On all of my Kindles over the years, yes, you could download and read books in various formats, other than Amazon.

About 50% of the content on my current Paperwhite is not-Amazon.

By "everyone" I assume you're referring to "conspiracy theorists?" Humans were there because the only thing that can actually secure an area are boots on the ground. The C-130s were there to bring the MH-6s. This is pretty simple, and in order to complicate it you have to really want it to be something else.

As someone who's been using Samsung phones for about 15 years, I had no idea there was a thing called "Samsung Messages". I tend to tune out all the shovelware that phones come with (and take steps to remove or disable them).

I really like Samsung phones, but their software ecosystem is abysmal. Everything they provide is inferior to other options.

Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

This is just plain not true. Microsoft has about 1/4 of the global cloud computing market and, if nothing else, the number of things that just use Entra for auth is insane. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, I'm just saying your claim that Microsoft is some kind of edge case in "internet service" is ridiculous.

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

I find I can do everything I need with old and OWA, and OWA is only really needed for some SP/group stuff that will probably never make it into "old". I'd switch to Thunderbird, but that's coming up short in some areas too and OWA alone won't make up the shortfall there, so my current approach is the least painful for getting stuff done, no matter how much that chafes. I find "New" to be a confusing and broken mess that is missing several key features needed to interact with other Microsoft systems (FFS!), and have fed that back to Microsoft in no uncertain terms every single time I've found myself switched to it and have immediately switched back using the feedback form they give you. No real idea on the Store version as I've only tried it once in the hope it might do everything I need (it didn't), but I hear that's awful too.

So, yeah, GP listed three products, which are the "local" versions, then there is the OWA version, so Microsoft has four totally different products that use the "Outlook" name by my count. Maybe they employed a former cola exec to lead the product development, or something; throw flavours at the wall and see what sticks? Store seems to be the "Diet" version, so maybe next up will "Cherry Outlook" and "Lime Outlook"... Personally, I really want "Outlook Zero", which will be me uninstalling it for good once I can switch to anything else.

Used? Why stop? Others and I still use mutt!

There's also Outlook Web Access (OWA) that you use through a browser. All are borked in various ways, but the cherry on the cake is that most of them have some functionality that at least some of the others do not, especially if you are in an Exchange/Sharepoint/Teams environment where you may need to switch between different Outlooks depending on what you want to do.

Even allowing for the fact they wanted to rebuild "classic" in a more modern framework and shipped before it had anywhere near feature parity, I honestly can't even begin imagine what kind of decision process, or lack thereof, must have gone on in Microsoft to get them to this point...

Lets say you have a trendline for the expected impacts of the changing climate. It has error bars to cover the expected deviations caused by short term weather patterns and, since the variables become less certain the further you go into the future, those error bars get further and further from the central trend line as you go. Typical trend prediction graph for any number of fields, in otherwords.

Now, lets say your worst case error bars for 2026 allowed for a deviation of upto 5%, but when the data lands it's actually closer 10% (not the actual numbers, BTW). I think your comments would pretty much align with those quoted in TFA, and especially so since this is only one year out from last year's known data and the margin of error on the trend line is at its smallest. For those that can't figure it out for themselves, and assuming this isn't just an extreme outlier, what that implies is that the models that many sceptics dismiss as "alarmist" might actually be too conservative and the future trajectory could be *far* worse than even the most vocal of the climate change advocates are saying it will be.

It is rare that I see something you post that I agree with, but words cannot express just how much I agree with the above. The GP really is a miserable fuck.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Lol, I was thinking of this instead ;)