It's trivially easy to end up with TBs of data from photos, home video, digital music collection (FLAC, for example), digital assets (e.g. blender) all from personal activities and it's beneficial to have off-site backup in case of theft, fire, flood, etc. You might also choose to backup game installers (e.g. from GoG), where Cyberpunk alone is knocking on the door of 100 GB. Backing up stuff from digital stores is not uncommon, particularly as there is no guarantee they don't withdraw access due to merger or bankruptcy or licensing shenanigans. With poor upload speeds, you could be talking a year to back up stuff, and an incomplete backup is fairly useless when disaster strikes.

If it were simply about money, they likely could have found a path via one of their commercial arms (you know they have those, right?) to permit access to their back catalog via a paid service. Or they could use ads (they stuff those into their web sites if someone visits from outside the UK).... That they don't / can't, even for UK citizens temporarily overseas (who paid for a license, but the geolocks still impact them) strikes me as odd. Even someone outside the UK wants to pay the BBC to access their content, they can't; if a UK citizen has paid them, but are outside the UK, the iPlayer geolock gets in the way. Looking here, the BBC income seems pretty flat. Granted, inflation eats away at this, but one could argue that opening up the access could help : https://www.statista.com/stati... It's also a little tricky to hide behind the budget argument when they've allowed salaries to reach excessive levels: https://www.statista.com/stati... Finally, the BBC also encouraged this outside production stuff in years gone by. They made their own bed.

The BBC is fairly aggressive with their VPN detection for iPlayer, so I would expected them to employ as much effort on the radio side, given that they're actively shutting the rest of the world out. It's something of a shame given how much soft power these kinds of things bring more generally, but fewer and fewer organizations can see beyond the end of their nose, it seems.

I also like nano for its simplicity. Brings back memories of pine for email, all those years ago, when commonly received email was not HTML-by-default... https://www.nano-editor.org/

It's a lot more difficult to do a lot of damage if there are no firearms and associated ammunition within easy access. Your post casually glides past that inescapable fact. If there were no guns so readily accessible the perpetrator would have to get a lot closer to do damage and would be unable to cause so much damage so quickly because nothing else has the convenience, range or rate-of-fire as a readily-available gun and its ammunition. There's a reason we don't send soldiers out with pointy sticks and bad language, after all. The US does not have a monopoly on unhappy people, but looking around no other country suffers the rate of incidents of mass murder that the US seems to exhibit on a near-daily basis. You try and duck around that with your post, but it merely highlights, again, that the availability of weaponry intended for killing at-range and extremely efficiently is the enabler for the mass murder. You surely can't argue that knives or pointy sticks would, in the hands of these same people, allow for as much damage as the semi-automatic weapons and the like, or the cheap ammunition that is trivially available. If you're suggesting that healthcare would be great idea, I'd agree. Sadly, anytime that's brought up, there's no shortage of misinformed people declaring 'socialism' and getting upset that their money is going to help someone else. It is also completely orthogonal to the ready supply of tools designed explicitly for mass murder.

TFA is hosted behind a paywall, but from the small amount of text visible, it appears that this is an expansion of CNSE (Albany Nanotech) already at SUNY Albany. They already have TEL, IBM, etc. there and there's an EUV installation as well, so it's not really behind the curve. That said, Albany is a rough place to be for a good chunk of the year if you don't like dark days and -25 F temperatures. It can snow as early as September and as late as April/May.

SUNY CNSE already exists in Albany and has a research effort there, with TEL and others around. There's an established EUV installation in CNSE, so they don't exactly lag behind the curve much. 6 years or so ago, there was also GF Fab 8 in Malta, just up the road, with R&D into leading edge technologies, but that's not exactly a draw any more when they finally threw in the towel for anything below 12 nm. The winters, though, are just brutal. The rest of the year is not altogether bad, but losing 6 months to ice and snow, with very short days, just sucks hard.

A rouge planet would be Mars.....

nVidia drivers are often a curse here. Under AMD hardware, for example, Steam version of the Forza games run just fine. Under nVidia, they generally don't work at all or crash after a few minutes. nVidia has zero fucks to give about Linux, it seems.

I would argue a big demonstration of Microsoft's respect for its customers is the impressive compatibility for legacy applications. It's really impressive how so many Win32 applications continue to run on modern Windows. Apple just breaks things wholesale, and trying to run moderately aged applications on Linux tends to lead, in my experience, to lots of library version pain. That's not to brush aside the other issues, but not breaking your users' stuff, with that effort continuing over decades, shows quite a bit of respect, I would suggest. Even with their enormous market share, they really went the distance to avoid breaking things, it seems to me.

I think the OP's point is that the act of starting to smoke shows a degree of (willful?) ignorance of the long-established facts that it's difficult to excuse. The personal dangers and peripheral effects of smoking (e.g., the stench, staining, passive smoking) are well known and documented, as is the challenge of quitting. Given all of this, it's tricky to understand why someone voluntarily takes up the act. There has to be an element of personal responsibility here, in the end, and perhaps 'stupid' stings a little, but I'm not sure it's too far off the mark.

You can't always escape it, but it's not always necessary to dole it out. Each of us can make the world a slightly less annoying place by being less inflammatory over mild disagreements.

Have the same contempt for the Irish? The IRA did not restrict their activities to military targets. I guess that makes the entirety of Eire terrorist sympathizers. Quite a few US folks provided funds and resources to the campaign. Does that make all US citizens also culpable? At some point, the broad brush labelling needs to be recognized as a poor method to effectively discuss problems, and put away. There are assholes in all communities and parts of society. It doesn't mean that the entire community needs to be condemned.

Far less dangerous? Depends on your situation. If you're non-white, or a woman wanting an abortion, or someone suffering under the US 'health care' system, or a muslim, or left-leaning, or .... then your experience may indicate he's rather more dangerous.

I admit to some puzzlement that this is a necessary thing on a regular basis. Is there no better alternative than this for your case? It seems rather extreme unless there's no way to source equipment and supplies nearer to the job in question.