Assuming other countries haven't already deployed space weapons. We know Russia has military jamming satellites in very high orbit. I've always assumed that there have been some kind of satellite in orbit that can be weaponized, even if it's a regular military communications satellite that just happens to have some extra maneuvering fuel and a couple of extra thrusters that can be rammed into other satellites.

itâ(TM)s literally the only site I can think of that canâ(TM)t properly display text.

There, fixed it for you.

No, he was convicted of illegally structuring of bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements.

Had he said "I'm paying hush money to someone I sexually abused a few decades ago earlier", the whole financial part of it would have been legal.

From what I've heard, they scan for open WiFi networks and auto-connect to upload data. They don't tell you that they are doing this.

My son went through high school having been assigned a total of three whole-book reading assignments. Most of his reading assignments were newspaper articles, short stories, or single chapters of books. When I went to high school, I was expected to read at least two books every summer, then several more per English class.

It's a choice made by teachers. My younger daughter had one teacher had her class read four books throughout the year. It was middle school, so they were shorter young adult books, but she had read more than my son did throughout all of high school in one class.

But for a zoomable world map, the Mercator projection isn't too bad. Most of the time you are not opening Google Maps to see a view of the whole planet. You will zoom in to a smallish area, and within that area, the shape and relative sizes are preserved. OK, zoom level 5 in Iceland is a different magnification from zoom level 5 in Colombia. That doesn't matter much, as you just zoom to whatever level shows the area you want.

By contrast if you pick a projection like Equal Earth, it's great for a whole-planet view, but anywhere away from the central meridian is skewed. Your city map of Vancouver will show roads that run due north pointing diagonally up and to the right -- while east-west roads are still horizontal, so you can't just rotate. The fact that your zoom level shows the same magnification as someone in Madagascar viewing the same zoom level is irrelevant.

Best I've ever used is the old Syntrillium CoolEditPro, before Adobe screwed it up in the later versions of Audition.

Second best is Live. It's fairly intuitive for doing basic things. It gets iffy when doing more complicated track layouts, but all DAWs do.

It's competition. Keeps everyone on their toes. So now you have Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin all competing for contracts. Having one vendor is how you get Boeing's Starliner budget blowing up by 50% and nine years overdue. Why execute when the government will just keep paying you money as there's nowhere else to go? Keep in mind, most of the companies that built the old space capsules, and the space shuttle, are all part of Boeing now.

Then why support said hardware longer than any other cell phone manufacturer? They could have been just like Motorola or Samsung or Blackberry and provided two years of software updates then abandoned it. Seven years later my 11 Pro is on the latest version of iOS. Crap my 5S got an out-of-band security update a year after they dropped official support for it entirely. That's ten years after it was released, and seven years after they stopped selling it. Here's another fun anecdote. I bought a dirt-old $50 Intel iMac with a firewire port to play with some equally old firewire audio gear. Plugged in a network cable, started up holding CMD-OPT-R, and it happily connected to Apple's server, downloaded and installed the latest version of MacOS X for itself. This thing is old enough to vote and Apple still will install an OS on it.

Let's be honest, you're going to be using a Linux box for that stuff, even if Apple still sold a big tower with a bunch of slots.

It's funny people keep bringing this up. After seven years I'm still using my iPhone 11 Pro and see no need to replace it. In the same time frame my coworker has gone through two Galaxy S phones. The first hasn't had an OS update in four years. The second isn't going to get the latest OS update, so he's looking to upgrade again.

Cell phones used to have a usable life of a year or two. Motorola would completely stop supporting Razers after two years. You might get two years of device support from Blackberry, maybe a bit more if you were using their server software. Nokia was a bit better, Samsung was a bit worse. Apple supporting software updates for five to seven years on consumer devices is unheard of.

And that was a design criteria for JPEG-XL. It's designed to recompress existing JPEGs without loosing much fidelity. I've played around with it and it's pretty good. It's very source-dependent, if a JPEG is already poorly compressed it will look worse. A good quality JPEG, say from a phone, recompresses nicely. You have to blow up the image quite a bit to notice any difference, hence it's fine for general web use. My current standard for lossy compression is AVIF, and I'm seriously considering switching over to JPEG-XL once the format settles a bit.

So "Good enough for general web use" is crap? Do you think everything should be sent as deflate compressed WQUXGA PNGs?

That's what every country does. Al-Jazeera doesn't push content about Brazil. The BBC doesn't push content about Lithuanians. French film companies don't produce movies about Korean ex-pats living in Japan, and Japanese film companies don't produce dramas about winemaking in Bordeaux.

People can watch whatever they like. The "Made in Canada" laws are ridiculous. The CBC wanted SCTV to produce "specifically Canadian" content when it switched to that network, so they cooked up Bob and Doug McKenzie. As if a Canadian-produced TV show featuring mostly Canadian actors wasn't Canadian enough.

Microsoft doesn't care about desktops any more. They barely care about servers. There is no growth in those markets. You can run SQL Server and most of .NET on Linux now, and host the apps on Kestrel. They want you to switch everything over to Linux, then put all of that on Azure, because, even for them, Linux VMs are cheaper to run than Windows VMs.