> Sarifs are, in fact, for ease of reading, but point
> well taken. The justifications are wrong and the
> people making them are petty assholes.

Yeah... the letters I and l, as well as the number 1, would beg to differ. Another insufferability I've notices is that sans-serif fonts also omit the slash in the 0, which makes it easy to mistake fo the capital letter O. I would grant that Helvetica is eaiser on the eyes for mere consumption only. But to actually get real work done, serifs are fairly helpful.

At the end of the day, *THIS* administration should be using Comic Sans or Wingdings. I doubt anything it produces is worth reading no matter the font.

Monsanto board members and their families should be forced to live with levels of exposure to glyphosphate farmers and others who have used it for years face. Maybe they'll be just fine. Not everybody who has been exposed to glyphosphate got cancer, right?

If you think Meta doesn't already censor accounts all over the world on behalf of the United States, I have a space elevator to sell you. For example, make an off-hand comment about how easily Canada could manufacture a dirty bomb as protection against US aggression and watch limitations start to be applied to your activities. Meanwhile, Russian bot pages continue to be treated as honoured guests.

Muskrat is openly on russia's side and using spacex to act against Ukraine! He bent the knee back in 2023, I think it was, by ordering Starlink blackouts strategically crafted to prevent Ukraine's communications in their defense from russia. And it's not even a general lack of service or anything he could blame on profitability or whatnot. He targets specific Ukrainian military operations and cuts the communications support for those. The only thing that's "black" about this "market" is the ink on the check that putin wrote.

There's always somebody who can be intimidated by a bully.

From a European perspective, the US also qualifies as an "enemy society", thanks to Trump being little better than a Russian sock puppet. China is a more distant threat. Putin, however, is going to keep carving off little bits of all the former SSRs until somebody actually forces him to stop. That "somebody" will not be Donald Trump.

I dunno about the other guy, but I am currently sitting in a red state hotel, and will be subjected to quite a lot of it tomorrow and Friday when I'm at my aunt & uncle's place for thanksgiving; and it will probably be on every television in every airport on Saturday until I get back to SFO. I don't know how often you have to venture out into the lion's den. But people here treat that shit like it's a 24/7 prayer service or something. It was also on just about every airport TV on the way here once I hit Atlanta. And it was on three different televisions on the hotel's lobby level when I checked in. You can't get away from it here unless you hide in your room by yourself.

I'm actually kind of surprised that they still exist in the first place. What do they even still make or sell anymore besides shitty DRM'd printer ink and the occasional toner cartridge for a 1990s-era Laserjet that just won't die?

There's not even a point to that anymore. Tapping those cables worked back in the day because everyone thought they were so untouchable that they didn't bother to encrypt the message traffic. Now? Ever since the US Navy demonstrated to the world that the cables CAN be reached and they CAN be tapped; you can take it to the bank that everything, particularly the military and government traffic that would merit tapping them in the first place, is encrypted to a fare-thee-well.

So unless the NSA has a quantum computer at Fort Meade no one knows about that can break all conventional encryption; there's not much point to the taps anymore.

You could use CAPTOR mines, placed along the cable's shallows and reprogrammed to fire if the adjacent cable section is cut. That little ASW torpedo isn't likely to *sink* a full-sized surface combatant. But it should be enough to muck up the prop and rudder such that the cable-cutting vessel will wallow around in one place long enough to round up a Super Hornet or Eurofighter to put a few Harpoons into the stack of crap.

I don't know much about firmware, so maybe somebody here can help me out. The capability is still in the CPU, but Dell and HP have disabled it. How long will it be until some bright star who understands these things writes a firmware revision to re-enable it?

I'm ancient...I recall when overclocking was an edgy, high risk activity. Not so much now. Can we look forward to a new generation of hackers who will find ways to make computer components work the way they were actually designed to?

I've plenty left over for that, but that's not quite as simple. Pure capitalism is pure poison. Properly managed (which is not the case in North America), it isn't a bad way to run an economy.

In any case, there's the human factor. A business owner can choose to be evil, or choose not to be. I knew a guy who left money on the table rather than compromise his ethics. His company was profitable, and he was respected in the local business community. He prospered, even though he refused to squeeze every nickel out of is staff, or illegally dump waste when he could easily have gotten away with it.

I've always been against the death penalty, but for the conscienceless monsters marketing this dangerous crap for children, I might be willing to reconsider.

Yea... I have long since forgotten most of my math. But I actually graduated with a minor in mathematics, basically because I only needed two more MA electives (Differential Equations 3, which, admittedly, was a beast and Advanced Number Theory, which was a "Why the heck is *this* a 400-level class?" class.) than I already had for my CS degree. A few years back, I ran across one of those "This is how kids are learning now under Common Core" articles. And DAMN!!! WTF sort of jobs do the people who came up with that garbage think they're preparing kids for? Counting out how many McNuggets to put in the little cardboard box? Because CC sure as shit isn't teaching them the math they need to be scientists or engineers.

On the plus side; the defective educations that kids were already getting at the primary level, combined with the current administration's war on higher education, means that my cohort of GenX, which is getting to be about the right age where it would otherwise be a concern, is going to have to worry a lot less about ageism than previous 40-somethings. So... yay for silver linings!

Yeah, but with RFK and "Doctor" Oz running the nation's health care, how can we even actually trust vaccines in the US at all anymore? If I'm going to get stuck with the needle, I want it to have an actual medication or vaccine in there; NOT colloidal silver or green coffee bean extract or essential oils or lysol or whatever other quackery has their attention at that moment in time.

Fortunately, I'm traveling overseas next spring. One of the things I'm going to get from my doctor at my next physical is a list of any boosters that are coming due any time soon. So I *WILL* be fully vaccinated because I will be getting my shots in a country with real medical leadership who practice and promote real science and medicine.