I'll humour you for a moment and pretend that your fantasy is based in fact. Given that - and speaking as a Canadian - I'm not entirely sure that living in a "poor, tyrannical Islamic hell hole" is worse than living in the "poor, tyrannical Christian hell hole" that my country would become if American conquerors imported millions of themselves into Canada. And that's what der Trumpenfuhrer keeps threatening to do.

Europe had a business partner - the US - who had been (relatively) stable, predictable, reasonable, and trustworthy for many decades. Why would they duplicate the dev effort and take on the expense of creating software which would then make it more difficult to interoperate with their American business / trade partner?

I agree with you that they should have taken the hit in the name of redundancy, resilience, and independence. That's easy to see in hindsight; but when a situation evolves slowly, the need to differentiate yourself and become fully autonomous may not be obvious until a sharp break occurs. Trump's second term was that sharp break.

Billionaires in the US only invest there because they pay next to no income tax. The consequence of that is that the middle class gradually disappears. The remaining non-one-percenters work two or more jobs to stay afloat and are only one paycheque, health crisis, or vehicle failure away from financial ruin.

So tell me again how "investing in the US doesn't mean fucking over anyone".

And will the phone be euPhonious? I guess it must, by definition! ;-)

That's because we "same people" have zero trust in Agent Orange as he threatens his country's own allies and invades other countries just for fun, while he simultaneously shits the bed over and over and over and over again.

We do, however, have at least some trust in the inspectors who, until the Great Trumpster Fire came along, were ensuring that Iran wasn't building nukes.

That would depend on which agency you're talking about, and how well Microsoft managed to curry favour with Trump.

I hear that money, flattery, and spurious ersatz medals can go a long way toward making der Trumpenfuhrer look the other way. And if the agency in question was NOAA or CDC, Trump might actually hand out a medal.

US is a danger to everyone.

FYFFY
(fixed your fix for you)

Here in Canada - at least among us average citizens - NATO is a very iffy thing just now. NATO's supposed leader has threatened the sovereignty of other NATO members, and launched trade wars with some of them. Ambassador to Canada Pete Huckster is an insulting arrogant bully, and he and American politicians are supporting Alberta separatists in a not-so-clandestine fifth column operation aimed at breaking my country apart.

So while the US spying on other NATO members is reprehensible, it's not really extraordinary. Throughout NATO, dealing with that kind of shit from America is just business as usual now.

And if they don't have the scale on their own, they can combine forces with other like-minded countries.

That's probably not ideal, but it would be WAY better than trusting ANY private-sector cloud services provider - never mind an American one - with all that sensitive data.

The Illinois legislation targets the LLMs themselves. I would like to see companion legislation targeting the server farm goldrush as well, since rapid growth in that sector seems to be driven - or at least excused - largely by AI demand.

By far the most prominent news stories deal with the psycho-social and job-market damages caused by LLM use. Equally important are the serious environmental and physical health consequences resulting from the server farms whose growth has exploded since the tech bros started pushing AI as though it's ShamWow.

And then there are Fascist Jews such as Netanyahu, almost everyone in his government and - so it would seem - a very large portion of Israelis. They are the ones who either support or actively participate in genocide, the killing of journalists, and the beating and imprisonment of people who try to give humanitarian aid to starving, dying Palestinians.

As far as I can tell, there are both liberal and conservative Jews among the Fascists. Thankfully, there are also both liberal and conservative Jews among those who denounce the genocide.

The Venn diagram of liberal Jews, conservative Jews, Israelis, Zionists, genocide supporters / deniers, and genocide opponents is one which I would not even attempt to draw. The thought of that makes my head hurt - never mind my heart.

That depends on your definition of "right wing".

I suspect that for most people at your end of the political spectrum the phrase means "conservative, traditional, and with a social, moral, and financial hierarchy that I'm bloody well going to climb as far as I can". I think folks at my end of the spectrum extend that definition to include extremely rich assholes who have invented and fought to legalize accounting dodges which allow them to pay ridiculously low taxes. (Oh, I almost forgot - add in the entirety of the fast-growing military-industrial complex).

Did you know that one of those tricks that the uber-rich use to owe sweet-fuck-all in taxes is to take smaller salaries than some of the people they employ? They pay income tax on those earnings, but they don't pay tax on the large loans-with-extremely-favourable-terms which underwrite their lavish lifestyles.

They themselves - along with, say, shares in their companies - are the collateral for loans which allow them to pay income tax on only a VERY small portion of the money which is really "income" by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, tax laws aren't a reasonable standard.

Any guesses as to who pushed for, and had their hands and noses in, crafting the tax laws? You see, THOSE people are the ones by which we lefties largely identify the "right wing". The identity politics, social conservatism, "pull your own weight" rhetoric and the like are just sleight-of-hand distractions.

SSDs have gotten stoopid expensive anyway, so maybe it's a good time to go back to spinning rust.

Then again, might this attack even work on the the silicon of a magnetic drive? Or is the buffer too small to be vulnerable in the same way?

They might, if they were subject to laundering and ironing on a regular basis.

That suggestion assumes that CEOs have sufficient imagination, familiarity with workflows, analytical ability, open-mindedness, and patience to do the required work.

In the days when CEOs rose through the ranks and actually knew shit, it might be feasible. But I suspect the average C-level these days is a placeholder who probably costs their company - and society - more than a dozen or more of them are actually worth in real-world terms.