It's planet of short stature now

Simply stating: We Do Not Accept DOCx or XLSx formats, forces compliance. Since MS can produce ODF (allegedly), that's how you get compliance.

There's always going to be a few people who won't do it, mostly because they're afraid to upset some important customer. How you get around that isn't obvious. However, you can start by making it a requirement that anything that comes in that's in an MS format is sent back with some boilerplate added telling the sender why it's rejected and a list of acceptable formats. Making that automatic, so that the chicken droids can't ignore the policy may be all you need.

Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!

My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.

Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.

Back when I was in Boot Camp (USN) we were given gas masks one afternoon and herded into a sealed chamber to see for ourselves that they work. Once we'd had time to try them out, we were ordered to remove them, and find out for ourselves what a low-concentration of teal gas was like, followed by having us exit the chamber at double-time to help clear it out of our eyes. Some things you can try out for yourself, others are too hard hitting for that.

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

Yes I was in the Navy. If the helmsman and the duty office stick the ship on a sandbar the Captain still gets the blame.

And now you know why the Captain spends so much time on the bridge at sea. BTW, every time the Captain comes on the Bridge or leaves it is logged in case it later becomes important. (I was in the Navy too.)

Only thing worth testing will be how well it runs a proper OpenWRT.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing, just 1 less screw.

What can go wrong?

I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks...

Yeah the cops need to take this one seriously.

You're making a common mistake here: the cops don't have any authority to prosecute criminals or to decide how, or even if the perps get punished. That's up to the court system and to what the local laws say. Yes, I agree that the perps here need to be punished, but let's be realistic about who gets to do it.

Why do the Islamists have so much trouble assimilating?

What makes you think that they want to assimilate? From how they act, many of them want to take over the countries they move to and impose Sharia Law on them.

I'm not going to go out of my way to be abusive to a toaster. I'm more likely to swear under my breath than bother typing it in. No different than praying your car makes it just a little further when you hear it start making a funny noise.

But no, I will not give even one duck about the toaster's "feelings".

If these were highly remote locations and getting a human to them in time to fix a problem was going to be a challenge, then maybe remote controllability would be important. But this is a damn supermarket; there's going to be somewhere there or nearby constantly. Dear Lord.

There's no reason that there can't be a thermometer and controls built in, and only accessible from the back. Add on a clipboard with pages printed with lines for date, time, temperature, initials and you have a way to keep track of the temperature without outside access. Add on controls to adjust things and you've got everything you need.