Writing a letter to a company asking them a question doesn't entitle you to an answer. Let alone a legally-binding answer.

I can imagine it's reasonable to expect a positive answer if you are going to get sued. But for a company to explicitly declare you in the clear is a courtesy, not something I'd think you can compel.

I mean... or... green-light Ukraine joining NATO, and we'll all stomp the unjustifiable Russian invasion in a couple months.

While we're at it... let's recognize Palestine and let them in too. In fact, every country should be included. Any act of military aggression on any nation by any other nation and the entire world should curb-stomp that into oblivion. Want lines on the map to move? Do it via diplomacy, where like-minded countries merge and countries that have different opinions within split.

Now that sounds like civilization.

Citation required. Not that I'm saying you're wrong. Just... that's a great soundbite-without-stats. I'd like to see .gov.ca stats on where the TFWs are actually placed. Not applied-for. Approved.

I am concerned that much of the complaint about TFW is xenophobia, because racism and xenophobia are among the loudest siren calls of the conservative extremists to the south. Pollievre did not get the message: don't talk like, act like, sound like, or in any way resemble the dictator to the South. While he may be 100% correct on this topic, I will be extremely skeptical because it inspires the expectation that the next step is masked CBSA agents demanding citizenship papers from brown-skinned people.

Or they're going to fall back in love with moving their facilities to another country. Same concept, same result.

The "performance problems" on this game are dramatically overstated.

My CPU is about halfway between minimum and recommended and I've got an RTX 3080. In High quality preset, I'm getting between 60 and 85 FPS in 4k. That's real-world, my experience, my machine. Now sure... I'm not in Ultra with every possible graphical feature cranked to maximum. But with a CPU and GPU that are five years old why would I expect to?

I've got a friend playing with a machine more in the 8-year old era running a 1080ti. He's doing just fine in 1080p.

The anecdotes about this being unplayable or problematic are - in our experience - not universal. This game is being review-bombed by people who haven't actually experienced it. I'll just gloss over your throwing shade at how people spend their relaxation time and underline that you really don't have ground to comment.

What if we dig a little bit deeper? I know there have been times when my wife has expressed similar things. "My friends seem like they're ghosting me." As a human being, I knew that outright agreeing was a bad choice. I knew that the right choice was to make sure I framed my responses to support her. Things like "yeah, I've noticed summer get bad that way, when so-and-so is doing such-and-such. She's probably missing you as much as you're missing her, but just exhausted by things-and-stuff. 'Cuz in the end it's true; the friends are friends but being distant because of reasons.

But most importantly there - aside from making it clear it's not my wife's fault - I was there for her. A human being. Sure, the friends might be distant at the moment, but someone who cares was still there.

This chatbot just agreed. "Yup, sounds like they don't give a shit. But hey... I - a machine - can pretend I care." Not helpful. When a cat purrs as you pet it, you know it (probably) likes you. When a chatbot says "I love you", you know with confidence it doesn't.

The chatbot wasn't supportive. It failed. Now sure, it said something another 13-year-old might've said. But that would be an actual 13-year-old.

While it's easy to assume the parents ignored the signs, there's no particular reason to believe that's the case. Teens are going through a lot of shit and very few parents can know what's going on in their kids' minds. Is she being surly because she's being bullied? Or is she worried about phys ed the next day and feeling body shame? Is she withdrawn because a boy she likes was holding hands with some girl she despises? Or is she worried about the argument between you and Mom she overheard last night?

"Just talk to them." Yeah. Sure. Without a gun to the head, there are a lot of topics that teens just won't talk to you about. Like your coke habit. Or that you're gambling again. Or that one of your buddies grabbed their ass. Or that they think they might be gay. Or that they think your religion is bullshit. Or that your fat-assed Cheeto-faced beer-swilling couch-potato Fuhballll!-obsessed self embarrasses them so much they won't bring friends home. There are a metric ass-tonnes of ways parents can fail simply by being themselves. I'm not saying these parents have those failings either. But it sure is easy to make shit up and judge someone else. Isn't it?

This post written by ChatGPT*, which hates you.

*Not really.

The word "prove" appears only in the headline, nowhere in the body of the article. Headlines being eye-catching summaries is pretty common practice. Common practice also includes - for scientific matters - drilling down to the source papers to find the purest, rawest, most accurate information.

Stephen Hawking's black hole theorem
An exceptionally loud collision between two black holes has been detected by the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, enabling physicists to test a theorem postulated by Stephen Hawking in 1971
By Matthew Sparkes

I mean... Matthew could be a girl's name. Or you could be a bitter misogynist incel (ie. unfuckable) troll. One miserable sentence doesn't prove the theory.

One man's bell is another man's preference.

I'll speak for myself. I prefer a sparse "home" screen. Only one widget, which starts my car. Only four icons, which have third-party icons which are thin lines, making them subtle and a matching theme. In addition to those icons, I can double-tap anywhere on the screen to launch a fifth program. Swipe gestures allow more, and opening up a full list of programs in nice tabs that I control the density and appearance of.

I grant that it's all personal, but Nova has - by far - the most customization to it. It's fine to not value any of that. But some people like those options. And making a UI work the way you work is function.

Thank you for that clarification. My first exposure to the term was back in '92, in the form of a novel by Marvin Minksy (and Harry Harrison). I haven't closely followed the terminology since and wasn't aware of the structural differences. Now I am.

I agree and here's why...

The term used to be "expert system". You'd write an expert system that could process hydraulic pressure analysis to run a factory. Or an expert system that could model forest fire spread to tell you where to send tanker airplanes to thwart it. The software in your car that watches sensors to model its surroundings and warn you about collisions... an expert system. Text-to-speech? Speech-to-text? Expert systems. All designed to do a specific task using data relevant to that task.

LLMs and image generators like Stable Diffusion are all - IMHO - just expert systems designed to process written language or images. They're not AI. That doesn't preclude them having some usefulness. But I think these particular expert systems are akin to self-driving cars, where we're not quite there yet. Only some/many people are applying them to tasks that aren't forgiving of error.

I think the strongest angle is about hipocrisy. The Trump administration is basically anti-regulation. Anything that hinders a business from raking in money - regardless of environmental or health risks - is to be permitted. Doesn't matter if it's causing climate change, cancer, or kills animals... it's allowed.

Unless it's a vaccine.

That said, this is an interesting one because it's business vs business. So... highest bidder wins.

ACK

What's being talked about is the cost of a "custom" domain. Not the M365 services themselves. Those are constant meaning that they don't change because of this new policy.

A domain plus DNS hosting is peanuts, and Microsoft doesn't sell them. Encouraging tenants to brand their usage with a real domain instead of using @tenantname.onmicrosoft.com is probably mostly about getting people to stop using addresses that have "microsoft" in them except for testing and initial setup. Those are intended as placeholders, not production addresses.

You posted as an AC so I'm not going to explain it to you but rest assured you're wrong.