Disney surely still has trademark on all variants of Mickey and key characters of their old animations. Using those characters in a commercial context could be construed as linking Disney and that commercial enterprise, when there is no such affiliation. They will NEVER approve of it.

Because it's out of copyright, one could freely broadcast the animations, include them in an anthology of old animations, play them on a projector for the neighborhood, etc. That does not mean you can adopt Mickey as your company logo.

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.

The core principle here is that Americans should believe that Elections are Free and Fair

I do not care what camp you hail from, but those are wishy-washy lawyer-speak level words I cannot abide. Most Americans believe some mighty retarded shit at the end of the day, and if they believe elections,
  as we know them, are free and fair then they have good company in the people who believe sky daddy wants the Jews to slaughter civilians--and that we should be complicit in the act by paying for it--and the people who believe men can become women and vice versa and that EVERYONE else should follow that delusion, and that everything our civilization offers should be free to foreign invaders.

Replace "believe" with "have" and I will vehemently agree with you.

I have been saying for decades now that the F-1 (student) visa should be able to convert to a resident visa upon graduation.

The whole idea of it not being a resident visa was a cold war notion that after graduating, the international student would return to their country and spread the gospel of how wonderful the United States was, and how their local country needed to oppose the Soviets. I doubt that ever really happened.

Today, weâ(TM)re just training people and then at best turning them into indentured servants for a few oligarchs, or even worse (and now the policy of the Trump administration), throwing them out so theyâ(TM)ll build up some other competing country, while weakening our own.

I take it your LED lights at home are at least 1500 lumens and 6000k?

You're off by about 3/4 of a century. Margarine became a mass market thing around the civil war era, if not a little before. Perhaps corpos strongly pushing margarine as a healthy alternative to butter began around WWII. Of course like most marketing, it is almost entirely bullshit.

Don't verb my pronouns! That's repressive wordism!

In the case of kits like that, it's more likely that being a low volume business, that sort of thing will be handled by a contractor who already has an injection molding line which has capacity to spare, and the completion--retail boxing, inspection, cutting spruces etc) would be done by the kit maker.

Yes on all counts, sometimes they even share the same office.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Surely, if someone requires a social worker and a therapist, it is an indictment against that person being a normally functioning, mentally healthy individual. Something was up with him which caused the parents to seek out that sort of help.

Your long winded analogy is flawed on so many levels. Let me correct it for you. We will stick with the Americans vs Aliens scenario:

The Aliens and Americans were part of the same country for quite some time. The aliens had originally conquered America, and America became intertwined socially, economically, culturally and even genetically. One day, the aliens government fails, they spin America off into its own country, and left some of its people behind, as they have been there many generations. The Americans then treat the aliens as second class citizens, Balkanized into a section of the eastern seaboard, near the aliens mothership. They will not acknowledge the alien culture or language, even though it's quite similar to standard Murrican. To the uneducated outsider there is barely a difference racially, culturally, linguistically, but nonetheless they see a difference.

The American government proceeds to supply its militias and tacitly supports them as they shell, machine gun and harass the aliens. Aliens are killed by the thousands over many years, all the while the world turns a blind eye. The new alien government in the mothership scolds America and warns they will use their death ray to attack America if they don't stop.

America does not stop, and the violence escalates. In response, the aliens hover their drone ship over Boston harbor and use their ion canon to capture the area. The americans are completely unprepared and are easily overwhelmed.

Some peace accords are made, but they are soon forgotten, and America resumes punishing the aliens but now they're armed with more advanced weapons supplied by the rest of the worlds militaries.

The aliens continue to warn America, and posture their clone army, and the attacks continue. This time, the aliens deploy their mothership and launch a ground invasion.

That was at least 500% more apt than your analogy.

Ukraine is a proxy being used in a proxy war, just like all the other proxies of the Cold War era, even the politicians and governmental leaders behind it publicly admit to such.

The protocol did its job over five years too late; that's how long it took the cheat to be discovered, after affected model years were already driving on the road. It was only discovered when a university researcher figured that the cars had drastically better mileage than computer models suggested they should, given the emissions controls--then they put NOX sensors on the car and figured the ecu was running lean and making more NOX than was allowed.

Better late than never and all, but the testing protocol enabled that cheat. I think that was his point.

I'm not so sure; the upcoming generation is used to micro transactions. They'll pay a few bucks for purely cosmetic avatar additions to their games, more bucks for DLCs, and insane amounts of cash to excel at gacha / mobile games. If they made the VW logo simply glow gold to virtue signal their wealth, some people would jump at the opportunity to participate; and that is where VW is missing out. They need to have some kind of LED badge that turns on when you activate the "performance mode", like a glowing Type R sticker. That'll make the whales lactate.