Damn! My mod points expired through disuse some time over the last 5-6 hours.

My Kilimanjaro suggestion was aimed at people who had always planned to turn back long before getting anywhere near the top, and I felt the need to point out that 3000m is not a big deal for most people.
I'm not a mountain climber, although I'll walk or ski at those altitudes without a second thought, although ski touring (walking uphill through deep snow with "skins" on my skis) is not something I'm planning to do again at my age.

"Only yesterday, I saw a guy with lung cancer smoke. If everyone stopped smoking, there would be no more cancer, right?"

A friend has it, he's never smoked (so he says, and I've known him for 40 years). His wife did some research and came up with the figure 40 - 40% of people who have lung cancer have never smoked. Assuming they were telling the truth.
Let's not get into passive smoking though.

How does age-verification for bots work? I think bots should be walled out because they are too young and don't have the maturity to understand what they're seeing. Especially Open AI bots.

At altitudes above 3,000 meters, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common.

I've spent a week at that altitude - with excursions on foot up to around 3800m - with no ill-effects at all. On the other hand, my room mate was barely functional at 3000m.
Another time in the mountains (this time in the Alps) I was hiking while carrying a (lesser) load at around 3880m. There were six of us in that group and two did have serious problems up there, the stupid thing was that they were aware beforehand that they were susceptible - apparently around one third of the population is.

Some people need time to acclimatise to altitude, but I don't understand why people who should know better think that even marching up the foothills is a good idea. In my case I have never been higher than just under 4000m and have never had altitude sickness so I don't know what my limits are. Maybe I should head up Kilimanjaro (just under 5900m) but I think I'll pass, and maybe Everest tourists should be required to walk up Kilimanjaro - or an equivalent - before tackling the big one.

When I read "Brain fry" I started wondering if zombies preferred their brains raw or cooked.

Is your phone AI capable? I bought a new one a year ago (the old one was out of OS support) and made sure that mine was not.
My second line in the sand is to use DuckDuckDo as the search engine, although I'm preparing to experiment with Brave's. Replacing the messaging app could be more difficult, especially if I want to keep my history.

I don't have a TV at all, but I have Cable and use it for Internet access at around 350 Mbps. It is far cheaper than any of the prices I've seen mentioned here (as in around $60 a month), no reason to change.

China is taking the long-term view here, building up goodwill in Cuba and in other countries where they see themselves potentially in the same situation. I hope they realise that military action with Taiwan would do a lot of damage to that goodwill.
Why is the US still bullying Cuba in the first place? It is not as though Cuba is a threat.

Well, looking at an earlier story from today, they have good reason to look for alternatives.

That appears to be a problem with the summary - the original articles (I must admit I did not read all of the first one) seem to be written by people who have a better idea of what they are talking about.

Well, DT's the investor Milton needs. It's called "giving something back".

That raises a question: Was that post composed by an LLM or has it subsequently been used as input to something like Grok?
As to "lack of respect", respect can be earned but so can its lack.

There is a public transport app called Öffi which I consider essential when in Germany. It is free, does not gather data on its users and covers the entire country, the alternatives are regional and many really want to know all about their users.
That link is to the Google Play Store, but it has twice been removed from there.
The first time it was because the app encourages donations, but that request was hidden from users installing via the Play Store. I think Google looked at the app and noticed that request for donations but could not see that it was functionally inactive. It took them a few months to accept the truth and permit the app again.
The second time was mid July 2025, they banned it again and refused to say why. I was in Germany and travelling at the time, the app ceased working with a database error and I was screwed, it took me a day or three to download Fdroid and get it working but now I get it from there. It's back in the Play Store (I don't know when that happened) but I have to assume this idiocy is going to happen again.

I use another App where the developer(s) announced that they were going to stop updating their Play Store version because the overhead was just too much, and that the preferred migration path was to Fdroid. It is a security product, one which resolves QR codes to text and requires the user to confirm that they really want to visit that site. Works for me.

I'd have thought there are other problems which are more important. A day or so ago in Wiesbaden (Germany) Google Maps decided a section of an Autobahn was closed, even though traffic was running normally there, at that point a number of misguided souls left the Autobahn and drove through the city to avoid the non-closed section. It took them a few hours to fix the error.

IF traffic-running-normally THEN ignore announcements that a road is closed.

If the road is really blocked then I'd expect barriers and signs detailing the detour. Google Maps can't read those signs but it should be able to notice that traffic has ceased to flow there.