's OK. The war (whether it returns to hot or remains "of negotiation") will almost certainly be over in less than two months, one way or another. Why? Because the Iranians can demonstrably control the Strait of Hormuz, and now they know that for a fact because the world's most powerful navy hasn't even really tried to force it open, let alone actually been able to do so. That means European and Asian airlines cannot get the jet fuel they need and - something Trump still hasn't grasped - pushes up the prices of oil for everyone, even if you can produce it yourself, because of the way the US set things up with the petrodollar (LOL!).

Why does that all matter? Because in less than two months, at least some European and Asian football fans (mostly) are going to want to fly to the US to watch the vastly overpriced World Cup.(under Trump, why am I not surprised?). Even if they have the cash to burn on it, they can't do that if the airlines are forced to cancel their flights, can they? Remember how wound up Trump got over crowd & stadium numbers? Do the math.

I'm sure the Iranians know this, and have almost certainly also realised they just need to stall while keeping passage through the strait to a minimum (they don't even need to expend a lot of munitions for this; just keep the uncertainty high enough no one risks the passage) until the Trump administration realises this and has to make some major concessions to get the oil and gas flowing again. How close to the first match do you think that will be for our 5D chess playing grandmaster? He's got six weeks before the fans get given a red card by their airlines...

I hear Trump is supposed to be doing a Bible reading as a result of his recent spat with the Pope. Might I suggest Galatians 6:7? :)

A way for Elon to dilute his losses from Twitter and other missteps into all those people who buy into the upcoming SpaceX IPO.

If your plan isn't to get in early and dump the stock as close as possible to the almost inevitable price spike those all who didn't a chance to pre-buy in cheap and are now taking part in the FOMO buying / cash-out frenzy that follows the shares hitting the stock exchanges, then you *really* need to be paying attention to where all Elon's debts and loss-making business units are. (Hint - he's been steadily moving them all into SpaceX).

Good question, that probably should be addressed in TFA, but isn't. Have a cookie, assuming you're not blocking them. :)

The Earth was exiting a period of relative geological and climatic stability and entering a cooling phase, which would have helped strengthen the AMOC. This process was then enhanced by a large scale volcanic eruption, thought to be in North America, with the ejecta from that and a series of subsequent eruptions leading to a significant deviation from the trendline, a mini-iceage known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LILIA) similar to the Maunder Minimum, a multi-decade period of cooler than statistically expected temperatures (up to 2.7C cooler than average in European summers). This is reflected in tree-ring records which show highly stunted growth for the time, ice cores from polar ice cores, and some of the remaining writings from the period that describe widespread crop failures.

The issue here might be that the hotel is legit, but their internal reservation system has been compromised. They get the booking.com confirmation, enter it into their system to assign you the relevant room, and the scammers use that info to try and stiff you. The scammer has your details, and combined with the fact that it's a fresh booking, a made up request for some clarity/additional confirmation followed by a request for money is going to press all the buttons for an almost perfect phish.

It apparently happens a lot, and it's outside of booking.com's control (although the hack in TFS is obviously on them), so all booking.com can do it advise you that they don't reach out view email or WhatsApp, and all you can do it pay attention to the booking details on the main booking.com site and only interact through that. Or use a different hotel booking site.

Don't try and report these to booking.com, btw, as you found out, they clearly give zero fucks. I had that kind of scam happen with one booking out of four on a trip (obvious scammer reached out on WhatsApp) and ended up going around and around in circles on booking.com to try and find a way to flag the fact that there was a compromise, probably on the hotel's side. After 3 laps I gave up, cancelled all four bookings, blocked the spammer on WhatsApp, and rebooked using a different agent swapping out the compromised hotel for another one. I can only assume that booking.com is definitely doing their part to ensure the enshittification of the Internet.

Totally agree with the rationale for the blocking; no sane company is going to willingly publish info that could harm them. Can't really argue with that at all; their site, their rules, and all that. What the First Amendment says about free speech is regarding the Government, not public entitiies like Meta, so they absolutely have the right to decline to provide these lawyers with an online megaphone and soapbox to stand on.

On your question though, it's quite likely no one authorized them. Assuming you're not blocking ads outright, then any ads you do see are basically the result of an in-browser bidding war to see which company is willing to pay the most (still tiny fractions of a cent) to get you to look at their ad instead of someone else's based on the info Meta has on your demographics and interests. Meta has a demonstrably loose grasp of ethics, so if you are thinking they are vetting every ad's contents before it gets accepted into the auction mill rather than just relying on companies to comply with the conditions Meta set and dealing with any that don't if any complaints get sufficient traction, then you have a radically different take on Meta than I do.

At best, they've probably just changed the Ts&Cs to put a clause in preventing ads of this type, or blacklisted the companies that were pushing them.

I find I can do everything I need with old and OWA, and OWA is only really needed for some SP/group stuff that will probably never make it into "old". I'd switch to Thunderbird, but that's coming up short in some areas too and OWA alone won't make up the shortfall there, so my current approach is the least painful for getting stuff done, no matter how much that chafes. I find "New" to be a confusing and broken mess that is missing several key features needed to interact with other Microsoft systems (FFS!), and have fed that back to Microsoft in no uncertain terms every single time I've found myself switched to it and have immediately switched back using the feedback form they give you. No real idea on the Store version as I've only tried it once in the hope it might do everything I need (it didn't), but I hear that's awful too.

So, yeah, GP listed three products, which are the "local" versions, then there is the OWA version, so Microsoft has four totally different products that use the "Outlook" name by my count. Maybe they employed a former cola exec to lead the product development, or something; throw flavours at the wall and see what sticks? Store seems to be the "Diet" version, so maybe next up will "Cherry Outlook" and "Lime Outlook"... Personally, I really want "Outlook Zero", which will be me uninstalling it for good once I can switch to anything else.

There's also Outlook Web Access (OWA) that you use through a browser. All are borked in various ways, but the cherry on the cake is that most of them have some functionality that at least some of the others do not, especially if you are in an Exchange/Sharepoint/Teams environment where you may need to switch between different Outlooks depending on what you want to do.

Even allowing for the fact they wanted to rebuild "classic" in a more modern framework and shipped before it had anywhere near feature parity, I honestly can't even begin imagine what kind of decision process, or lack thereof, must have gone on in Microsoft to get them to this point...

Lets say you have a trendline for the expected impacts of the changing climate. It has error bars to cover the expected deviations caused by short term weather patterns and, since the variables become less certain the further you go into the future, those error bars get further and further from the central trend line as you go. Typical trend prediction graph for any number of fields, in otherwords.

Now, lets say your worst case error bars for 2026 allowed for a deviation of upto 5%, but when the data lands it's actually closer 10% (not the actual numbers, BTW). I think your comments would pretty much align with those quoted in TFA, and especially so since this is only one year out from last year's known data and the margin of error on the trend line is at its smallest. For those that can't figure it out for themselves, and assuming this isn't just an extreme outlier, what that implies is that the models that many sceptics dismiss as "alarmist" might actually be too conservative and the future trajectory could be *far* worse than even the most vocal of the climate change advocates are saying it will be.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

Similar concerns here, both for F-droid apps and DJI's - which require installing from an APK downloaded directly from DJI to get the latest version. I only have a handful of apps I sideload, and when I'm not updating those I tend to have the ability to sideload turned off for the modicum of additional security afforded against inadvertant user error. If I either need to go through this 24-hour process every time I update the apps, or leave sideloading permanantly enabled (which I'd be more likely to do, I think), then this is yet another user-unfriendly move by Google that is almost certainly more about being self-serving than anything else.

If I wanted a walled garden, I'd have bought an iPhone.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.