If by simple, you mean simplistic, then yeah. What you're forgetting is that every time a bomb kills someone's mother, father, brother, sister, wife, son, or daughter, another America hater is born. So there's likely to be an endless supply of irrational leaders, so long as they are put into power by someone bombing the previous leader along with random military targets.

The only regime changes that are ever really positive long-term are regime changes led by the people of a country against their leaders. All other regime changes are statistically more likely to make things worse than better.

Linux underpins the internet. It's the primary server OS on the planet. High-value data is held on Linux systems. The idea that it's not profitable to attack those targets is silly. They're harder to attack. People still do it. That's why there are still ssh port scans for example.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

It is, but IME a lot of software needs architectural changes to work on it, similar to when you're trying to build software for Windows in cygwin. That's one reason I decided it wasn't worth the hassle back when I was running it.

When it comes to being allowed to do what you want with your computer, it's a lot more like Windows than it is like Linux. And it's been getting worse.

Now tell us how many similar bugs are in Windows, and will be found even without the obscurity of closed source. You don't know, because you depend on Microsoft to tell you when they fuck up, but you're declaring this a victory for Microsoft anyway? Do fucking tell.

No, 2MB was never enough for a Linux desktop. I had 8MB on my 386 and it was only just sufficient.

Not a lot against the guy, but he should be #5 .. he merely continued the trajectory set by the others.

For nearly 15 years.

Jobs passed in 2011. Tim Cook has been at the helm for 15 years since then. Even if he was coasting, Apple has done remarkably well in those 15 years just coasting alone. Most companies falter and die out by then. Heck, after Apple ousted Jobs as CEO, they were struggling by the time Jobs came back and he wasn't gone nearly as long as he is now.

Even if Tim Cook did absolutely nothing for the 15 years he was CEO, the fact that Apple is still around and still going strong is already a huge credit to his (non-)leadership in managing to keep the ship steady.

Tell me how many other CEOs are like that - because history is littered with failed companies whose leadership wanted to make their mark and then their companies imploded. Like Apple nearly did 20 years ago.

Tim Cook, by "doing nothing", managed to keep Apple on the up and up, and history reveals this isn't usually what happens.

The last time, it was likely Intel buying up AMD CPUs and dumping them. As well as forcing Microsoft and Sony to use AMD chips.

AMD has its ups and downs, and Intel was riding high, but Intel needed AMD to survive to avoid antitrust activity as well. Getting rid of fabs was one thing as they are expensive.

But Chipzilla is still very big and making a lot of money. And they released new chips that are surprisingly competitive. They're not fast against the top end 9860X3D CPUs, but are very cost competitive when compared to the midrange parts, or even faster than them. At the same price or lower.

They've also seen a bump in sales in chips supporting DDR4. So going into 2025 it was doom and gloom for Intel, but for 2026 so far, Intel is holding its own and maybe even starting a comeback.

And even after all these years there are still plenty of idiots who don't understand what the word "average" means. I always see them slowing down for a camera then speeding right back up again afterwards. How do people this dumb get a license?

There was a comedy troupe that posted 3 people along the first. The first one carried a sign that read "Speed camera ahead".
The second one carried a sign that read "Just kidding".
The third one carried a sign that read "Sorry".

The thing was, there was a speed trap between the second and third person. They'd slow after the first, speed way up for the second and get caught, then the third sign apologized.

There's a YouTube video of them driving and what you'd see and it's been reported a few times.

Also, many toll roads especially in Asia do this as well - you get a ticket when you enter the toll road, then you'd hand it in when you exit and they'll charge you the toll based on distance travelled. Problem is, they also note your average speed.

Though I do remember at least one having a rest stop with a restaurant on it - so stopping for a break and/or food would lower your average speed considerably.

Honestly, that's a pretty good spread for a small crew. And is much higher than any other population sample you could take. It only happened because these things are planned out so far in advance, that Trump's anti-DEI couldn't have taken effect without delaying it for at least a couple more years.

And the moon is not an easy feat - if you want a rough idea of scale, put a half inch sized circle on one of your wrists, Then put a dot on the other wrist. Then stretch your arms wide and you have a near scale representation of the Earth, the Moon, and the distance involved. Yes, it's that far apart and likely a lot further than books and school would have you believe. Or likely you would even believe.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

You don't. Because home internet connections, even the multi-gigabit ones, are terrible for things that need constant ping.

It's why people have been hosting services where they can get a dedicated IP, or likely one shared with similar services. Those hosting servers tend to have guarnateed connectivity.

Because direct IP connections sucked, and it's why booter services aren't so common nowadays. Because that's what happened in the past - if you got angry, you started pingflooding the host IP and making everyone's game terrible.

These days, you still have booter services, but they're services you pay for, and they're not used as much because the hosting server often hides the IP of everyone else.

I don't disagree with local servers, but maybe let's leave them on the local LAN plan. If you want to expose it to the Internet, then you can, and if you do, better have the expertise to know how to host it yourself.

And no, IPv6 won't fix this - because IPv6 only guarantees everyone gets a globally unique IP address. It doesn't guarantee that end-to-end connectivity will work. Thanks to firewalls and such which are a practical necessity these days.

The popularity of online multiplayer competitive play is driven in part by centrally hosted servers where there are people who do protect them against attacks meant to spoil the fun of everyone involved. Only a huge data center really has that ability. But if you want to host a small scale server on your own for you and a few friends, you should have the option as well

Let me restate that. Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is vehicles and pedestrians using the same space at similar times.

Who has priority is largely uninteresting, because ultimately if a car hits you, you're still probably dead whether you had the right of way or not.

Ostensibly, sure, if you got rid of all the cars, streets would be safer for pedestrians, but they would also be a huge waste of space, because pedestrians don't need huge roads to walk. Roads exist principally for cars. The fact that pedestrians have to cross them is just an unfortunate design constraint that's hard to avoid cheaply, and giving pedestrians priority is mostly just feel-good policymaking that doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems.

The only truly safe way to share the space is to ensure that pedestrians aren't in the road when cars are. The best approach, at least in cities, is second-floor walkways, so that pedestrians and cars are never vertically at the same traffic layer. A slightly less optimal, but still reasonable approach is to give pedestrians a separate walk cycle in which the entire intersection is theirs. Pedestrians have priority during that cycle, and cars have priority the rest of the time, and as long as everyone follows the rules, nobody gets hurt.

But none of those solutions work for neighborhood streets, which is why the presence of pedestrians on neighborhood streets without sidewalks and proper traffic control for pedestrians results in the roads being inherently more dangerous than other streets.

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

Attacking nuclear facilities is at least moderately rational. Various countries have done that half a dozen times over the past few years. Attacking drone manufacturing and storage might also be reasonable.

But...

What does an illegal decapitation attack have to do with nukes? Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one? There is a fundamental difference between going after clear military targets to prevent Iran from developing weapons that threaten their neighbors and going after civilian and government targets.

No, they will keep doing this until they are a nuclear power. They've seen what denuclearization did for Ukraine, and it's hard to argue with their logic. Having nuclear weapons is a strong deterrent to invaders, who realize that the response could be swift and devastating at a scale that countries never recover from.

It's unclear what other things they will do at that point. We can only speculate. Mind you, I don't like the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran, but again, I see no evidence that anything happening over there right now is going to change anything, or even delay it enough to matter.

Is anything that the U.S. government is doing right now going to change that reality? The way you prevent them from laying mines is the same way that you prevent oil from leaving Iran — bombing ships the second they leave the harbor. If you're not willing to start with a full air and naval blockade, you've already failed, and the only thing continuing the war can do is increase the number of ways that you've failed.