Buelldozer

WTF is up with this 24H2 update I keep hearing about?

The first thing you have to know is that it hasn't been released yet! That's right, every one of these articles screaming about 24H2 bugs is based on Preview, commonly called Beta, software.

This particular issue being caused because Microsoft is moving to "Checkpoint Updates" so that updates will install faster and be smaller in size.

Right now 24H2 is marking parts of 23H3 as necessary for future updates so they can't be deleted. This will 100% be fixed before 24H4 goes RTM.

Basically this one is a non-issue. It's being used as an outrage generator.

I think you're missing the bigger picture. Right now there is 535 votes, 100 from the Senate and 435 from the House.

If the House were expanded to 574 (Wyoming Rule, based on 2010 population data) there would be now be 675, which reduces the relative weight of the Senate's votes by nearly 1/3rd.

Nothing says it has to be the Wyoming Rule either, we could set a fixed ratio of Citizens to Representatives say 250,000 to 1. Now the HoR would have nearly 1,000 people in it and the Senate would be down to just 10% of the EC votes.

Frankly the HoR should be 1,000 seats or larger. A body of only 435 or even 574 is too small to accurately represent the interests of almost 340,000,000 people.

The far easier plan is to simply increase the size of the House of Representatives. All it needs is a change, or repeal, of the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. Replace it with something like the Wyoming Rule and done.

Not only does that fix Presidential Elections it would also fix or substantially ease a pile of other problems like Gerrymandering by giving the denser population areas the Representation they should have.

The HoR being fixed at only 435 seats is at the core of so many problems in this country.

I didn't know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.

Honestly it's always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.

What data does this app have that isn't freely available somewhere else?

The 2 percent of GDP target is imaginary.

The target was set so that no country would be able to join NATO and then just let everyone else pay for everything. You contribute to the common defense or you GTFO.

We can bicker about 2% being too high or too low and whether the target should have been adjusted Post Cold War but any argument that some target isn't necessary is just silliness.

No amount of NATO bombs or tanks would have stopped the invasion.

Oh I'm fairly certain that NATO military power would have stopped the invasion in the first 24 hours. A single flight of F-35s would have made those original Russian convoy's cease to exist à la the Highway of Death from 1991.

Even now NATO military power could substantially end the ground war in Ukraine before the end of the month.

It only would have fueled the flames and given legitimacy to Russia’s claimed insecurity.

So what? NATO didn't do it and there's STILL an ongoing war with a casualty toll well over a million and millions more displaced.

Economic power is much stronger than military sabre rattling.

Then the EU should have flexed them in 2014. They didn't and here we are.

I fucking detest Trump, but there is a kernel of truth in his statements about Europe more or less just riding on the US’s coattails in terms of the balance of military power, instead of trying to be a meaningful and (taken together) a peer power to the US.

You don't have to point to Trump. Literally every United States President since Bill Clinton has publicly said it. Hell Bush Senior may have said it too. I'd have to go look it up.

It's been a sore spot for decades and has nothing to do with Trumperoni.

What really grinds my gears is when shrinkflation happens to pre-packaged products that are used as ingredients because it throws recipes off. Here's three examples:

Campbell's pre-made soups like Cream of Mushroom or Creamy Tomato changed from 10.75oz down to 10.5oz. If your favorite casserole doesn't taste quite like it used to this is probably why.

Pre-packaged meats like bacon and tuna. For as long as I could remember pre-packaged bacon was always sold in some multiple of a pound, now you have to pay attention because often the bags are 10 or 12oz instead of 16. Growing up tuna was 6.5oz can and its now down to just 5.

The same thing has happened with canned vegetables like green beans or even canned mushrooms. Once you're done adjusting the amount of Cream of Mushroom in that Green Bean Casserole you're going to have to circle back and fix the amount of green beans in it.

When you bust out Grandma's recipe card you need to be careful because her "can" or "jar" of something was almost certainly bigger than what you have!

Oh, and if you are trying to make older recipes it's not just the volume / amount of things that changed it's also the formulation. Almost everything that is pre-processed has been re-formulated over the past 20 years so it no longer cooks or tastes the same as it used to.

Some old recipes are damn difficult to make correctly these days because the ingredients aren't the same type or size. It's frustrating.

The Russians couldn't, or chose not too, afford to build their own and they've been paying for that mistake since they started this damn War.

I have to be misunderstanding this

You're not.

How fucking dumb are these people?

Yes it's dumber than a bucket of hair but you have to reflect on how they ended up here. Russia started a 21st Century war with a 20th Century Soviet built military. Back then a field radio was the size of your damn chest and they weren't even issued at the platoon level. That shit obviously isn't going to work on the modern battlefield where they have to control drones, guided artillery, distribute real time high resolution satellite imagery, and the battle lines shift by the hour instead of monthly.

The Soviet's didn't need these things and because they hadn't been invented yet Russia showed up without them and promptly got cock-slapped by Western backed Ukrainian forces who were vastly more prepared because The West, including both military and private companies, spent literally Trillions of dollars investing in a robust and secure communications infrastructure.

The Russian Army absolutely required this kind of communications infrastructure to function on a modern battlefield but it didn't exist so they did what they always do and applied their "Ingenuity" to the problem. They came up with using things like private Discord rooms, piggybacking on Ukraine's cellular infrastructure, and hijacking Starlink; basically using the same Western tech that Ukraine was using.

So in the contest of not have anything at all and using tech that was subject to Western spying the Russian Military, at least at some level, chose the latter.

It seems that perhaps the Russian MoD has decided that the Western spying has become to pervasive and is shutting down these cobble-together communication and control systems but that's going to put the field level operations right back to where they were 2 years ago.

You can't win a 21st Century fight with 20th Century systems. It's like playing a game of Civilization where you've got Aircraft Carriers and the other player is attacking you with Canoes.

I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case

British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.

That's a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.

In a nutshell the volunteer "Naming Committee" setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for "Company". They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an "at a glance" way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The "Naming Committee" was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.

By the mid-90s the volunteer "Naming Committee" was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn't open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom's internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.

There's more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.

tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it's just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.