Too bad that “mood” really doesn’t seem to be relevant in totalitarian dictatorships.

If a large country such as France is serious about such a switch I’d be surprised if they didn’t use some sort of custom distro, perhaps built upon Ubuntu. This would allow for solid compatibility with the “parent”, but also allow for some tweaking to fit the specific needs of the French government and its many agencies. To my knowledge the German state of Schleswig Holstein, which decided to switch to open source as much as possible months ago, still hasn’t decided which distro would be the best fit for their project. Such a major decision really needs good planning and cannot be allowed to go wrong.

It must have been a terrible experience serving on one of these. The death rates were also very high.

I’m certainly not cheering for a regime like the current Iranian one. I deliberately put “good guys” in quotation marks and suggested they might be the more reasonable party, as in the party that is more likely to keep its word.

It’s really difficult to look like the “good guys” in a conflict, when you’re the Islamic Regime of Iran. Somehow the current United States are making the Iranians look more and more reasonable.

It would seem like different nations are trying to find a sort of modus operandi to somewhat use the shipping lane again. Let’s see how long it takes for the US Navy to be used to keep it closed for everyone.

It’s worth considering setting up payment for various commodities in other currencies as well. Obviously the buyer and the seller have to agree, but it’s not a far stretch from accepting payment in Renminbi to also having parts of the trades done in more reliable and importantly freely traded currencies like the Swiss Franc, to name just one example.

This is just one example of the trend that has started and that will continue over the next years and decades. With the United States stepping away from the role of guarantor for free trade, various economies will find ways to deal bilaterally without using the US Dollar. We’ve already seen a shift towards precious metals as a form of reserve currency instead of the Dollar. Now the monetary trade volume of the Dollar is also at risk. When the Dollar no longer is the undisputed world reserve (and trade) currency, it will become incredibly difficult for the US to sustain its current level of deficit.

All that needs to happen now is for the countries of Europe to unify and St. Lucia loses this incredibly important title!

Are any routers made in the United States and theoretically compliant with this rule?

We all know that temporary relief is going to become permanent economic reintigration is going to become economic support is going to become military support.

It’s quite obvious that Iran (or at least its current regime) is fighting a war of survival. If the current regime stays in power and gains the ability to open and close Hormuz at will, that should be a win for Iran. If the US cannot guarantee safe shipping through Hormuz, that is a loss for them. In my book that seems pretty straightforward.

And here I was thinking that it takes one side to start a war but two to stop it. The US seems to be in a no win scenario. Either they just call it a day while publicly claiming victory, which in practice results in an Iranian victory, or they commit to a ground campaign, which is Afghanistan all over again but much bigger in scope.

Oh Boy. A keyboard warrior who tries to compensate for a lack of courage with a wall of text. Have a great life. I hope you come up with something good to do during the rest of it.

That’s a very sad point, if true. I’m old enough to remember coverage of that event on the evening news. How can a clear and obvious case of ethnic cleansing be downplayed?

I was in Afghanistan, first serving with the Dutch armed forces and later working for a company that built clinics and schools. After that I worked in eastern Africa for a rural electrification programme. While parts of these efforts may have been fruitless in hindsight, I still stand by these choices.

What have you done? I feel like I was (and am) willing to work towards putting an end to atrocities, at least within my limited influence. I am willing. Therefore I expect a similar level of caring for the lives of others from others.

It’s so frustrating that we are living through an active genocide (again) and doing absolutely nothing (again). In my youth, when there wasn’t yet a 24 hour news cycle and I learned about the genocide in Rwanda as a teenager, it was my naive belief at the time that a lack of knowledge was the main reason for the general indifference in “the West”. A year later the genocide in Bosnia, especially the massacre at Srebrenica, was headline news in my home country of the Netherlands and yet people seemed to collectively just shrug that off just as quickly as it happened. Now, many years later, I’ve become much more cynical. If you want people to care about unjustified murder you should either make sure to have your country located really really close to “the West”, but even that is just of limited use to Ukraine, or make sure that the killing happens to take place at the hands of mostly Jewish people, although most Palestinians can attest to the fact that while media attention is good, action is still lacking.

She must be lying. After all, she’s talking.

From what I read it’s mostly bot created nonsense stub articles. I’d rather have a smaller wiki with higher quality than a pond that’s miles wide but only inches deep.

Thank you for this great answer! It’s something I intuitively felt but couldn’t put my finger on with the same surgical precision you just did.