It's actually subtle Japanese humour, "let's show them a photo of a kidney stone and see how many people spot it".

Eight olympic-sized swimming pools.

Isn't that right next to Manchester, Guangdong?

That was my reaction as well, this isn't the farmers saying "we've finally got repair access to our machinery", this is John Deere saying "we've got our flesh-eating zombie layers working day and night to misuse these conditions and make sure those damn hayseeds never get anything useful from us".

Nah, they used Windows Calculator on a Pentium PC to work run the numbers. Also, that's the third set of figures, they couldn't use the first lot when it calculated that Linux had 956.00000000000079% desktop market share.

Or they realised that they're way over-staffed. How do you get 1,600 surplus people working on game development? Given that this is a reduction in force rather than closing down the product it presumably means they still have a crowd of thousands in the Xbox division.

Also, stay in an Ibis Budget, not the easily-identified NY Empire Hotel. They look the same everywhere on earth, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Marseille, Hamburg, always the same hotel no matter where you are.

Also, is "Mozilla's well-loved Pocket app" the same as "Mozilla's shove-it-down-your-throat-without-asking-you Pocket app"?

Looks more like "Microsoft and Amazon keep passing the same multibillion-dollar IOU around to keep their stock price up".

No, it's absolutely brilliant for attracting funding and press coverage. Every few months you get to re-announce quantum supremacy or the quantocalypse and people will practically shovel money and media attention at you. In all of modern technological history I don't think anything that doesn't (provably) do anything has had so many billions of dollars and thousands(?) of person-years of effort invested in it.

Personally, I'm just sitting back with popcorn to see what crazy reaction King Donald I will provide us with. Was it antifa? The radical left? Commies? Who knows, but it's bound to be entertaining.

At the high end they're more or less the same because they sell based on being the most expensive bling, not on features. In the midrange Oppo is a far better deal, all the features I'd care about in a Samsung phone at half to a third of the price.

Other countries started it, but I can't see the US changing their laws just because some godless socialists in Europe did. It may have been a useful supporting argument but I can't see the US saying "well, it worked in the Netherlands, we should copy them".

I've been in policy meetings (non-US) where every single person in the room said we should do the right thing X, but the US does Y which everyone agreed was wrong but no-one wanted to stick their neck out and put their name to doing X. This is how soft power (used to) work, luckily the Trump administration's extensive soft-power immunisation program is helping to end that.

A lot of countries tend to copy what the US does without thinking about it too much, or possibly at all. Sometimes it's because the US is holding a gun to their heads in terms of trade restrictions - I mean historically, not the current farce - and others it's because of monkey see, monkey do. A recent example is decriminalising cannabis use, which a number of countries suddenly magically decided to do as soon as the US did.

Is it? My aunt lives on the side of a valley that military jets sometimes fly down and the sonic boom is just a bit of a loud thump, and kinda cool to experience if you're a kid, I didn't find it much of a problem.