And of course, most newcomers to Linux will take the default desktop both because they have no idea which one is really best for them and because they'll figure that it's the default so it must be best. I'd bet that if the various DEs were listed in a random order not only would far less people would start out with Gnome, but few of them would migrate from one to another because in their own way, they're all good.

Same here, but I abandoned Gnome when I saw what Gnome 3 was going to be and I've never looked back. If they can't manage to raise enough cash to pay for themselves, maybe it's time for it to die.

Now, Congress has stepped back and allowed you to get a hearing aid from anyone.

And note how far the prices have dropped. Proof, if any were needed, that the big name hearing aid makers were gouging the public.

If I wrote that Bytedance was losing money, I miswrote. My intended meaning was that TickToc was unprofitable.

Tomorrow it will be insulin prices or something.

I'd like to see them go after the prices of the interferon drugs used to control MS. My sister used to need to take one of them once a month, and before she was taken off of it the price had gone up to $1600/dose. The feds had put anybody using it on MedicAid automatically, but that's a huge, unreasonable price for something like that.

And hearing aids. Notice how you can now get them by mail order at about 1/10 the price the big boys charge? Wonder why they've always been so expensive until now? Well, here's the answer: "Everything the traffic will bear!" Congress should have stepped in with an investigation decades ago, but they were too busy pocketing campaign contributions to bother.

According to TFS, the company is losing money, but they're still fighting to hold onto it and would rather shut it down than sell it. This suggests that profit was never the main goal of its owners, and that propaganda or other intelligence gathering has always been its purpose.

Which part of it? If you're talking about the fighting, he's kept himself in shape but she's regularly training in martial arts and learning new styles and techniques. If memory serves, she used three different styles in that fight and was getting a fourth ready when he tried to escape.

(Food sizes also seem weird to me no matter what. Why do tomatoes come in 28 ounce cans? Who decided that was a good quantity? There's probably some interesting history there.)

I'm only guessing, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had to do with filling boxes of a certain standardized size. They made the cans so that they got a convenient number into the box and then checked to see how much they held.

That is every religionist's favourite fantasy and it does not survive contact with reality. I've had a major near death experience, it did nothing at all to convince me of the existence of god.

I think you've slightly misunderstood that quote. It doesn't say that atheists stop being atheists in foxholes and stay that way afterwords. It only claims that they start believing in someone who might keep them safe while in the foxhole but says nothing about how or if they believe later.

It's the only scifi universe I've read from in years.

If you like police procedurals, check out the In Death series by J.D. Robb. It takes place in a near-future world that's not quite ours and the protagonist is Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD and head of the Homicide Squad at Cop Central. Not only is she good at solving murders, she's quite capable of beating the hell out of a military trained man who's fighting for his freedom and is quite ready to take her life to get it.

So all they need to do is find some ephemeral justification by invoking the Commerce Clause and every Congress member is fitted for a crown?

It's not quite as bad as that, but if memory serves, the feds once found a way to use the Commerce Clause to interfere with the operations of a restaurant because it was using pepper, which was brought in from another state.

I doubt that the original legendary Atreides would have ever said something so peaceful. They were not nice people.

I love the Windows people who pay for it and enjoy the simplicity of it for what it provides.

Simplicity? I haven't used Windows in at least 20 years, but I do pay attention on what's happening with Windows, and every time a new version comes out there's a huge number of people complaining about how much the UI has changed and how they hate what MS has done. The only times I can remember that happening in Linux are all of the complaints about systemd (I don't like it either, but I learned how to use it because I understood that there was no turning back and my complaints would just be ignored.) and what happened when Gnome 3 came out. I too didn't like it because it needed far more resources than I could dedicate to it and it made it difficult, if not impossible to set my desktop up to look and work the way I wanted. In my case, I did a bit of looking around and when it officially came out I could ignore it because I had already migrated to Xfce, a lightweight DE that made it easy to do things how I wanted, not how the devs thought I should.

Judging only by what you wrote, you seem to think that any distro that has a built-in way to avoid dependency hell is using training wheels.

Some of us prefer this because we don't feel the need to have training wheels on our OS.