You know where all that "four humours medicine" came from? Hydraulics was a very impressive technology, so people tried to explain the human body with it. Certain idiots have recently started doing the same thing with computers and the human brain.

That's something which should have two reactions. Stop using Microsoft software AND report them to the police for extortion.

Unions are for reducing the imbalance of power between a company and its workers. They can be used for whatever objectives the workers have. In this case, it seems the workers are not disgusting human beings who can disregard the morality of whatever they do so long as it's obeying orders, and so not being involved in war crimes is an objective of theirs.

But actually, protecting your soul is a kind of protection.

Linux distributions are supposed to contain both operating system and applications though.

That's a conversation about celebrities, not philosophy. By the way, the term "Judeo-Christian" is a huge red flag. Anything which is both Jewish and Christian will also be Islamic, so you'd call it something like "Abrahamic", anyone who uses it needs to be asked why they're marginalising Islam.

Lots of people simply don't know about this. They don't deserve any problems just because they've never been told the truth about how big corporations are allowed to commit crimes with impunity, and Sony are one of the criminal ones.

It's definitely a suitable trio to condemn, but something like "the three worst people in international politics" might be a more accurate description, they're the three most obvious points where evil/amorality and power come together with international implications. (What e.g. North Korea does to its own population is utterly horrific, but they aren't bombing any other countries at least.)

They're actually quite different, Putin is the epitome of amoral self-interest, prosecuting a huge war which is crippling his own country just becuase he thinks having to say "ooops, I made a mistake" would weaken his grip on power domestically. Netenyahu is driven half by vicious racism and half by needing constant war to keep his coalition together and avoid potential legal problems for himself. And Trump is this half-crazy narcissistic collection of all of his country's worst impulses, doing things like this simply to validate the way he feels.

If Iran got them, we wouldn't be able to bomb them whenever we wanted any more.

The only relevant group here wanting to bring about the End Times of which I'm aware is a subgroup of the fundamentalist Christians in the US who support Israel for Biblical rather than imperialist reasons. The Iranian regime wants to survive. Nuclear weapons would be very useful for this, since it has two powerful and aggressive states which love bombing it which need to be deterred somehow. They look at the complete absence of bombs being dropped on North Korea and want the same immunity.

The major uncertainty here isn't in the fundamental physics part of the equation, it's in the international politics part, and other areas like human power dynamics. A fundamental physics expert is probably considerably smarter than the average guy about these topics, but it's not actually their area of special expertise.

Israel and the US, the fascist aggressors who started this war, should obviously surrender, and hand over the architects of the war to Iran to face trial.

Though there are other places, like Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela which will also have the right to put some of the same people on trial..Those rogue states really do attack a lot of other countries.

There's a very big difference between chess, and things like programming. In chess, you can quickly and easily tell whether you have checkmated your opponent or been checkmated. It's possibly to algorithmically work out what is correct, with absolute precision in the simpler cases. With programming, there is no state of correctness. LLMs are based on the idea that you must want some kind of weighted average of the sum total of human endeavour they have ingested. That whole technique can only get you so far, even when you get it 100% perfect.

Watching television can be an extremely rewarding way to spend a segment of your life. The trick is to watch good TV. If a drama can be reasonably described as "watching fictional people live their life", that's not good TV. Good drama will be about something. It will convey things. Stuff like that.

It happens because big corporations are above the law. Remotely activating filters on things people have bought fairly in a shop unless they show you some ID is obviously a crime in violation of the Computer Misuse Act. But Apple are a big corporation, so nobody will be prosecuted. Like nobody was prosecuted when Sony included trojan horse software on music CDs, back when music CDs were a thing. Like nobody is prosecuted when Microsoft says WIndows 10 will be the final version of Windows, people buy computers based on this assumption, and now they're being made obsolete if you want to connect them to the internet. It's all because we live in a plutocratic system.

The Stalinist regime of the USSR was disgusting. I'm still glad they beat the Nazis. Similarly, while the current Iranian regime is disgusting, I still want them to beat the fascist aggressors who are attacking them. Defeating fascism is always the number one priority.