I don’t know, I thought it was kind of fun that they mixed things up for a change and had the protagonist be the villain and the central plot be about his triumph over the antagonists who are the heroes; the movie ending with him relaxing and enjoying the sunset now that his great work was over and so he could retire and put down his burdens was a really nice touch.

Sure, but what’s the end game supposed to be, then? Just making the same request over and over again indefinitely?

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

Rooibos is just an inferior version of honeybush.

Change my mind.

In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.

Speaking personally, it’s consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I’ve installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn’t true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)

I also really like its “Refresh Install” feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I’ve used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.

In a way this naming makes more sense, because an important aspect of the virtual worlds in science fiction that many people seem to idolize is that they were as appealing as they were due to a large part because the real world was such a dystopia that they were desperate for an escape from it, even if it meant living inside a world that existed only inside a computer.

It is hard to see how the explicit goal of not receiving updates too early is reconciled with the goal of not sacrificing security. Shouldn’t there be no such thing as “too early” when it comes to security updates?

Yeah, I’ve had enough bad experiences with this that I actually ended up unsubscribing from many of the science subreddits.

For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.

There’s essentially an open standard for streaming video so it’s not like the old days where you needed to download a platform-specific component to watch streaming video. I use Linux as my primary environment and I can’t even remember the last time I had trouble with it; certainly not for several years at least. I’ve used Netflix, DisneyPlus, Amazon, Paramount+, and probably others.

Just as a heads up, though, if you are using Firefox then the first time you go to any of these sites it will prompt you as to whether you are fine with enable support for DRM video, and you need to click “Yes”. This is a one-time thing, though. (It does this because if you are an open source purist then you might not want to do this so it likes to get your permission first; most browsers just assume that you don’t care and enable it by default.)

Interesting, but if all the shops close when everyone gets off work, when do people get a chance to actually visit the shops when they are free before they close?

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.