Because they don't. That's the basic error. Yes, sometimes they cooperate. But the U.S. cooperates with China from time to time. And even with Russia, when it comes to the Ukraine War, especially with Donald Trump at the helm. Is the U.S. now a secret ally of Iran, because the U.S. sells soy beans to China, and Iran sells oil to China? As I say, you have a completely simplistic world view, lumping everything together, and blind to what really goes on.

Oil prices rise, and what's the U.S. answer to that? Lift oil sanctions against Iran and Russia. What does Putin want more than more revenue to finance his war? He does not need to step in in support of Iran. He got everything he wanted out of the conflict already. Even the amount of air defense missiles the U.S. could potentially sell to the Ukraine is reduced, because they are now all fired into Iran, 10 million dollar items, each to shut down a single 1000 dollar drone. North Korea acts according to the well known strategy: "Don't stop your enemy when he is making mistakes". And what does Trump? Getting angrier and threatening to leave NATO, which has nothing to do with the war on Iran, did not want the war in Iran, even warned him that this would be exactly the big blunder it proves to be. But I fully support the other NATO members here: You break it, you own it. Donald Trump led the U.S. in this quagmire without any necessity. It's his very own job to clean up the mess he made.

That's your error in a nutshell.

Yes, they are bad, and I don't want to live in any of the countries. But lumping them together and consider them a monolithic block marching in sync is such a misjudgment of reality, that it is exactly that simplistic world view I am referring to. If the police chases a suspected killer, do you expect the thief to come out in support of the killer, just because both are bad? No, the thief does not care if the police catches the killer or not. He will seize the opportunity with the eyes of the police somewhere else to continue stealing unimpeded. That's what Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-Un are doing right now. There is no point in defending Iran and getting into the line of fire. The eyes of the world are somewhere else, and they can continue whatever they are up to right now with less scrutiny.

The world is not a superhero comic, where the superhero with supernatural superpowers thumps the baddie and everyone applauds. The world is not a secret agent movie where there is only one real antagonist, everyone else considered bad is in serfdom to him, and his henchmen lack any marksmanship, while the agent will hit two of them with a single .22 round from 1000 yards away. And the world is not a chess game with a limited set of pieces, each with a limited set of legal moves, and you win by catching the enemy's king.

1) They knew it already. Nothing to see here. Iran was always the outcast on the Persian Gulf, being Shiite, anti-monarchist and Non-Arabian.

2) That's the whole point. Iran shows that you can do damage cheaply, and very expensive to defend against, even against an enemy with far superior firepower.

3) It was before, and like Hamas, it is so deeply rooted in society that you have to kill the population, e.g. commit genocide to get it out.

Why should China and North Korea come out in support? Do they gain anything from their verbal support? As long as China gets its oil from Iran (which it does, and cheaper than other countries), it just sits and waits. And North Korea could not care less for Iran, but grins broadly because the U.S. is wasting money and military power somewhere else.

Your whole idea how the world works is very simplistic and in a black-and-white, us-versus-them scheme.

It might be a hallucination, or it might be a real problem. And there are other possibilities. (E.g. earlier it was suggested that MS noticed a bad bug *somehow* and the government didn't want the bug to be fixed.)

If you want to be fair, it's been headed that way ever since the 1860's. And prior to that the individual states were headed that way.

People in power like to make their jobs easier.

"Security by obscurity" doesn't work by itself. It's a necessary component of every security policy, however. You can't just pick one. (It's called "defense in depth", but that's not really a good metaphor.)

* No reasonable RAM upgrade path
* No reasonable storage upgrade path
* for some models, difficulty replacing battery

I would love to get something like the Apple Neo laptop if I knew I could extend its life to 8-10 years by upgrading hardware at the 4-5 year mark at a reasonable cost and replace the battery as needed at a reasonable cost.

Without those options, I'm looking at non-Apple hardware, which means a non-Apple OS and not being in the Apple ecosystem and not giving Apple the revenue stream that goes with being in that ecosystem.

I hope someone at Apple sees this and lets the right people know that their decisions to make hardware upgrades difficult or impossible is costing them future revenue.

At least one of the late-1980s/early-1990s Mac desktops and at least one IBM* enterprise-fleet-targeted desktop were designed for very fast in-the-field repair by corporate IT staff. By repair I mean "unscrew the case, replace the faulty component, screw the case back together, and get the customer back up and running ASAP."

I personally saw computers from both companies that had ONE screw, not counting customer-installed security screws/locking devices. Everything else was held in place by latches, friction, or other easy-to-manipulate no-tools-required connections. You could literally replace any one of the major components with less than 5 minutes of downtime once you'd done it a few times. Floppy drive, check, hard drive, check, power supply, check, motherboard, check, add-in boards, check, various cables, check, case, check. OK replacing the case might take 10 minutes but only because it requires moving all of the other components.

* IBM sold off its PC computing line to Lenovo in the 1990s or 2000s.

The future is to use AI to screen code before it is published to the world.

For code written or influenced by an AI, have a different, independently-developed AI screen it for security bugs.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

But just because they could not. Russia, being a imperialistic country since the Grand Prince of Moscow named himself Czar of all Russians, would immediately if given the chance.

Define "established session", and how it works with SIP or H.323, and what happens if signalling runs within an encrypted channel!

They were named after people who did some pretty unsavory things during their times in power.

Doing unspeakably evil acts is part of many "successful business models." Whether it's mafia-style threats of "pay me or I will rape/kill your family," eliminate-your-competition/opponent mass-murders-and-take-their-property-as-spoils like you see in some wars ("ethnic cleansing" anyone?), or actually selling the "work product" of crimes (e.g. selling stolen goods or filming a rape and selling the photographs), there is money to be made from acts of evil.