It's so cute that you think that control of the money can be taken back. The last vestiges of your democracy - the will of the people by mandate as declared by vote - has fallen. Some of you haven't noticed yet, is all.

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.

Yeah, but I heard exactly the same thing about Windows 7 (although admittedly never about 8). If you're using Windows, you will eventually move for something. Whether it's hardware, or some new app you want...can't predict it. Just that looking at the pattern over many years, you will.

I have an install of it. I don't use it, I'm Mac for my main platform and Linux for my gaming. But I still have a Windows partition, and it's Windows 11 too, mostly to handle odd manufacturer firmware update programs for external hardware. Even I moved to 11, and eventually people will do need to do so if they want to stay on the Windows platform. In my case, even if they don't want to stay on that platform in fact.

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.

I found the setting for this: chrome://password-manager/settings has a "Use Windows Hello when filling passwords". It was off for me - I can only assume that is the default, as I have several Chrome profiles over several PCs and it's off in all of them.

Also noticed there's this:

which, if I click on, takes me to a page that just says "On-device encryption canâ(TM)t be used for this account. Sign in to another Google Account and try again."

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.

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.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

Tell me about that service guarantee when the power goes out - how does the electric company make it up to you?

The issue is the community buys its electricity from one company that in turn buys its electricity from another company - it that 'other company' that is reducing available electricity, and the first company is working to find a new source of electricity, which is apparently a paperwork issue, nothing more.

Drama Much?

Do people in third-world countries get 12 month notice of a reduction in the amount of electricity available to them? These folks will have reliable electricity, it will just not be as much as they currently have.

In a free market another private, for profit, electric company would add generation capacity to the residential grid and meet the needs of the community, but this is not a free market.

If half the homes add solar panels, the issue is solved. It would be pretty simple for the state, as a cost added to the incentives to bring in the AI Datacenter, deeply subsidized the residential solar panel deployments in this community.

Public utilities are not "free market"