..which doesn't support 486s, so the OP's statement that OS/2 still supports 486s is still not true.

This is just plain not true. Microsoft has about 1/4 of the global cloud computing market and, if nothing else, the number of things that just use Entra for auth is insane. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, I'm just saying your claim that Microsoft is some kind of edge case in "internet service" is ridiculous.

"Entertainment purposes only" Note that they don't say *whose* entertainment.

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

"Support", not "in use". IBM sure as hell doesn't support OS/2 any more.

No, they only found the cow tools.

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.

I don't think it's directly related to IQ. I also don't think it's restricted to chatbots. A lot of people are willing to accept the opinion of any authoritative source that they've accepted. Think religion or political party. Once they accept it, they stop questioning it's proclamations.

Note that this also applied to those who accept the proclamations of scientists or compilers. Once you accept an authoritative source, you pretty much stop questioning it. It's been multiple decades since I really argued with a compiler...unless it was a known bug from a source I trusted. I generally just assumed that I misunderstood what the language meant by that construct. (Of course, the few times I really didn't accept it, I eventually turned out to be wrong. Oh.)

The first person to think of the concept of solar sails was Johannes Kepler in 1610, when he observed that comets' tails always pointed directly away from the sun and speculated that whatever force caused that could be harnessed by sails. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1921 made the first serious proposal, with the concept of light pressure being fairly well-understood at that point.

As far as Star Trek is concerned, I might point out that while TOS never had solar sails, Deep Space Nine did entire episode centered around a solar sail vessel ("Exploters").

Not to mention all the seamen.

Big players *love* regulation, as long as it's red tape but doesn't actually interfere with the business. It's a fixed cost, which they can spread out over their large operations while it strangles the smaller competition that might be a problem.

This, however, is far from that point. ... But I *do* prefer LibreOffice. However my use case is different.

Not necessarily impossible...but almost always inadvisable. They can be sure that all their actual competitors already have copies before they get the takedown issued.

In this case I don't think a takedown will even limit the damage...it might well exacerbate it.