs. a Roomba - my Roomba used to always get itself locked in rooms by accidentally closing doors after it entered, while the Roborock really tries to avoid ever touching them.

The Qrevo S has actually rotating mops, and they do a superb job with the floor. Spotless. My robot has the hardest mopping job in the world, too - it has to clean under my parrot's cage, and he poops off the edge onto a plastic mat under it ;)

I've never had to contact support - hopefully I don't need to :)