Which regime? The current Iranian one, the one running is Israel or the one running the US right now? They are all kinda crap quite honestly. At this point Israel's and Iran's leaders are probably competing for body count. Iran it is is its own people and Israel its the Palestinians, which they treat as scum.

Certainly not Java blood, unless we are talking the blood of the developers writing software or the black stuff that comes from grinding a few beans and adding liquid to them.

Maybe, but then maybe they shouldn't price it as if it was ownership? I'd even argue that if publishers don't provide a way to self-host a server, then they should be required to keep their servers running for 4 years after the final sale of the full price of the game or refund the "purchase" fee.

We are moving to an economy where if you aren't in the 1%, then everything will be a few months wage. This is definitely a case where a US administration was doing everything to increase prices, intended or not. Its what happens when you let a monkey and his buffoons run a system that requires understanding of consenquences.

Everything requires maintenance. Hopefully the repair equipment can be migrated to hybrid and then fully electric in the coming years. It’s going to take years, given the investment, but when oil is politically risky and environmentally risky, then there are incentives to move beyond it.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

Who remembers with fondness the McBride times? Ah the shit show that was.

Its complicated. For some its a saving and for some is lost business. For smaller "mom and pop" style businesses or those who prefer I'll go with cash.

One thing I forgot is that in a number of cases using plastic means dealing with a business tied to another country, making your ability to buy stuff dependent on them politically. Then the other risk is choosing a purely national system that cuts out travellers. For this reason mixed options are the way to go, though my pecking order would be cash -> national entity -> foreign entity.

Of course it's well known how much money some artists make through their tours. People are willing to pay the price to see them, so good for those artists.

However, at what point will it no longer work? At some point the prices will be too high to sell out arenas. Big acts have been able to demand $1,000 or more for the best seats at giant arenas. Like so many others I can't name a single act that is active currently that I would pay anywhere near that much to see. If prices - and fees - keep going up the number of people in my camp will increase. Maybe the premium experience will be enough to offset that, but at some point demand side economics will take over.

If I can buy every single album, LP, single, and special edition an artist has ever released for less than 1/4 of what a ticket goes for - or for that matter less than just the fees for a ticket - the system seems a bit broken. Sure the live experience is different but is it worth that much?

Most everything that involved a plastic card, or a proxy for one, involves some third-party to make a transaction, and those third-parties are also typically wanting a transaction fee. They also sometime decide their "morals" are law onto themselves.

Ensuring money exists in a physical form ensure that the ability to do a transaction does not depend on the access to a device, so helps keep the ability to spend money democratic.

Which isnâ(TM)t necessarily a bad thing. Consider systems still using software written in COBOL that are still running today with minimum interference.

With node.js if you sneeze you are out of date. There is a balance between keeping things up to date, and not creating new breakages and risks while doing so.