I'll stipulate every one of your Russian talking points.

Now, I'll explain why they aren't operative: Ukraine isn't trying to conquer pieces of Europe. Ukraine can be as corrupt as it wants, draft whomever they wish, predict whatever fantastic victories they please, and fail at weapons development as much as they like. As long as they don't go kinetic and start European land wars, its all good.

It's bad enough that we've gone from "Papers please" to having our "papers" automatically transmit their location at all times and now all of our purchases and earnings are auto-tracked and profiled (and we're not even getting into the cameras or "smart TVs".
Never mind the fact that more and more companies are guiding customers away from webpage use to apps on a smartphone. Especially when most PCs these days have just as good of security as phones.

"You will each receive an ~~identity disk~~ SMARTPHONE. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this ~~disk~~ SMARTPHONE. If you lose your ~~disk~~ SMARTPHONE or fail to obey commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That will be all."

Putin is way behind the curve on this one: Ukraine has reverted to destroying distillation towers, pumping stations and oil depots. So the data centers are probably safe for the time being. The real issue they'll have is surviving in many kilometers long fuel lines during the Russian winter.

Jay in Kyiv says it best: These are the sort of problems you face when you invade a peaceful and much smarter neighboring country.

No, he's telling the truth: Internet Explorer is deeply integrated into Windows.

Oh shit, sorry! I thought you were talking about someone else. Never mind.

Why would a manufacturer's device need a trusted introducer to communicate with that same manufacturer? Vizio can be its own CA. There's no intermediary between themself and themself.

If you want the truth about why "affordability" might be a problem for you, look no further than this summary ("...would need the green light from those major mobile carriers...") and extrapolate that to essentially everything that costs too much, because that is exactly where it's coming from. Whether it's incumbent hospital networks deciding whether to permit new competitors in their territories, or incumbent universities deciding whom they will and will not permit to be accredited, and thus be eligible for government subsidies, government-backed debt, or any number of other examples where incumbents have wheedled themselves control of some measure of government apparatus to limit and control competitors.

In any case, none of this is "Capitalism." Actual "Capitalism" does not involve this sort of dysfunction. It certainly has other dysfunctions, but private-interest incumbent control over government gatekeeping is not among them. That's a different problem, and rational people don't confuse it with "Capitalism."

And all of this exists because every time one of your ancestors felt some frustration or suffered some grievance, real or imagined, they called the cops and created another opportunity for some wonderful new bit of "fairness" to be enacted into law. That's what you're really paying for. That's the price of your romper-room world, and why your elders have the jaws of a vise cranked down on everything today.

"It just has a bad name, that’s all. Everyone would love it if it had a cute name like, uh, elf grass."

Who are you and what have you done with rsilvergun?

Broaden your scope: Both the America revolution and the US civil war were consequences of prosperity. Subsisting people spend little time pondering pamphlets or worrying about ratios of atmospheric trace gasses. The Left and its simple minded and reactionary hair-shirt solutions to all problems are certainly their own worst enemy. That's a key point as well: the enemies they imagine, including all the churches and all the fictional Nazis that live in side their heads are nothing by comparison.

Of course you believe this. You have no concept of actual warfare. Your whole worldview is what you've been fed by comfortable, secure establishment media that hasn't dealt with an actual military threat in about 80 years.

No son, job loss and "disinformation" are not worse than kinetic warfare. You're a poster boy for the consequences of excessive peace.

This is the language of someone that's never been more than a few hours away from a source of food.

Taiwan is a island of people that don't want to be enslaved by a totalitarian hell state, and China will not hesitate to nab Taiwan at the very first instant they think they can pull it off. All your 8-D chess thinking is just you filling your head with shit. Stop doing that to yourself.

The only reason Taiwan hasn't been blockaded and starved into submission is that China lacks the 2-3 additional aircraft carriers and naval air wings they'll need to ensure the success of that mission. That's it. No other reason. And you're likely to live long enough to witness the truth of that.

When that day comes, do yourself a huge favor: recall this discussion and take it to heart. If you do, the good news for you is that perhaps you'll be able to salvage some of your remaining years free of the cognitive damage you've indulged.

That works for science. But for biographies? What makes a biography "verifiable"? The longer someone has been dead the harder it is to verify any claims. Ultimately you're relying on historians or whomever wrote the history books and more often than not they've been wildly biased in favor of the viewpoint of the historian. It's not supposed to be that way, but it is.
I can point to several "sources" for George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and not lying about it. Doesn't make it "true".
Jesus? Mohammed?
Likewise, it's going to be difficult to find legit sources for some historical claims. (and that doesn't even get into Wikipedia's arbitrary judgements on what makes a source reliable)
At the end of the day Wikipedia is just following human tradition - "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

I doubt that. This isn't the nifty fifties and we don't moral panic over blowjobs anymore. Clinton was poking girls with cigars in the Whitehouse and the Bezos beams dick pics around to women. Jenson could handwave this, and she can't "Me Too" him because she's a spy that did it for her government.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.

Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.

Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.

The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?

No. Just no.

Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.