That's fine, competition is good. Though it's only a duopoly so it's not exactly ideal, but if it means communications with Mars gets competitive then it can only be a good thing.

Would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of "tip your server".

In the bad old days where servers were basically PCs in tower cases (with some being in nice double-wide cases), this actually happened. It was sitting under the desk of the person who basically was the IT guy in charge (he did stuff requiring high performance computers, so no one was going to question his need for a high performance computer to be a server back in the early days where office networks were starting to become a thing).

One day he accidentally kicked it and it tipped over. and landed flat. All we knew is it didn't boot. Not quite sure what the issue was, but likely the processor fell out of the slot and I think the drives were none to healthy after that. I think he moved it to a corner of his office after that and carefully routed the network cable out of the way.

The early days of networking were fun. Rarely did offices have Internet access so if you needed to do something on the Internet there was a computer with a modem in a open office. A year later it got upgraded to a PC running WinGate when the entire office and everyone's PC got networked together, but there was a delay accessing the Internet because it had to dial in to the ISP.

Tip your server, just like you tip your cows.

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

Utilities will love this. Production just popping up all over the place.

Balcony solar generally isn't that much. Especially in North America where it can only provide half the load. Most balcony solar installations generally have less than 1000W of capacity which compared to the daytime load is basically nothing. (This is because they plug into a weedy 110V 15A outlet which restricts how much power can be pushed anyways)

A proper rooftop solar installation will generally have anywhere from 5-20kW of capacity - the larger installations generally include battery storage because it's usually not affordable to release it on the grid.

It's basically guaranteed that balcony solar systems will be used by the home it's plugged into.

I don't think it's been ignored, but it might have been siloed. I was aware of it, and I'm not even close to an expert in that field. (OTOH, that bit about Teflon was surprising. I'd have expected Teflon to be totally inert.)

That's probably a underestimate. But, yes.
The real problem, though, is that many of them intensely support him. I think many of his supporters tend to be more firmly committed than were Nixon's.

Calling him a loser is incorrect. That he has occasionally lost is correct, but find someone who hasn't. Sometimes it seems he's playing a different game than the one we expect him to play.

But I rather agree with the rest of your characterization. And think it leaves out quite a few correct pejoratives.

I think the problem is that there's a conflict between good security and ease of remote use. They've been pushing ease of remote use with "adequate" security. Now that security is no longer adequate, but they don't want all the customers to be angry with them.

Sorry, but who, officially, has the right to name the lake? I'm pretty sure it isn't the president.

My preference is Eustatia.
I think I first proposed this around 1990, perhaps a little bit later.

The OSS exception prevents something being taken away. That is a win, even if we did not win something.

And what is that something?

All the OS age verification stuff does is avoid the third party age verification systems currently in place for things like Discord and other stuff. If you use Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, the age verification can be done via an attestation from the OS. All the Linux exception does is not require Linux to support it.

That means a Linux user wanting to use Discord and accessing age-restricted features would require using the same third-party services they always had (these services are not going away since basically all OSes right now do not support it). And those third party services would require IDs and such, which will not be securely stored (since many have experienced breaches).

All I see is that if you run Linux, you're going to have to give up information to some third party who isn't trustworthy and who may experience a data breach tomorrow.

I believe Linux already supports CPU hot-swap if the hardware supports it. It was needed by IBM so their POWER mainframes could literally do just that.

Unfortunately I don't think there's many x86-based servers that support CPU hot swapping.

Or maybe it was a competitor who wasn't interested in stealing the laptop so much as stealing the game before its release?

In any other timeline, I'd agree. But given Gamescom has been going on for years and such stuff hasn't really been a thing, stealing laptops of some indie developer doesn't really get you much.

I'd think it was more for the hardware - tho laptops may not be worth too much, but you can bet they would have 64GB of RAM and likely a nice SSD, both of which can net you north of a grand. Plus SSDs and memory are tiny and can be stripped from the laptop in minutes.

I suppose we might find out if someone finds a bunch of laptops stripped of memory and SSDs. (If you want to use those Bitlocker exploits it requires the original machine so if the hardware is "discovered" then you know it was just for the hardware.).

The right-wing loonies are coming for the EU too. It's a constant battle, it never ends. There will always be people who vote for hate, everywhere. Countries outside the US are not immune to this nonsense either.

Correct. It's why it's a constant battle. In Europe, the last time it happened was in Germany just prior to WWII.

It is no coincidence that the US voted the way it did because WWII is basically a distant memory and the lessons of the past were forgotten. Especially since the rise of American Exceptionalism that happened in 1956 when the US became the superpower and took over from the UK.

There's no reason to not incorporate both.

The UI is easy - while the car is in motion (not stopped), the touch screen should be disabled. Any adjustments you need to make while moving needs to be done with buttons you can feel and navigate without looking.

So things like HVAC controls (fan speed, temperature, mode (AC/heat/defrost/etc)), radio (volume, forward/back depending on mode - e.g., radio seek forward/backwards, or track skip/repeat), seat heat/cooling, and seat adjustments all may need to done whilst in motion as they can affect safety and comfort. But things like setting your destination on the navigation, setting up your music playlist, etc. only need to be done while the car is stopped and thus can remain touchscreen only interface.

There should also be buttons to control what the screen should show as the main display - e.g., a button to show the map or navigation in action, a button to show infotainment information, car status (fuel, battery, power flow) etc. But that's only needed if there's not enough screen to show all the items together, and it should just be a readout status where you can glance at it.