Not necessarily true.

I'm managing a site with 800,000 worldwide users, of which ~12,000 are in Europe. Never captured, let alone sold, any personal data but GDPR compliance cost obviously not worth it. So bye bye Europe.

Reread this para, replacing 'science' with 'reality'. Whether it's science, or politics or business or international affairs, it's the same story.

'Science and journalism seem to be uniquely incompatible: Where journalism favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and misdirections... '

I've been through this. Progressives are terrible for computer use. Just stick to regular reading glasses for the computer while using progressives for everything else.

I've heard that some new (very expensive) progressives have exceptionally large reading zones but I'm so comfortable using traditional reading glasses that I haven't bothered.

The headline is wrong. This is not at all a cargo ship. It's more like an free-floating platform on which a gas refinery has been built. It will stay in place during its entire lifetime.

It should not even be compared to ships.

Actually, it's mostly open fields, not streets.

You should try it some time. It isn't as bad as it's made out to be.

Seriously - at the risk of sounding like a basher - has Microsoft ever produced a product where they focused on providing better quality than the competition?

Your risk of sounding like a basher is indeed serious. Try talking to some old folk who switched from 1-2-3 to Excel around 1993 or dBase/Foxpro to Access around 1997 to get the real story on how some major Microsoft products once actually were much better than the competition (even though Foxpro was a Microsoft product by then).