Yeah, and their whole argument is irrational. $1500/$30 = 50 months. A four-year ROI isnâ(TM)t irrational. Whatâ(TM)s irrational is companies expecting to make back their costs in a year, and expecting that because their service sucks so much that people wonâ(TM)t stay past the promotional period.

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

-

In my experience, most sufficiently advanced use of PHP involves rendering the HTML. You can do it either way.

And most sufficiently complex PHP uses PHP as a full-fledged language, complete with classes, etc., and to the extent templates are used, the code in them consists of tiny partial-line-long fragments of code that call some method in some other file that is basically just code.

In other words, very fragmented code isn't caused by PHP; it's caused by the way that the developer chose to use PHP.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

I still want a USB-A port on my MacBook Pro. The number of times I don't have the right cable/adapter with me is still way too high.

But no, I meant phones, where Lightning was dumped on iPad in 2018, but didn't go away on the iPhone for another half decade.

Yes. At the very latest, they should have changed when they changed the iPad over. Having a different charger for iPhone than for every other Apple device was overtly user-hostile. It meant carrying around extra crap for zero reason other than because Apple extracted four bucks worth of MFi revenue off of every licensed iPhone cable sold, and couldn't extract revenue from every USB-C cable sold.

And given how thin Lightning cables had to be because of the miniature connector and the inability to use a bigger connector because of case manufacturers building the holes too small to accommodate them, and how often the cables failed because of the too-thin wires, I'd imagine that was quite a nice revenue stream. The number of Lightning cables I went through was nuts.

USB Mini was in 2000. Micro was in 2007. Both were before the first iPhone. Don't get me wrong, micro-USB sucked. But we'd all have been better off if they had gone with mini-USB and stuck with it. We'd all have been better off if Apple had stuck with the Dock connector another two years and pushed the USB Forum (of which they are a member) to make a reversible connector happen, then switched to USB-C. We'd all have been better off if they had switched to Lighting, scared the rest of the industry into making USB-C happen, and then dumped Lighting for USB-C in 2018, starting with the iPad and then quickly progressing through the entire product line, rather than changing the iPad, but keeping the iPhone on Lightning until 2023.

Instead, Apple waited until the EU forced them to do it. By the time they finally switched, I was about to give up and move to Android, because the experience was so much better being able to share power infrastructure with my Mac instead of carrying around special sh*t-quality, low-data-speed cables just for the iPhone. Don't get me started on the fact that Apple never put USB 3 silicon into any iPhone, so they maxed out at a pathetic 480 Mbps data rate. It made photography and videography on iPhone absolutely horrible, because you couldn't get data off of them in a timely manner.

Everything about the way Apple handled Lighting on iPhones was botched just about as horribly as you could possibly botch it. Consumers put up with it, but that didn't make it suck any less.

Apple has sold two different versions of their display on Mac laptops for years — a glossy screen and a matte screen. An OLED screen option wouldn't be unthinkable. They'd just have to price it appropriately based on availability.

But you're right that doing it across the entire product line would be a lot of hardware. Even doing it for the Pro line would be a lot, largely because that's more than half of Apple's laptop sales — a sad testament to how badly Apple screwed up when they dropped the standard Macbook in favor of the thermally throttled Air. Contrast that with when the first Macbooks came out and the Pro laptops were maybe a percent or two. This doesn't leave Apple with the wiggle room to have truly high-end-only features except by making them BTO/CTO options.

It's still noise compared with the 1.1 billion OLED panels expected to be sold this year. Whether manufacturing capacity drove Apple's availability or Apple's demand helped drive capacity is unclear. Probably both.

As far as I can tell, this is an Android phone minus the phone. It is the iPod Touch of the Android world (which Apple discontinued years ago for lack of any real-world demand beyond use as a developer test device).

Why are they building this?

Oh. For "audiophiles" (in the "I don't understand how anything works, but making the back of the device out of some special kind of metal sounds like it could make the sound better, so I'll spend thousands of dollars on it" sense of the word). Now I understand.

Therefore, don't look. Yeah, this is indeed a fairly likely explanation.

To be honest, I don't think this is them ignoring privacy. I think this is them having gotten so complacent about privacy that nobody there even understands how to protect privacy anymore.

I mean the first rule of privacy on the Internet is "DNS isn't private." This is such a basic mistake that nobody with an ounce of privacy sense should make it. The URL's hostname should contain only the organization name or individual username and maybe some unique identifier if they really need that. But 99% of titles aren't secret in and of themselves, so I'll give them a pass on this one for now, even though it is still a horrible bug for the remaining 1%.

And the second rule of privacy is "Knowledge of a resource is not authorization." The fact that a resource that has not been shared can be accessed by its URL, and that apparently no attempt has been made to ensure that only people who are authorized to access that URL can view its contents means that they effectively have no access control at all. This would be an epic fail even if the first security bug weren't there.

This makes me suspect that some intern vibe-coded this thing as a prototype with no human design review at all, and that their team shipped it without actually taking the time to understand how it worked, relying too much on AI to do the review, and that the AI had inadequate training on how to implement privacy and security. Either that or the design docs did not adequately cover how the authentication worked and the reviewers did not bother to ask, which is an even bigger concern.

Either way, Meta needs to seriously clean up their act. This should have never shipped without a proper security review, and the fact that problems this severe were not caught is clear evidence that a proper security review did not happen. Identifying the underlying reasons for that failure should be a top priority, and the answer is never "Fire person X for not doing their job," because something this bad is never the fault of one person or even a small number of people. It's always systemic. It's always a lack of adequate controls, adequate numbers of eyes on design, adequate review, etc. And until they address the systemic problems that led to this outcome, I won't trust anything that Meta does going forwards as far as I can throw it.

So my advice to Meta would be that they do a very detailed internal postmortem, identifying all of the different places where this could have been caught and why it was not caught, identifying mitigation strategies to ensure that similar things don't happen in the future, etc., then implement all of those mitigation strategies, and finally create a second, publicly sanitized version of that doc and publish it externally as a "Here's what we're doing to make sure this never happens again" document. That's what they need to do to restore the faith of the folks who have witnessed this disaster.

Anything short of that level of public documentation showing that they truly understand how badly they screwed up and have genuinely taken steps to ensure privacy and security in future products would be inadequate, given the level of corporate ineptitude required to reach this point.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

False. The DoD banned imports of new, foreign-made consumer wireless routers due to claims of national security, supply chain, and cybersecurity risks.

There's no evidence that crappy consumer-grade routers with firmware written by contractors to hit a specific set of bullet points on a spec sheet are going to be any more secure merely because the low-quality firmware was installed on the devices at a factory in the United States. The national security risk is a total farce. And the supply chain problem is still a supply chain problem even if it is assembled in the United States, because few (if any) of the components inside it are made in the United States, nor do U.S. manufacturers exist for most of those parts.

So what you actually have is a lunatic executive branch leader whose tariffs got thrown out by the Supreme Court who then weaponized the DoD and the FCC to raise the price of many electronics goods, despite no evidence that doing so will actually create any short-term or long-term improvements in the near-total lack of U.S. component manufacturing (which for silicon parts is itself dependent on foreign silicon wafer manufacturing, because U.S. manufacturers consume far more silicon wafers than U.S. manufacturing can produce, though ironically, most of the sand that goes into them was mined in the U.S.).

This is actually surprisingly rare. Most of the time we've berated Apple, it has been because they've dragged their heels on basic stuff like USB-C. I see no reason that Apple dragging their heels on OLED displays will be any different.

I've been complaining about Apple displays not being bright enough to use outside since my first active-matrix Mac laptop. Ironically, the passive matrix black-and-white Mac displays from the early 1990s actually could be used outside easily. You changed the contrast to a mode where it behaved like a reflective LCD panel. So from my perspective, Apple is finally getting back to the level of usability that I had with my PowerBook 145 more than thirty years ago.

In fact, I can't think of any examples of what you're describing, and certainly none where users would not have been better off with Apple introducing the feature sooner and then making it better in a subsequent generation. After all, having a feature, even if it is not refined, is usually better than not having it at all.

In general, when Apple is late, they're just late. They're either doing it because they have some financial advantage to delaying it (Made for iPhone revenue from the Lightning connector), because they didn't have the engineering resources to integrate it for a particular release cycle, or because they didn't think the components available were good enough (e.g. early folding displays).

But Apple has been shipping OLED panels on phones since 2017. Almost a decade later, laptops are finally catching up. Maybe they thought the early ones wouldn't last as long as people kept their laptops, maybe the cost for larger panels was high enough to discourage laptop purchases, or maybe they just dragged their heels because they knew they wouldn't have anything interesting in the feature pipeline and wanted people to have a reason to replace their laptops. Either way, they're fully a decade behind in display technology, and it's about time they finally caught up.

Looking forward to the touchscreen as well, at least in principle, though in practice, I doubt it will get a lot of use. :-)

No, it isn't. To be fraud, the lie has to be material. Would him saying that he fought in the military have disqualified him? No. Because being in the military of a communist country doesn't automatically make you communist. It might have caused a deeper investigation, and that investigation might have concluded that he was, but given that the regime had already fallen and any records would probably have been nonexistent at that point, that's a pretty unlikely outcome — doubly so decades later.

Second, the lie has to be deliberate. In U.S. law, there's not a presumption that an error is deliberate; the government has to have some evidence to support such a claim. And given that he has been dead for a long time, there's no way to get him to admit that it was deliberate, so in the absence of some sort of documentation, this one isn't provable anymore, either.

Third, even if you could prove both of the first two, the fraud was still committed by her father, not her, which makes it moot after the fact.

Continuing to spew this same nonsense over and over doesn't make it true. First, he was a citizen. Until such time as you get a court to agree that his citizenship should not have been granted (years after his death), all of this is purely academic.

Second, even if you did so, although removal of citizenship is considered retroactive to the time of the original grant of citizenship, you still run into the presumption of regularity when trying to extend that retroactive removal to a retroactive nullification of the citizenship of an additional person who relied on a presumption of the regularity of the prior immigration decision. That just won't fly, because as far as was known to her at the time, he was a citizen, and as far as was known to the immigration people processing the paperwork at the time, he was a citizen. And none of that changes even if his citizenship were removed retroactively, which means *she* did not commit fraud.

Further, his citizenship was likely not material to her being approved for citizenship. She didn't become a citizen because he was a citizen. She became a citizen *when* he became a citizen. Had she applied independently, even if we take the most outlandish interpretation of the law and assume that his military service would be disqualifying, it would not be disqualifying *for* *her*. And at that point, the courts would be effectively punishing her for not waiting a few extra months and filing a form independent of her parents. No court is going to do that, both because doing so would be a gross miscarriage of justice and because the specific form that she filed is almost certainly not material to whether a young adult would qualify for citizenship.

Plus there's that pesky little problem of you not having any actual evidence to support your absurd theory in the first place, which means that while you might get a lot of idiots on your side in the court of public opinion, you'd be laughed out of any actual courtroom.