No, we mostly stopped using chemical weapons because they were bad at modern warfare :

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Maybe true, but also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706867

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2013-01-22/how...

And they will be stopped by someone sane in the chain to actually fire these missiles. (Like it already happened several times.)

The danger is upfront : if there is a group of people insane enough to set up a system where there is no such chain. (As lampooned in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964), in particular on the Soviet side.)

Those Microsoft pawns ?

There are people that pre-ordered their latest PC that are currently waiting for the remaining batches to become available, finish paying the PC price in full, and have it shipped to them. So this information does fullfill a direct customer need.

I have never made a purchase via Framework and still got the email from them. Probably because I once put in my data to see final shipping and import costs.

Facebook/Meta is a great example indeed when one remembers that they took part in a genocide, and still haven't faced consequences for it.

The current kind of car is extremely good at doing what it does. It's just that most of the benefits are short term, and for the car user (and the oil salesman), while the costs are borne by everyone else, and some of the worst ones are long term.

(Some similarities to hard drugs here.)

Yeah, it's infuriating when poorly implemented.

I think it's impossible for it not to be poorly implemented because the gesture is inherently ambiguous (or becomes so when you overload it).

I think what "poorly implemented" actually means for touch screen gestures is to be lacking the customizability to reassign or disable infuriating behaviors.

Gesture configurability is nonnegotiable: when implementing gestures, have the configuration system in place first and make sure every single behavior is tied to a preference.

What kind of 'infrastructure' did China have when they had "fallen out" with Google (in 2010?), that the EU does not have now ?

I agree. Beyond scale and inertia against moving (and frontier AI models) it’s not obvious to me what would be hard to replicate in Europe given regulation that mandated non-US hosting.

Most companies using hyper scalers are doing weird superstitious things at the behest of overpaid consultants. And the huge margins they take make it easier to adapt to things like higher electricity costs.

It’s technically possible, but would face too much resistance. People don’t want to leave familiar and cheaper services, and care less about the non-immediate issue of European sovereignty.

For the worst, you mean ?

The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).

> You can't even buy a fucking game without it being encrusted in anti-user DRM.

You very much can. And notably, exceptions that do use it tend to be from giant public corporations.