How else will I be able to feel that deep sense of dread when I call any company's customer support and I'm greeted by an overly polite chatbot that's so syrupy it gives me type-2, that doesn't understand my problem and refuses to let me talk to a real person?

Censorship is a big no-no for tech companies. Particularly when it doesn't make then any money.

> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.

55 comments is pathetic for a racist dog whistle post like this. Remember when Googler James Damore wrote his anti-diversity screed and got fired for it? 5000+ comments, and as far as I know they're still arguing about it.

I've been hosting my open-source projects on Github for years.

Why you ask? After all, isn't every open-source and free software advocate's duty to stay clear away from Microsoft?

Here's my reason: I only use the git part of Github. I don't use any of Microsoft's proprietary crap on top of it.

Therefore, Microsoft has no vendor lock-in on me: my projects are one git-push away from being hosted elsewhere. I waste their resources by making them host my massive files for free and they have absolutely nothing to show for it - no revenue, no private data to monetize, nothing.

But the minute Microsoft starts getting annoying, my repos are gone. I'll move them to Codeberg and I will gladly pay for the hosting in the form of donations.

When you have 32 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor, you need all the programming talent you can get to squeeze the most performances out of them.

When you have 32 gigabytes and dozens of cores, any incompetent code monkey can churn out the same application in Visual Basic or Python.

Resources don't make your computer faster. They empower incompetent and sloppy developers, who crucially are paid less than good ones, so their boss can make more money.

I remember in the last 90's / early 2000's discussing with a colleague how it was possible that X allocated 2 megabytes for an empty window, just for sitting there on the screen.

Do coral reefs really matter though? Sure, it's a milestone, but not an existential one.

Yes, they absolutely do matter, and yes it is potentially an existential one. Coral reefs are the most biodiverse part of the seas and are the source of many of the ocean nutrients that get carried around the globe on currents like the AMOC, so they play an essential part in the overall ocean food chain that many people rely on to survive. Removing the coral reefs from those people's food chains would be akin to the impact of removing Alfalfa from the US food chain that ultimately leads to all that beef and dairy produce.

Also, if their primary food source is unable to support them, they're not likely to stay put and starve for the greater good, are they? Where do you think they are going to start marching towards?

The AMOC relies on a cycling of warmer water in the tropics and cooler water in the Arctic Circle to generate the circulatory current. The warm water flows north, cools and sinks below the thermocline, then flows back to the tropics. It is not a loop on the surface like tidal flows, but rather a loop in an elongated cross sectional view that stretches right around the Indian and Southern Oceans as well as the Atlantic and is, in effect, a gigantic natural heat pump moving energy from the tropics to the North Atlantic ocean. The basic idea behind the potential shutdown of the flow is that as the temperature differential declines, so does the energy in the system, resulting a slowdown of the current and, ultimately (if taken to a logical conclusion), it stopping altogether - just as a heat pump would once the temperatures on either side have the pump have equalised.

In terms of impact, there's a bit more to it than that to do with variations in salinity between different parts of the ocean, which in turn being compounded with the inflow of fresh water from the melting Arctic ice cap and (mostly) Greenland's glaciers, that it also bring nutrients essential for the supporting the marine life in the Atlantic, plays a key part in sequestering the vast amounts of CO2 the ocean captures into the deep ocean (which is a whole other feedback loop). Even if it doesn't stop altogether, but only slows significantly, the impact on the entire biosphere, and especially around the North Atlantic, is going to be profound.

to serve up advertisement and privacy-invadind SaaS at lightning speed. I can't wait!

If you're dumb enough to use Beidou, your entire movement history is available to an adversary nation, China. Why not just use the /Russian one instead? GPS is the safe one, nobody is spying on you. National security spying on Americans is illegal by Act of Congress, with stiff prison terms for anyone who violates this sacred trust.

It would actually be quite wrong to just say "funded by taxpayer!!". It's funded by a central EU funding pot, yes, but that pot is fed from more than the individual taxpayers titheing money to their governments, which then use it to pay their EU dues. Both the EU's central pot, and the individual state's exchequer, will are supplied by more than the taxpayer and will include investment returns (that money isn't just sitting in a vault around doing nothing until it's needed), fines including the multi-billion $ ones levied against Apple/Google/Meta/Microsoft, etc., the sale of criminal assets seized through disgorgement like Bitcoin and tangible goods such as cars and properties, foreign visa fees, and customs fees, just for starters.

There's almost certainly a full breakdown of the sources on Europa.eu if you wanted to go and look for it; pretty much all of the EU's operational processes and finances are in the public domain.

and low bars for academic performances have been the norm for a long time.

Now we have a replacement to kill off since Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been largely bleached away and killed due to Trump's climate policies.

What's an awful lot of words to state that Trump sucks and his voters are fascist scum. Why go to all that trouble? Just say it out loud. You won't go to prison for it, not yet anyway.