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Scene: The Prime Minister stands outside in front of the country’s national parliament. She is surrounded by members of her cabinet and regional leaders. She is addressing a press conference 24 hours after tariffs were imposed on her country. News agencies are in front of the stage. We anticipated that Mr. President would eventually target us with tariffs. We are not sure whether this action stems from a belief that societies operate within a zero-sum paradigm of winners and losers, where one group’s gain necessitates another’s loss, or whether it is a consequence of his country’s extreme shift to the right, resulting in governance by a small group who perceive personal benefit in a destabilized world controlled from a radicalized nation. As those previously targeted by Mr. President’s actions have noted, tariffs will escalate costs and generate instability for all affected. Citizens of Mr. President’s country have been misled into believing that tariffs will ultimately...

  On February 13th, Sage Evolution software experienced a start-up failure.  Running the client application produced no visible result. This issue mirrored a similar incident from two years before. The temporary workaround involved changing the date on all computers and server to a day other than February 13th. While this allowed the software to function, it created significant problems with transaction dates and impacted other software such as 2FA Authentication Codes. Upon reverting the server and client dates to the correct date, Sage's anti-piracy measures were triggered, requiring client software re-registration.  This registration process involves providing the company name, a system-generated PIN, a registration code, and a serial number. The serial number, derived from the other provided information, necessitates contacting the client's Sage solution provider.  Until all required details are entered, users are unable to access the software. Unconfirmed source...

This screenshot shows an erroneous transaction from my banking app - one I personally experienced. The incident taught me several lessons, but most importantly: check your statements regularly. Had I not caught this withdrawal, it likely would have become permanent. For accounts with significant activity, weekly reviews are essential. These checks needn’t be time-consuming - just a few minutes, perhaps during an ad break, to verify your recent transactions. When I reported the error, the bank responded within 24 hours and confirmed their mistake. However, getting them to explicitly admit “We made a mistake” proved surprisingly challenging. Mistakes can happen even with advanced technology and controls in place, despite everyone’s best intentions. Yet it raised a troubling question: what if our roles had been reversed? Had I made the error instead of the bank, I would likely have faced multiple charges - “processing fees,” “adjustment fees,” “error fees” - all automatically appli...

This article explores a Microsoft Power Apps canvas solution that implements a Wordle computation engine. In this application, users input a target word (the “answer”) and a guess. The engine then processes the guess and returns a string representing the match status, using the following colour-coded indicators: G (Green) : Indicates that the character in the guess matches the character in the answer at the same position. Y (Yellow) : Indicates that the character in the guess is present in the answer, but at a different position. B (Black) : Indicates that the character in the guess is not present in the answer.   Enabling User-Defined Functions This engine utilizes an experimental Power Apps feature called User-defined functions , which must be enabled as follows: Click the Settings (cog) icon. Select the Updates tab. Scroll down to User-defined functions and enable it.   Download the Source Package The source package for this solution is available for dow...