It’s logically possible that he’s innocent, but, all evidence considered, it’s not terribly likely.

It’s somewhat more likely that he’ll walk, though rich, well-connected dudes have a way of evading consequences.

Ooh la la

Hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages, resulting in bankruptcy. The IA shuts down immediately, their assets are auctioned, and soon fragments of their server racks appear in trophy cases in the lobbies of intellectual-property enforcement organisations.

Distributing a lactose-based food as charity to low-income neighbourhoods, when people of colour, who are most overrepresented amongst the poor, are also most likely to be lactose intolerant, has a certain energy.

You know how a lot of DIY gadgets have slogans like “trans rights are human rights” on the circuit boards? I wonder if the Modretro has some fascist slogan similarly inscribed. Perhaps “Deus Vult” or some particularly authoritarian Bible verse number, or maybe just a couple of plausibly deniable 14s and 88s.

He’s been fash for a long time

How’s his British accent? A Bond who is not canonically an Englishman would be like Superman not being American.

It could be a threat, or it could mean something like “hang in there” or “stay the course” (“dead” as in dead straight, dead reckoning or similar), possibly from some specialised vocabulary. Is there more context?

And whose fault is it for defining everyone’s sex as being at time of conception?

I suspect Nicole is a similar sort of operation to Aidana the pretty lady dentist from Kazakhstan, only aimed at people who’d be more sceptical. So instead of stealing images from a fitness influencer, they got some from a more average-looking young woman and made up a story. If it’s like Aidana, there’s a guy somewhere (probably in the hinterland of Russia or elsewhere in the former USSR) whose day job is to string the people who reply along, lead them into believing they have a relationship with this lady, make sure they’re absolutely sure this isn’t a scam, and then pig-butchering them for all they’re worth.

He was given a stately home and a hereditary title for his efforts. Presumably his descendants remained in the aristocracy, possibly to this day. There may today be someone in the rarefied upper echelons of high finance, hobnobbing with bankers and billionaire heirs to titles that officially no longer exist on a yacht in Monaco or a high-ceilinged office in Geneva or somewhere who owes the fortune they were born into to opportune flatulence. Perhaps there’s an oil painting of Roland on the wall of their chambers, or perhaps the crest of their family or logo or motto of their brokerage conceals a fart joke.

Their hearts would have to beat a lot slower, as pretty much every species gets 1-2 billion heartbeats per lifespan.

The handful of pet Galapagos tortoises are something like that.

Vaduz? Did they just choose two cities for capital-less Switzerland?

From what I recall, it does, especially for new words (items like “backpack” and “T-shirt” seem to have almost a different word in each country). Maybe Duolingo’s Spanish is from former south (Argentina or Chile perhaps?)

Given his leading role in AfS (a party to the right of the far-right SD party, whose role in the ecology of the Swedish far right appears to be to be the ideological shock troops who float extreme ideas and see which of those are ready to be laundered into the mainstream by the “respectable”SD), it’s probably safe to say that this guy was a piece of shit.

Japan clamped down on all that pretty quickly, even before Tokugawa-era self-isolation, and as such, Christianity never got a hold in the mainstream there (though later the handful of Japanese Christian converts had a role to play in establishing western-style universities), unlike in Korea, where American evangelism had a stronger influence.

I have wondered whether some of the difference between Japanese and Korean pop music comes down to this: Japanese pop has largely drawn from jazz and jazz-fusion, which is not strongly tied to Christianity, whereas K-pop has more influences from soul and R&B, genres with roots more immediately in Black American gospel music.

The downside of this is that it involves giving money to Bezos in the first place. If there are similar techniques that work with, say, Apple Books, Kobo or other stores not owned by a literal Bond villain, they’d be even better.

(Also, everyone else seems to use the EPub format, while Amazon have their own proprietary fork of an old PalmPilot ebook format. Meaning that you’re probably going to need to convert it to EPub for reading, which is one more step and could, in theory, go awry.)

Do they? Duolingo, meanwhile, teaches a Latin American dialect (possibly Mexican), with “ustedes” as the second-person plural. (IIRC, their Portuguese is also Brazilian, which is a greater leap.)

You’re right, it does not make sense.

If Toronto isn’t in Poland, you must acquit! The defence rests.