I worked for a company which outsourced a lot of work to an Indian company. Some of them were on our site (in a separate office, a couple of miles from where I was working then) and some more were in India. It worked by and large, and I only ever actually saw most of the "local" Indians two or three times over all the years I worked there.
As for people "working from home", that often meant they could not be reached at all, or the background noises made it clear they were walking the dog.

Disney's lawyers did not answer the question, so what happens now?

BILLABLE HOURS for those lawyers!

In this case I disagree - six months makes good sense in several ways. I wonder who managed to talk him into making a sensible suggestion for once.

There's roundabouts and there's Denham Roundabout (just west of London, on the M40).
Back when I lived in the area it was a perfectly normal roundabout with 5 roads leading off, two of which were slip roads to/from the M40 (it may have been the A40 then).
I was there again a few years later and each junction was a mini-roundabout and you could head clockwise on the outside or anti-clockwise on the inside, depending on whether the exit you wanted was closest going left or right. Google Maps satellite view says it's still like that now. Scary stuff for the uninitiated.
I believe there's another one like that around Swindon.

Is that you, RFK?

* profile pictures

Whatsapp offers the following settings:
Profile photo

Who can see my Profile Photo
- Everyone
- My contacts
- My contacts except...
- Nobody

I think the default is Everyone.

There is also a setting for "who can see my Live Location", Since I don't allow WhatsApp to access my location at all, that one is firmly off.

My understanding is that EU laws differentiate between public services and those offered by companies, and that you can't force a private company to provide a non-essential service. That means Meta can get away with crap like this, it even permits Microsoft to kill accounts if they feel like it - cutting Windows 11 users off from pretty much everything including their data, I don't know how that works with Apple. You'd think that the "Gateway" system would impose extra restrictions on that kind of behaviour but apparently it does not.
My Gmail account gets maybe a half dozen mails a year, mostly Google saying "Unknown device, is that really you?" but it would affect my ability to use Android and that would be a problem. Apart from that I seem to be pretty well insulated - no Facebook, Instagram or Microsoft.
Of course the big one is my Slashdot account, what would I do if that was blocked?

Big whoppers should be at least remotely plausible.

They are also making ARM more popular to make it harder to boot Linux due to limited hardware support.

I can't see that, it's more a question of them trying to keep up with Apple and their M1, M2, M3 and M4. The ARM processors are far more energy-efficient than the Intel-based ones and Microsoft had to have something to offer there.
I was reading a review of various laptops a few weeks ago, obviously ARM-native software runs really well on ARM hardware, some other software runs reasonably well but there is quite a large segment which runs "not at all". Add in problems with drivers for exotic hardware, it is early days for their ARM support.

ALTER and repeat

and does "Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna" really believe what he's spouting? He seems to be around 35 years old (although he looks a lot younger) so this foolishness is going to be an albatross around his neck for a long time.

I've been following this story since it first broke and Heise were also reporting where people had bought their affected drives, the sources included authorised Seagate dealers. They did of course tell their readers how to recognise these drives, although I can't remember if they wrote the necessary software themselves or simply stated what it was called and where it was to be found.

I can read (and speak) German so the original Heise article was not a challenge. Some of the Seagate drives found there were rebranded as different models, does that count as "counterfeit"?
Heise started reporting this problem a while ago, possibly towards the end of last year. Their main computer magazine is called C't and is released every two weeks, recent editions have moved away from this story - rather than report "more of the same" - but before that new details were emerging all the time.
The only other recent story I can think of which generated frequent updates over months/years was Intel's suiciding processors.

I was born after Stalin died (and Hitler of course), but Nicolae Ceauescu got his inspiration from North Korea so NK may be the competition.

I occasionally update Wikipedia entries - without an account - if I see something incorrect or missing.
A week ago I added a missing entry to a table, only to see that it had been backed out again three minutes later. I suppose it was the equivalent of filling a gap in the periodic table except that it was far more obscure than that. The account which did this appears to be a real account but I don't understand how a real person would even notice such a correction let alone revert it without checking the content - it has to have been an automated process (and a real person would have checked and reinserted the entry).

He's part of DOGE