Is this from Spain?

It sounds like what they are doing is clearly illegal and you probably could do a lot of people a favor by complaining to the authorities.

Generally for the eu: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2017-003934-ASW_EN.html “If users receive unsolicited communications after having withdrawn consent, they can file a complaint with the national regulatory authority. In addition, they have the right to a judicial remedy before national courts.”

The responsible agency for Spain: https://www.aepd.es/

This seemed like such an arbitrary law that I went looking for it and apparently it’s a small committee (4 persons*) rule that was poorly substantiated. The rule itself has been shot down by an appeals court in 2023, but the industry obviously had already set plans in motion to change their product line ups.

“On September 13, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the CPSC’s rule on custom window coverings. The court agreed with WCMA that CPSC failed to provide an opportunity to comment on the underlying incident data, conducted a flawed cost-benefit analysis that ignored the enormous harm that the rule would have caused the multibillion-dollar custom window coverings industry, and selected an arbitrary effective date for the rule. The CPSC acknowledges that the industry will need at least 2 years to develop completely new products. So the six-month effective date would make it impossible for the window covering industry to create proven safe replacement products.”

https://suncoastblinds.com/understanding-the-cpsc-rule-on-window-coverings-and-the-appeal/

• I’m not from the USA, so to me it seems very weird that this is how decisions with far reaching consequences are taken. In the eu legislation like this gets putten through the wringer in the eu Commission, probably also voted on by the eu Parliament, and then still given years preparation time and back and forth between industry/lobby groups/government. But instead this was: 4 non elected people take a vote and those 4 see no issue with a 6 month deadline. Wth, what a rugpull this would have been for the industry.

Edit to add: that rule that lost in appeal in 2023, was from November 2022, so maybe it does go in effect in november 2024, since it seems like that timetable was the biggest issue for the industry. Just speculating though, can’t look it up atm.

Yeah, that seems to be the point. He’s again appealing to his macho fascist supporters by further enabling abusive behaviour. Domestic violence has been decriminalized for years already in Russia, violence against outgroups is allowed/encouraged, they have a national snitch on your neighbour system, … It’s become a true fascist society.

Reporting what questionable government sources say without enough due diligence is not the same as supporting the actions of that government. If I say that Davy was beating up Mark because Mark stole his cookie according to him, but then it turns out that there never was a cookie, then me wrongly reporting about the cookie does not mean that I ever approved of Davy beating up Mark.

I found that the NYT editorial board opposed the war in an opinion piece that was released just prior to that war, so I’m of the opinion that they opposed it. Probably as one of the few media outlets in the USA.

And I find it funny that the first and most prominent article in the pbs link is the NYT criticizing the reporting of the nyt, that’s promising at least. The smh article reads like it’s written to lay the blame for being dragged into the war with someone else, a narrative of “we were all duped, if only we could have known beforehand and we would have acted differently”, conveniently ignoring that there were enough other international sources that called out and demonstrated that the wmd evidence was very flimsy.

Do you have examples of that support? Or an article/report that lays it out.

When I looked for it, I only found the opposite; https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/saying-no-to-war.html

Imo it’s much more likely to have never been an actual piece of fruit. The story is probably an allegoric warning for some taboo subject and now we can only speculate on what was originally meant.

My theory: Adam and Eve were convinced by Adam’s one eyed snake to fornicate, but then their dad found out and kicked them out.

Convergent evolution. Some eagles are evolving into chickens. A new species of murder chickens.

Ennio Morricone

"but also provided psychological protection by shading the face from close scrutiny. "

To me it feels like this was made up by some spoiled twat, who couldn’t stand that people that they thought were socially inferior, wouldn’t show the expected obeisance by removing their hat in front of their “betters”.

Yeah, earth in Dutch is “aarde” and in German it’s “erde”, which both sound related to “earth”.

However, it originally must have meant soil/dirt/land, long before those humans were even aware of the concept of planets. So who was the first to call Earth after earth or Terre after terre? Probably the first persons to figure out that they were living on a planet is my guess, it makes sense to name something after the part that you can see imo.

Solid idea, but imperfect execution.

Which company?

Not ibm. You might be thinking of Bell: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

What is the flag within Luxembourg? I can’ make it out.

Edit: I’m guessing Portugal.

It’s state dependant.

This article has a few Connecticut examples of the cruelty of the system and some background, from before Connecticut mostly abolished the pay to stay practice (thanks to democrats): https://apnews.com/article/crime-prisons-lawsuits-connecticut-074a8f643766e155df58d2c8fbc7214c

So apart from coercing inmates to do for profit work for pennies (other countries would call it slave labour), some inmates also get to pay for the privilege on top of that.

Here’s a more comprehensive article on how inmates and their families are being milked in the USA : https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/americas-dystopian-incarceration-system-pay-stay-behind-bars

I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.

I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:

*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.

Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.

In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.

for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*

*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.

The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.

I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.

Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/

Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.

Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.

The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.

Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.

This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.

The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.

Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.

I used a windows phone for a while and while the ui was good, it failed in some critical ways and because the people at MS had their heads to far up their bosses asses, there was never a fix.

4 things that were game breakers (iirc, it’s been a few years):

1. if you set the same alarm every day, then the alarm worked reliably. If you set a special recurring alarm for 1 day in the week (at the time I had to get up early every Friday), then that alarm would work once and then not anymore after that.

2. if someone send you an sms (or a number inside an sms), then it was not possible to add that number to contacts. You had to manually open contacts and type in the number.

3. the app store was forced localized and if you lived in a small market, you could only see reviews and review scores from that market. Not all apps where available either. With how few users windows phone had, there were no useful aggregated review scores available, only dodgy ones. Fortunately there was a user made app with which the global store could be opened, but as an out of the box experience, it sucked.

4. the app store was filled to the brim with the lowest quality shovelware in existence. I once went in to find if Firefox had an app and I found a shitload of apps called stuff like “install Firefox now”, each for a small amount of money. So I went to Google and found that there was no Firefox app yet and those were all scam apps. If the Microsoft CEO then goes on the news and proudly proclaims how many apps their appstore has, then you also now that they had no intention of ever fixing this shit and it was going to stay shit forever.