And the reasoning? As always Terrorists, pedophile, criminals, etc. Guess what: If those guys have not learned yet to make a big detour around official chat apps, they deserve getting caught. My bet is, those people already have their own secured means of communication. Maybe they have their own encrypted app, or they have a forum somewhere in the Darknet, whatever. But the chance that this new law will catch anything worthwhile is practically nil.

You don’t have them yet?

GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

“the”, “a”, “and”?

As long as Ukrainian drones concentrate on tanks that are moving to the front, the danger of hitting decoys is low.

Reminds me of a story from WW2: The Germans had built an airfield with lots of planes - from wood, as a decoy. One day, a single allied bomber appeared and dropped one bomb in the middle of the airfield. The “bomb” was made of wood, too.

It is the surprising exception to the rule. I never questioned this, but are there any real reasons for mandatory voting in Australia?

I don’t think mandatory voting is a good solution. This is mostly practices in autocratic/dictatorial states, and would have a bad taste to it.

What should be done is to either make voting day a public holiday (with mandatory “half day off” rule for anyone who would still have to work in retail or services), or just move it to a Sunday, like many other countries have done ages ago.

The other word for “finish the job” is “Endlösung”.

For the level of “quality” they delivered, they have always been too expensive.

Well, a lot of the Leavers wanted to bathe in a perceived Victorian Empires’ Greatness. At least in that aspect they have reaches Victorian levels…

I don’t know much about Taylor Swift, but I assume she is simply too smart to be conservative.

And who might have an interest in hitting the Kerch bridge? ;-)

So in the end it is a game of Bingo with rounds of playing Battleship…

Not bad for a country without a fleet.

Back then, the internet was a thing of trust and cooperation. We got an assigned port number the same way. Current problem: Our company changed over the decades, and I no longer have the email address that would identify me to the IANA as the one who requested that number reservation.

How many targets (russian ships) of that size or bigger are left in the black sea?

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

All batteries are replaceable. Some take a bit more effort and some specialized equipment, though.

Well, lets call it an armed robbery, then.

I’d pick Apollo, the most sciency guy of the bunch.

The phone market has been a lot like the PC market 20, 30 years ago.

Back then, you actually had an advantage by getting a new machine quite often, as the newer machine was so much better and faster than the model from the year before. It actually made a difference for 99% of the users: The text processing, calculating, or browsing programs ran way better and faster on the current model than on the one or two year older one.

Nowadays, any off-the-shelf PC fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. It runs Windows/Word/Excel (or whatever else they use) fast enough to not be an issue. The only people who still need the bleeding edge stuff are some high-end uses e.g. in engineering, and gamers.

Same with cell phones. Ten years ago, the annual new model actually provided a big leap of abilities and comfort. Nowadays, I’m replacing my 5+ year old model just because the battery is getting close to the end of it’s usability.