Gestrid

Eh, I'm okay with an app as long as it's good.

The McDonald's app is not good. At all. In the slightest. It won't even let me login 99% of the time.

Even if it is listening, based on the article, it seems the current CEO wants Alexa itself to be profitable. He doesn't want another division of Amazon to be profitable because of Alexa.

Ah, that's what you meant. A presidential nominee will typically pick someone who's different enough from them (but that they still fundamentally agree with) that people who felt underrepresented by the presidential nominee pick will feel represented by the vice presidential nominee pick. That's the general logic behind who becomes the VP pick.

That's exactly what happened in 1800. Both Jefferson and Burr, who were from the same party, tied in the electoral college vote. Some people in the party didn't like Jefferson, but they but didn't like the opposing party even more.

Each electoral college member got two votes. So all the electoral college members who were part of what would be the winning party ended up casting one vote for Burr and one vote for Jefferson, resulting in a tie. (Due to slow communication in those days, they all assumed someone else was going to be the one who would cast the tie-breaking vote.)

The tie went to the House of Representatives to break it, as is specified in the Constitution. Unfortunately, neither Burr nor Jefferson got the majority vote needed even after thirty-five separate votes. (Note that, in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a "majority vote" is not "more than 50%". Typically, you must get 2/3 of the votes in order to win.) On the thirty-sixth vote, Alexander Hamilton managed to convince some others to vote for Jefferson, and he got the majority vote he needed and became president.

No. There's a reason we amended the Constitution not to do that. The system prior to the 1804 election created a deadlock between two candidates that took the House of Representatives (which is responsible for breaking said deadlocks) thirty-six attempts to try to break the tie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Because, out of all the platforms available (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), Twitter is the place where the news will spread the fastest.

This might be one of Twitter's automatic security features I'd heard about a while back (prior to the Musk takeover). Supposedly, Twitter stops accounts from getting a large amount of followers in a short amount of time to try to limit botting. Sometimes, rarely, it can trigger when a large amount of real people follow a real account.

I think I heard about it when I ran into the issue myself, but I don't remember what account it was that I was trying to follow.

You just have to use the side of your foot (like in soccer) instead of the front.

Any more details?

This sounds like the setup to a fun story.

If it was the second Tuesday of the month, probably updating.

I'd heard some hospitals were affected. They cancelled appointments and non-critical surgeries.

I'm guessing it was mostly their "behind the desk" computers that got affected, not the computers used to control the important stuff. The computers in patients' rooms may have been affected as well, but (at least in the US) those are usually just used to record information about medicine given and other details about the patient, nothing critical that can't be done manually.

But the computer is within leg's reach.