The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In which alternate reality?

Iran is not "a", but "the" supporter and financier behind Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and a bunch of other militias and trouble sources in the region. So no, they were absolutely not playing nice, even if you ignore all the atrocities inside Iran.

Yes, but Trump's will go in 3 years by itself. The IRGC regime will not.

At this point, there is probably nothing that can rescue either Microsoft or Linux from the hordes at the wall. Both are performance-first operating systems. There's nothing surprising or unusual about that; this is the dominant paradigm. Windows NT made at least some attempt in the other direction until version 4, but then they prioritized UI latency over memory security. LLMs apparently don't have to be able to think to recognize patterns which indicate vulnerabilities. If having closed source is even still a benefit in hiding failures, it won't be for long.

On top of that, the hardware isn't secure enough either and both are going to have to be addressed to reasonably secure our systems from this new threat. They were never really secure, humans could find the same vulnerabilities, but there weren't enough humans looking. There's lots of compute hours being spent looking.

This isn't limited to Windows and Linux, every vaguely common system has the same problem. None of them were built for security first, because such a system would cost more to operate and almost nobody has been demanding to pay more for less performance in security's name. But many have long predicted we'd get to the point where we start to spend our performance advancement budget on security because some development will necessitate it, and it seems like we might have arrived there now. There are and have been more secure systems, but the home PC is going to have to become one of them because otherwise we won't be able to use them for anything other than getting pwned.

That would make it easy if the legal system didn't make it hard.

That's a typically shit take, because both of these business guys have proven repeatedly that they are both hot garbage as human beings. It on brand for you to ignore that.

And unfortunately, it does. The corporate world has already satisfied all of the relevant if statements. It works to some extent if you are willing to accept massive failures — the industry has proven that over and over again by rewarding failures with sales, they will buy proven trash before paying for quality; they will accept "good enough for right now" and kick the can forever; they will rewrite entire products and discard years of both development and goodwill just to look like they're forward-looking to idiots, because nobody ever went broke assuming there'd be no shortage of them.

If you're willing to accept shit results because you have no pride then AI is good enough. And... *waves around vaguely* ...people should pay attention, because that's the dominant paradigm.

It's hard to prove that Microsoft cares less about security than other vendors, without a bunch of information from Microsoft and other vendors that we're not privy to — not even shareholders get to know the full risks involved in the products upon which their dividends depend. But it's easy to prove that they will happily lie about it.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

MBAs are "highly polished turds" because we've lost the ability (legally and culturally) to assess people on merit. You end up with a poor surrogate, which has become gameified to produce people who make the metric the measurement of work instead of basing metrics on the value of the outcome.

Where have you been? You couldn't be more wrong.

This entire culture has been bent around the idea of quarterly profits for decades. "Stocks are up!" Short term gain at the cost of long term employees and innovation. Ship faster!

While, yes, the trend to seek short term profits has slowed and even in some small ways reversed, we are a good number of years from being focused on incremental innovation and experience, again.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

The virus can persist for days in dry crap, which is the primary way it's spread to humans, when they disturb it

Yeah it's a good idea to try to get people concerned about concerning issues