Ah, so the republican voters will happily pay additional taxes to service the record debt the orange shitgibbon created? Nice.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

It is actually pretty simple unless you are a bot, of course. The vikings didn't annex russia, they have merely replaced the rulers with one of theirs, keeping the rest as it was.
The mongol conquest also hasn't been an annexation. It was more like a racket, with the russian princes paying protection money while being free to launch wars of conquest on their own. Pretty common in history, really. See danegeld as an another example.

At the same time when vikings conquered parts of it and at the same time when the mongols conquered parts of it. And obviously after that, too. So yes, "throughout the history" is pretty much correct.

How do you think russia got so huge and multi-ethnic? Pure conquest.

Garin's beam was not infrared, it was visible light created by some kind of chemical candles IIRC.

Biden was not worse. He did not allow to strike deeper than 300 km into russia with american weapons, that's all. The ban is still in place, domestic weapons are used for deeper strikes. Also forbiding donating jets, helicopters and tanks is bullshit, Ukraine received all of these while Biden was still president. Trump, on the other hand, blocks weapons and ammunition, even though the EU has paid for them. The orange shitgibbon is putler's tool.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

In WW1 the aggressor lost.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

The laws of thermodynamics.

Autonomous forklifts have been a thing in factories for quite a while now. The AI driven stuff is being added to save money on sensors.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.