This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

Apparently, nobody really noticed that. I mean, why would you check the expiration date on a patent in Canada? Surely, a company like Novo Nordisk wouldn't neglect to pay the maintenance fee?

I would not count on this requiring the app to update.

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

The fact that "walkable cities" scare you indicates the problem is on your end, not your fantasy Europeans.

The problem in that scenario isn't the guard: it's the manager who entered faulty data into the database.

Also the fault of the database maintainer for (a) not verifying the data (b) distributing unverified data and (c) not removing bad data.

Facewatch is just a matching algorithm that lets you search by image rather than by location, time, or other metadata.

It's sold for identifying people you don't want, and they don't bother to verify the data, nor do they respond quickly or barely at all when they have faulty data.

I don't see why you should get a free pass on slander or libel just because you use an algorithm.

Are any of the profits going to Gila Monster conservation?

So every international traveler could be searched to see if their meds contain any patent violations and seized at the border?

This is entirely unworkable.

It depends on what they've purchased. Microsoft's basic licenses haven't gone up by that much in five years. The top tier E5 license was $57 per month in 2020, and today it's $54.75 (albeit without Teams, which costs $8 per month with a phone number attached). European prices are probably a bit different, but the price changes in percentages won't be notably different. Even add-ons like Entra Suite or Intune Suite won't add 72%. It's more likely that they have Azure VMs or other services, and that's where the majority of the cost increase came from. If they're not planning on bringing that on-prem, they'll see some savings, but it may not be all that much.

Given the way so many people vastly over-estimate ChatGPT as an actual intelligence, I thing it's quite fair to put it up against an old and tiny chess engine on easy level. This is basically "Are you Smarter than a5th Grader" for AIs. And it is NOT.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

And that's a problem. Too many things require you to read the mind of the package maintainer so you can not do things that they didn't want you to do (but never documented "don't do this, it works fine in this version but it won't work when we upgrade to another version".)

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

270 sqm, about the same latitude as Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 824 mm or 32.4 inches of rain every year, average temperature 10C / 50 F.