You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

So...nothing anyone wants to actually see then.

The sticky parts here:
Delta is demanding from its contractor reparations for damages that it's refusing its customers. When they reject claims for which they have responsibility, how can they go after their contractors on the same basis?
Delta is not the only airline to use CrowdStrike, and they all had outages on July 19. Delta, however, is the only one that couldn't recover until July 24.

Crowdstrike's test and deployment processes to me look like gross negligence: their business is having companies entrust them with access to the Kernal and deploying timely and safe updates. Everyone else uses a robust testing process including staggered deployment.
But Delta, in going about a lawsuit, will be required to reveal their own IT processes and shortcomings that led to a five-day collapse.

Or they settle for zero dollars.

"Most" is pretty vague. Which ones don't overlap? Do you even know? Have you read both? In full? Project 2025 is 922 pages long. Somehow I doubt you've read it, instead relying on the media to tell you what to think and say and do.

What if "most" of the overlap are things that are relatively mainstream, non-controversial things? What if the only places they don't overlap just happen to be the Big Boogeyman Ideas you're so terrified of? Did you ever consider that enough to bother reviewing both proposals? Or did you simply hear "Trump = Project 2025 and Project 2025 = bad, therefore Trump = bad"?

The sheer lack of curiosity about the stances some people are willing to take is stunning sometimes. Presumably you have a prefrontal cortex. You may wish to use it from time to time to think on your own and come up with your own opinions.

And yet who will build, program, and maintain this AI-controlled fleet? Another AI-controlled facility? Who will build, program, and maintain that? Or is it turtles all the way down?

At some point humans have to be involved, and those humans will be gainfully employed and benefit from their labor. Those who adapt to this new economic reality will prosper. Those who do not, will not.

This is nothing new. When mass production put artisans out of work, the same hue and cry was raised. The human race as a whole is incalculably better off today than it was when that happened. Those who try to stand against the march of technology to maintain the status quo will always get steamrollered. And we should not weep for them, for we all benefit from the march of progress. If you truly believe in the betterment of humanity, you cannot allow the creation of a society where stagnation is rewarded.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the insurers refused to pay out on this one. It's like a fire prevention company deploying a smoke detector that, at the same time around the world, does an auto-test that, due to a design flaw, disables the detector and starts a fire. No amount of "use this device at own risk. We will not cover fire damage costs incurred by using this product" is gonna fly. Liability insurance might cover something, but not a failure to follow basic software security practices. And, even then, who is going to insure them tomorrow? Who is going to go to the boss and say: "well, these guys can't follow the most fundamental rule in keeping their clients' machines secure, let's hire them as our security solution!"? Nothing short of Russian sabotage is going to save them. Good news for competitors: fresh contracts are on the way. Also, you can probably hire some engineers. Just keep an eye on them.

If it decouples the flash from social media, how are people going to find out about it? Once someone starts using it, that person disappears from the major marketing channel of our time. The problem with truly useful tools is that they don't propagate themselves or move as many copies as flashy, trendy crap that breaks or goes obsolete in two years.

So then I see a price of $800 for specs that are a little vague, but which most people are going to associate with a device that costs about $200; of course, those devices are the flashy ones, and they can be churned out for a profit much cheaper, given the economies of scale.

And I'd want to see how this display works before plunking down. So we're doomed as a race.

He has to live with Outlook, which, like other mailing software, scans messages before they are sent for keywords such as "CV", "Resume", "Attachment", and, if it gets a hit, and there's no attachment, reminds the user "would you like to add an attachment?"
Unlike other mailing software, that dictionary includes "Bill". Every email he types his name into generates a "would you like to add an attachment", until he either disables the feature or sets up a signature.
Unlike other mailing software, using / will try to include a file, picking something that resembles the words typed, and by default attaching the file. On the Outlook 365 web client, not even Bill Gates can disable this feature. So, if Mr. Gates ends an email with the signature /Bill on then the helpful Web Client will find a sensitive piece of financial information and automatically attach it to the message.
Unlike other mailing software, Outlook gets bundled into office IT packages for companies around the world, supposedly to offer a comprehensive solution for your basic business infrastructure. Businesses end up including proprietary features and locking their users into Outlook. Sure, you can tell people to set up signature blocks, but you're as likely to get 100% compliance on that as with telling people they shouldn't use tab to indent their paragraphs.

Yeah, they don't see it as useful, but many people do, and it's part of national heritage. Maybe the government should take care of it? After all 4.5 million quid a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of digitization and the recurring cost of ensuring the integrity of the data. Oh, this is the government?

Digitize their whole collection? Okay. How big is that? 8 million objects? So, digitization means what? Full scientific photography of each object? Or are we talking 3D-scans too? Let's assume just the photography part. Each object needs to be signed out, transferred to the digitization center, set up on the digitization apparatus with controlled lighting, color control cards, rulers, whatever other targets you want, and photographed completely, before being returned to storage. Meanwhile the digitization team needs to prepare the metadata, verify the images, archive the images and metadata, as well as generate a reproduction master for use on the website. And you need a long term archival plan, with offline copies being remotely stored and routinely checked/corrected for bitrot. The cost of preparing the metadata alone will exceed $12M. Heck, the cost of having employees move those objects around the museum will cost more than $12M. If digitization only costs $1.50/object, we'd have a lot more digitizations in the world.

You mean the Chinese server farm that can't respect robots.txt and DoS'd my server? They have a social media wing?

So the moral of the story is early buyers will pay full price while getting a buggy, unbalanced, unfinished product. Meanwhile, those who wait will generally get discounts, see fewer bugs, and more polished content.

This is why I almost never buy anything as soon as it's released.

Also not (necessarily) true. Dissolved CO2 can be consumed by algae and seagrasses in the ocean, converting it to biomass -- where carbon remains largely sequestered when the organism dies -- and oxygen.

Almost but not quite. You left out a few relevant factors.

Personal bias - despite attempts to eradicate it, it still exists. A scientist who has their reputation staked on a particular theory or outcome will tend to favor that outcome, disregard outcomes that don't agree with their position, or both. The recent LK-99 "room temp superconductor" is an example of this.

Funding bias - Scientists don't work for free, and even if they did, research itself is an expensive endeavor. This requires funding from external sources, usually government but sometimes major industries contribute as well. Both these patrons tend to fund research that confirms whatever policy or product they wish to push. Likewise, funding for other things either doesn't get funded or could disqualify you for future funding.

Community peer pressure - Despite the stereotype, contemporary science is largely that of conformity. Mavericks are generally frowned upon, laughed at, or ostracized. This has historical precedence. Major luminaries like Einstein, Bohr, etc. were regarded as crackpots when they first challenged the establishment before they were recognized as prophets of truth. Very few people have the courage to stand against such as this, hence conformity and groupthink are more normal than most people suspect or are willing to admit.