Replace former English colonies with former French colonies. Much of West Africa is French speaking.

I get almost no spam calls... Last one I got was to a number I use exclusively for data on overseas travel (free data roaming in 72 countries for just £10 PAYG/Prepaid so I only put money on there when I'm travelling). My main UK number gets nothing any more, it's been years since I even got a "so we's heard you was in an accident" call. So you can do something about it.

That something is punishing telcos that allow spammers/scammers to operate. It's relatively cheap to set up a VOIP/PABX setup however if you want to phone people on a phone number you still need to link to a network which means the telco's can be gate keepers and should be. They can easily spot someone making a dozen phone calls a minute and just as easily cross reference that with a legitimate business like a well known insurance company. Totally Legit Call Company PLC with one director listed in Companies House should set off a huge red alarm bell.

I'm guessing you're American... the problem you've got is that the telcos are making money off that and none of your spineless leaders have the stones to tell them to stop. It's not that they cant, it's not impossible to action against, it's just that they wont.

Which means the calls are originating inside the country. This means someone is paying for a connection even if it's a VOIP/PABX that connects to a foreign site... this means the Telcos can be held responsible for activities that are now illegal.

You might not be able to fine or imprison people in another country but you can do that to telcos operating in your country and you can bet your arse that the telcos can tell who is making dozens of calls per minute on their networks (clue... they'll be taking money from them).

I cant imagine it would be cheap to dial in internationally and caller ID would put the country code in front of it. Definitely not profitable on the return you get from spam/scam calls.

Have we compared this with other major groups of bigots to see if strong opinions on Immigration are a contributing factor?

Identify is precisely what security guards are hired to do, the big issue with CCTV is unless you know when and where an event took place, you're looking through a mountain of footage for a needle. This is likely the same problem with robot guards, they cant tell when or where something untoward is happening.

Arrest, probably not as, in most civilised countries guards are instructed not to put themselves in danger. However the article mentions places in the US so that doesn't really apply.

The other thing they're there to do is deter, which a physical presence tends to do a lot better than any camera or robot. Even a cardboard cutout of a police officer has resulted in noticeable reductions in petty crime. Humans are wired to respond to human features (notably eyes) in that way. A liveried police patrol car will slow down far more drivers than 100 speed cameras.

Like most of us, life first arose, discovered that it was a really bad idea and went back to sleep.

Nope, you don't haggle on a car like you're at a Turkish bazaar, you negotiate and yes, you can and should negotiate on a made to order car. Especially so see what options and extras they'll throw in for free. If anything, it gives you far more options and power as the dealer knows it's easier for you to walk away.

Nope, it's most manufacturers. Dealers don't really keep stock of most models as they want to sell them with options, so the demonstrator they have on site will not have all the options. Most cars are ordered from the factory these days, only the base models are kept in stock.

Right now, self driving cars are just stopping in the middle of intersections because they don't know what to do. So "better" than the average driver they are far from. If a human driver just stopped in the middle of an intersection because they got confused we'd take their license off them.

Also, they should be better than the average western driver, if not the average Nordic driver. Saying they're better than Americans is saying they're still half as good as the rest of the developed world (1/4 compared to the UK or Nordic nations).

But the horse de-wormer chuggers have constantly told us how many bad side effects there are from mRNA vaccines... tell me they weren't lying. I mean we're all already dead from vaccine hurties within 2 years of even thinking about taking one as they predicted.

RFK Jr must be in a hell of a pickle, he wants to say "vaccine baaaaaad" but flu is a big killer of the elderly so it's literally killing his voter base and here is an effective preventer of that death.

This. Also the car you test drive won't be the one you buy unless you're trying to buy a used demonstrator.

I suspect that they're will be a remotely deactivated "dealer mode" that will be turned off after delivery (or perhaps not even present on cars that are not intended to be demonstrators).

This will just be the test to see how much the frog can be boiled, after the backlash they'll say "it was just the marketing intern and we'll make sure it's toned down from here" and then slowly ramp it back up again after the backlash dies down. The only long term solution to this is to make it illegal, which will never happen in the US. It might happen in the EU and perhaps the UK, however I suspect most of those "70 markets" are not in the EU and do not have strong consumer protection laws like we have here in the UK.

It's worse than that. They will find a way to justify why that woman needed to be killed and skullfucked, trying to turn it into a necessary event that their heroic manbaby had to do. There are none so blind as those who cannot see.

The irony is, a few years ago you couldn't get them to shut up about dementia, government corruption or "crime" families... now their silence is deafening. Seems they were just trying to prepare us for Trump rather than warning us about Biden.

What Microsoft needs are companies to keep buying CALs yearly. The OEMs are just a drop in the bucket as most corporate laptops will have the corporate image dumped onto them as soon as they arrive. OEMs are mainly there to try to prevent home users from switching to other OSs by being able to buy a laptop without an OS on it (large corporate purchases can be made without buying Windows licenses). MS has largely stopped giving a shit about enforcing licensing for home users. I recently went looking for the Win10 key I bought 5 odd years ago and couldn't find it only to realise that I never actually used it so I never downloaded it from the CD key site I bought it from and that was entirely due to the fact at no point did it ever ask for a key in the entire time I was using the OS.

Microsoft has one trick to keep companies buying CALs and that is Office 365, without using the native programs which only run on Windows, it's an unusable mess.

The main reason I've given up on GOG, which is to say I rarely buy anything from them any more is because their marketing emails stopped listing prices, instead going with the ambiguous "XX% off" which doesn't actually tell me what the price is, it's telling me what it isn't and I know it's designed to get more clickthroughs but it really has the opposite effect on me and I've unsubscribed from their mailing list.

Sadly this kind of behaviour has become all too common these days... FFS, if you want to sell me something, start by telling me how much it is otherwise I'm just going to ignore it.

I personally couldn't give a crap about friends lists... I'm a Linux user, I don't keep a lot of friends anyway.

To me GoG Galaxy it serves two purposes, 1 for games that are too large to be downloaded easily such as Cyberpunk 2077 which has about 50 parts to download and for games that get updated regularly. Aside from that it's a convenient launcher.