The EU isn’t a federation, not as of 2026.

I do kind of hope that someone lends the funds to cover it, though, and that Orbán loses next month and Hungary subsequently hands it back.

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

In the autumn of 2022, Hamas began planning a surprise attack on Israel. Sinwar sought to convince Iran and Hezbollah to participate in the attack or in a broader conflict with Israel,[52][53] aiming to cause its ‘collapse’.[52] During one meeting, Sinwar acknowledged that such an attack would likely require sacrifices, probably referring to the people of Gaza.

Well. With Iran and Hezbollah now engaged, looks like Sinwar will ultimately achieve his broader conflict with involvement of Hezbollah and Iran. Just that now the US is directly involved.

I think that it is unlikely that the move will have been advantageous to Gazans.

We won’t. No need for it. We massively overmatch Iran in conventional capabilities.

When the UK last year implemented a similar age verification system for adult sites, in the first week of it launching, four of the top five downloaded apps in the Apple app store were virtual private network (VPN) apps, with Proton reporting an 1,800% increase in downloads of its VPN app.

VPNs allow users to appear to sites that they’re in another location, which could bypass age check requirements in Australia.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today+5-y&geo=AU&q=vpn&hl=en-US

I don’t have data on VPN signups in Australia, but I see that Google searches for VPNs have abruptly spiked among Australians.

EDIT: Might need to reload the page a few times if the graph doesn’t show up. It’s giving me an error about half the time.

“Restraint’s probably not the perfect word,” but the president may start exhibiting “a little more contemplation and thoughtfulness,” Dolen suggested.

I mean, theoretically, yes…

even at JEDEC speeds.

My last Intel motherboard couldn’t handle all four slots filled with 32GB of memory at rated speeds. Any two sticks yes, four no. From reading online, apparently that was a common problem. Motherboard manufacturers (who must have known that there were issues, from their own testing) did not go out of their way to make this clear.

Maybe it’s not an issue with registered/buffered memory, but with plain old unregistered DDR5, I think that manufacturers have really selling product above what they can realistically do.

How Flightradar24 became the go-to platform for the world to watch global aviation crises unfold

I tend to use ADSBExchange, as it has a convenient way to filter to show only military flights, which is nice for stuff like Ukraine.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/

Anecdotal evidence, but I had both a 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPU with the bug that caused them to over time, destroy themselves internally.

The most-user-visible way this initially came up, before the CPUs had degraded too far, was Firefox starting to crash, to the point that I initially used Firefox hitting some websites as my test case when I started the (painful) task of trying to diagnose the problem. I suspect that it’s because Firefox touches a lot of memory, and is (normally) fairly stable — a lot of people might not be too surprised if some random game crashes.

The problem is that ECC is one of the things used to permit price discrimination between server (less price sensitive) and PC (more price sensitive) users. Like, there’s a significant price difference, more than cost-of-manufacture would warrant. There are only a few companies that make motherboard chipsets, like Intel, and they have enough price control over the industry that they can do that. You’re going to be paying a fair bit more to get into the “server” ecosystem, as a result of that.

Also…I’m not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that. Or whether BIOSes, which can automatically detect a viable rate by testing memory, are simply being too aggressive in choosing high memory bandwidth rates.

EDIT: If it is actually broken memory and only a region of memory is affected, both Linux and Windows have the ability to map around detected bad regions in memory, if you have the bootloader tell the kernel about them and enough of your memory is working to actually get your kernel up and running during initial boot. So it is viable to run systems that actually do have broken memory, if one can localize the problem.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badram.html

Something like MemTest86 is a more-effective way to do this, because it can touch all the memory. However, you can even do runtime detection of this with Linux up and running using something like memtester, so hypothetically someone could write a software package to detect this, update GRUB to be aware of the bad memory location, and after a reboot, just work correctly (well, with a small amount less memory available to the system…)

While I appreciate the thought, Zelensky, and the difficulty of dealing with Trump, I think that you’ve probably already got enough on your plate for any national leader and then some.

I’m not sure I agree with this theory, but you might find it interesting. The idea is that there’s periods of something like 10 to 40 years where things swing liberal, then conservative, then back to liberal.

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

United States cycles

These are cycles first identified in the United States or are specific to United States politics.

Schlesingers’ liberal-conservative cycle

Historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and others have proposed that the United States has an alternation of national moods and tendencies between liberalism and conservatism.[2][3] Each phase has characteristic features, and each phase is self-limiting, eventually generating the other phase. This alternation has repeated itself several times over the history of the United States.

The Schlesingers proposed that their cycles are “self-generating”, meaning that each kind of phase generates the other kind of phase. This process then repeats, causing cycles. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. speculated on possible reasons for these transitions. He speculated that since liberal phases involve bursts of reform effort, such bursts can be exhausting, and the body politic thus needs the rest of a conservative phase. He also speculated that conservative phases accumulate unsolved social problems, problems that require the efforts of a liberal phase to solve them. He additionally speculated on generational effects, since most of the liberal-conservative phase pairs are roughly 30 years long, roughly the length of a human generation. The Schlesingers’ identified phases end in a conservative period. In a foreword written in 1999, Schlesinger Jr. speculated about why it has lasted unusually long, instead of ending in the early 1990s, from how long previous conservative periods typically lasted. One of his speculations was the continuing Computer Revolution, as disruptive as the earlier Industrial Revolution had been. Another of them was wanting a long rest after major national traumas. The 1860s Civil War and Reconstruction preceded the unusually-long Gilded Age, and the strife of the 1960s likewise preceded the recent unusually-long conservative period.[3]

Based on your current cabinet composition, and the turnover in your last cabinet, I’m not convinced that you’re all that great at selecting people for positions, Trump.

The urethane pleather on my headband started cracking on my xm4’s. A replacement headband was half the price of a new unit.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/SOULWIT-Replacement-Headband-Pad-Kit-for-Sony-WH-1000XM4-WH1000XM4-Headphones-Easy-DIY-Installation-Silver/16417371960

This is third-party, but it’s $19.

It’s also just the pad, but I assume that that’s what’s failed, if you’re talking about pleather.

The older headphones there don’t look like you can rotate the pads, yeah? I mean, it’s that rotating hinge which failed here.

I guess one could say “well, I don’t want headphones with rotating pads”, but it’s that rotation that lets the XM5 headphones fit into a fairly-flat carrying case.

I will say, though, that the XM5s probably weren’t going to last over 30 years, if for no other reason than because they use an internal battery…

I’m not sure when we lost that, but oh boy, it’s a festival.

I remember when it was considered outrageous that Flash would phone home and report its version, because that would leak the fact that a given machine was running a given version of Flash.

We sure don’t live in that world today.

It’s possible that the video had surround sound, say, 7 channels or something, and that the commercials didn’t. Or that the video bitrates for the movie and ads are different.

Kurdish Iranian dissident groups based in northern Iraq are preparing for a potential cross-border military operation in Iran, and the U.S. has asked Iraqi Kurds to support them, Kurdish officials have told The Associated Press.

I haven’t been following the whole Turkey thing, but this is the sort of thing that I’d imagine would get the Turkish government twitchy, since they’ve traditionally been worried about an independent Kurdistan showing up, as part of that would likely overlap with part of Turkey.

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

Kurdish areas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_Hungarian_parliamentary_election

Significant differences have been noted by the Hungarian media in the numbers produced by different polling companies.[23][24][25] In January 2026, political scientist Gábor Török observed that the large differences between government- and non-government-affiliated pollsters was a new phenomenon in Hungarian politics. He suggested that the differences as they stood a few months out from the election were “unexplainable on research grounds”.[26]

Government-aligned:

Independent/opposition-aligned:

Interesting.

Of course, another option is for people to dramatically curb their use of social media, or at a minimum, regularly delete posts after a set time threshold.

Deletion won’t deal with someone seriously-interested in harvesting stuff, because they can log it as it becomes available. And curbing use isn’t ideal.

I mentioned before the possibility of poisoning data, like, sporadically adding some incorrect information about oneself into one’s comments. Ideally something that doesn’t impact the meaning of the comments, but would cause a computer to associate one with someone else.

There are some other issues. My guess is that it’s probably possible to fingerprint someone to a substantial degree by the phrasing that they use. One mole in the counterintelligence portion of the FBI, Robert Hanssen, was found because on two occasions he used the unusual phrase “the purple-pissing Japanese”.

FBI investigators later made progress during an operation where they paid disaffected Russian intelligence officers to deliver information on moles. They paid $7 million to KGB agent Aleksander Shcherbakov[48] who had access to a file on “B”. While it did not contain Hanssen’s name, among the information was an audiotape of a July 21, 1986, conversation between “B” and KGB agent Aleksander Fefelov.[49] FBI agent Michael Waguespack recognized the voice in the tape, but could not remember who it was from. Rifling through the rest of the files, they found notes of the mole using a quote from George S. Patton’s speech to the Third Army about “the purple-pissing Japanese”.[50] FBI analyst Bob King remembered Hanssen using that same quote. Waguespack listened to the tape again and recognized the voice as Hanssen’s. With the mole finally identified, locations, dates, and cases were matched with Hanssen’s activities during the period. Two fingerprints collected from a trash bag in the file were analyzed and proved to be Hanssen’s.[51][52][53]

That might be defeated by passing text through something like an LLM to rewrite it. So, for example, to take a snippet of my above comment:

Respond with the following text rephrased sentence by sentence, concisely written as a British computer scientist might write it:

Deletion won’t deal with someone seriously-interested in harvesting stuff, because they can log it as it becomes available. And curbing use isn’t ideal.

I mentioned before the possibility of poisoning data, like, sporadically adding some incorrect information about oneself into one’s comments. Ideally something that doesn’t impact the meaning of the comments, but would cause a computer to associate one with someone else.

I get:

The deletion of data alone will not prevent a determined party from gathering information, as they may simply record the information as it becomes available prior to its deletion. Moreover, restricting usage is not an ideal solution to the problem at hand.

I previously mentioned the possibility of introducing deliberate errors or misinformation into one’s own data, such as periodically inserting inaccurate details about oneself within comments. The goal would be to include information that does not significantly alter the meaning of the comment, but which would cause automated systems to incorrectly associate that individual with another person.

That might work. One would have to check the comment to make sure that it doesn’t mangle the thing to the point that it is incorrect, but it might defeat profiling based on phrasing peculiarities of a given person, especially if many users used a similar “profile” for comment re-writing.

A second problem is that one’s interests are probably something of a fingerprint. It might be possible to use separate accounts related to separate interests — for example, instead of having one account, having an account per community or similar. That does undermine the ability to use reputation generated elsewhere (“Oh, user X has been providing helpful information for five years over in community X, so they’re likely to also be doing so in community Y”), which kind of degrades online communities, but it’s better than just dropping pseudonymity and going 4chan-style fully anonymous and completely losing reputation.

When I looked at condensers in the past, they weren’t incredibly energy-efficient. I suspect that it’s cheaper in the long run to do desalination and build a pipeline to wherever inland you want freshwater, unless you have very limited-in-scale need.