Granted that Obama and Biden were foolishly soft on Iran, Trump has not done a very good job of stopping Iran from developing nukes. Almost all of the serious damage to the Iranian nuclear program has been done by Israel, not the US.

In one version of the story there's an additional factor, namely that Microsoft wanted to pay a fixed, one-time, fee for the license whereas Kildall wanted to follow his usual practice of getting a royalty on each copy.

I used ZIP drives extensively in the 90s. I still have a drive and some disks. As far as I know they still work though I haven't tried them in quite a while. They were a huge improvement for people like me who had relatively large files (speech data).

This is interesting but it is only half-true that the use of consumable chemicals has been the barrier to the creation of scent emitters. The other problem is that no orthogonal basis for olfaction is known. In the case of color, for example, we know that you can combine red, blue, and green to form any desired color. There is nothing comparable for scent. We don't know that you can use, say, rose, bitter almond, and sandalwood to create any desired scent.

The article mentions the state's tax revenue as if it would lose it if liquor sales were privatized. Really? States manage to collect taxes on all sorts of privately sold products. As far as I can see, privatizing liquor sales need not mean giving up any tax revenue.

That's already the case. The so-called National Security Law is used against any kind of political dissent.

Agreed. This sounds like a useful feature for me.

Not sure of the specifics, but it is possible to measure the senses of non-human animals, measure various aspects of cognition and memory, and to detect anxiety etc.

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

This looks like a classic example of this fallacy.

There have been studies of the reactance of bananas. It apparently decreases as they ripen.

What gives the UK government the authority to order the deletion of the archive? Is there a contract between the government and the archive that gives them this power? Generally, once the government has released information, it loses the power to control it.

Nope. You're showing that you don't actually read the post, which says: " iPhones and other modern smartphones". And incidentally, I have a Samsung Android phone. I avoid Apple products because they're too controlling. I run GNU/Linux.

Flip side - AI code generation makes developing small ‘throw away’ tools for niche problems trivial. There are plenty of niche tasks for which there are no existing software tools. Writing your own via vibe coding - i did this myself for a temporal disk space calculation tool. In an hour. Including walking across the street to grab a coffee, and checking it in to github. Previously this would have been a few hours of searching the internet before writing something myself with less features and more bugs in 3-4x the time.

It makes it economical to solve problems in code.

Really? It mentions other phones, which would include Android.