What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

The first thing about adapting a book is reading it at least once, and Peter Jackson skipped that step.

That's a blockade done against human drivers, who (usually) know how to drive off the railway track, and the blockaders are only protesting rather than actively trying to murder. They stop cars from passing but don't trap them on the tracks.

What GP suggests is that by people simply standing there, the self-driving car's software will stop on the track without aggressively trying to escape.

Here in Poland we have campaign teaching people how to get out of a railway crossing if you get stuck. A bunch of differently-smart humans didn't even contemplate driving through the bar gate, and in some cases didn't even evacuate the car either. The bars are designated to break easily when forced by a car, but somehow in a stressful situation drivers regard them as sacrosanct. As Waymo cars behave that way in about every potentially dangerous situation, I'm afraid they'll do the same when on a railroad crossing as well.

Another piece of evidence: a link in the summary goes to https://support.microsoft.com/ which is currently tits up. Apparently they're hosting that site on Windows and/or staffing it with their employees.

The policy changes have been rolled back. Heck, it even looked possible that Russia would have its first non-rigged election in their history, but for obvious reasons that couldn't have been allowed to happen.

They don't need to stall forever -- there are only two important dates: 2026 midterms and 2028. Afterwards, even if Reps win your election, it won't be Trump's administration, and he doesn't care who ends up paying as long as it doesn't interfere with his opportunities for graft. If he can continue his gravy train till 2028 and his and his friends' ill gotten gains don't get taken back immediately after, all is good.

Well, it's Dems who have been the more racist party, both historically (1860 1910 1960) and today. But then, both of your parties are very very similar. They do have some disagreements on social issues, and they fight violently _which_ of their donors deserves more of public money, but their core platforms are pretty much the same: insane corporatism.

It's kind of like claiming that brown socialism and red socialism are opposites when they're factions of the same side.

Compare with eg. the country that I just received another lecture to not call them "Russia" -- which went from communism to fascism without any change to internal policies.

There's plenty of mirrors. For example .ax, .es, .mx, .fr, .lol, .info are all online and not domain-squatted.

The most accurate predictor for cable breakage is the number of ships that have been renamed more than 20 times in the past year going in their vicinity. Number of overlays is nothing in comparison.

Yes it was. That's why people are trying to make something to replace the Disney slop.

To the contrary: they have demonstrated they're not teenagers. Kids don't use old memes as those are "uncool", and underpants gnomes are something that came out 28 years ago.

I see you haven't seen any version of GNOME from the last 18 years.

For Microsoft, that would be the wrong way. Instead of making many Microsofts, the govts should go the other way, and make zero!

That's why not running uMatrix or disabling its deny-by-default mode is insane.

Yes, but Red Hat, even under IBM's rule, isn't anywhere as evil as Poettering wants. I'm not good at who-works-where-ology, and haven't been paying any attention at all in the last few years -- but I am not aware of even a single Red Hat engineer who would deserve disrespect. Lennart is where he belongs.

If Google wasn't evil, we'd have working JXL in 2021. The lack of pressure also allowed Mozilla to waste years writing a NIH implementation in their own toy language. The benefits from JXL are pretty great all around, including both lossy and lossless, it's a pity we didn't get it sooner.

Google pushed their own WEBP and AVIF hard despite neither being as good as the rest. WEBP is very slow and hardly better than old JPEG, AVIF is at least usable but loses to other modern formats for anything except extremely low bitrates.