The train is indeed the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany, but it's so unreliable nowadays that it's practically unusable if you need to get somewhere on a schedule.
Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry, you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.
This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and it didn't use to be this way.
How was it a mistake? Europe got a lot of good telecom infrastructure for a low price. There's no evidence it was compromised.
It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.
> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.
It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.
> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
The author provides a single critisism ("The italic is mediocre"), does not elaborate, then immediately hedges their critique.
Helvetica is used as an example of a font which garners more "affection" in contrast to TNR, but is never praised by the author or recommended as an alternative - at least not in the linked passage.
The author also criticizes the narrowness of the font (and particularly of the bold style). They're not trying to argue that Times New Roman is terrible - just that it's substandard.
As a body copy font, sans serif is generally seen as "friendlier" and more casual--which is one reason you see more of it than you used to in marketing copy and many other uses. Friendly and casual are generally not things I'm looking for in legal documents.
Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.
Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.
By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.
Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.
They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.
Also it would be pretty hard for officers to make soldiers do bayonet attack if it weren't known they'd probably face little or no resistance. People tend to value their lives.
It's not ideology. The US has started sanctioning European judges who serve on international courts, causing Microsoft to cut off access to its services.
Given that the US has shown it's willing to wield sanctions as a blunt instrument against anyone and everyone, it's only prudent for European countries to reduce their exposure to US tech.
Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.
At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
> Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
...and, even worse, if they ever got to the very top of the ladder and started only playing against other cheaters, then they'd actually weaken their cheats so that they could drop down in ranking to play against (and stomp) non-cheaters again, and/or find creative ways to make new accounts.
Cheaters ruin games. The fact that the GP is so deluded as to claim that "The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards." suggests that they've never actually played a competitive matchmade game on a computer before.
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