Because we're going to stop supporting Windows 98!

At least there was a technical reason there, that Microsoft was merging the two separate codebases for consumer Windows and enterprise Windows, and building on the better NT codebase than the 95->98->ME codebase.

And XP was actually way better for the main thing that we were going to be using computers for going forward: networked with the actual internet.

Windows 11? Can't see any paradigm shift in how the operating system itself is supposed to work, at least not on anything that actually makes a difference in a favorable way.

Do you mean Lisa Frank, the artist for colorful animals on school supplies, and not Anne Frank, the famous diarist who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust?

• Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people's own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there's benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
• JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
• The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn't ready to replace camera RAW files, but there's room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

It's great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.

They always win, unless they don't. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.

Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: "We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time."

Put another way, this means that a malicious coffee shop or hotel can eavesdrop on all VPN traffic on their network. That's a really big fucking deal.

I'm glad that The Atlantic is covering this issue. Nothing groundbreaking here for anyone who follows these issues, but the Atlantic's audience overlaps a lot with actual policymakers and their staffs. The tech companies don't want to be regulated by the government, so coverage by these types of publications may be a good starting point for reform (whether voluntary or regulated).

Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn’t actually occur

Doesn't this describe, like, every mainstream live action film or television show?

Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.

I don't think that site would be problematic. After all, we're just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.

A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).

Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:

• Don't use the same verified email address
• Don't reuse usernames, including across platforms
• Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won't analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
• Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.

This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.