Hmmmm.... I wonder how far The Culture is from Roddenberry's ideals? In some ways, The Culture seems to me to be a far more realistic post-Singularity type of civilization than the Federation. The trappings are far more fantastic, (GSVs, anyone?) but TOS tended to underestimate many things. As one example, the communicators were basically phones, and other than communicating with an orbiting starship instead of a local tower, they only do a fraction of what today's smartphones do.

Plus even The Culture gets to have explosions. I'm currently re-reading "Surface States". The first time I read it, I particularly liked one Ship giving a fairly complex blow-by-blow account of a space battle that was only something like 15 microseconds long.

I was rather amused by the titles of the Tanya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan newsgroups, though to be honest I don't remember the titles any more and never read them. I just remember ".whack.whack.whack" being the tail end of one.

I actually did follow and post to technical newsgroups.

So is your desk a standing-only desk, or one of those that moves up and down? My wife has been looking at one of the latter.

However in Europe you've been warned. In the US we walked (or sat?) way too far down this path before discovering how bad it is. Now that we all know better, you can change your path before getting where we are.

OTOH, my wife are generally stupified looking at twenty-somethings smoking. Our parents didn't know better, and in fact during WWII the Army included cigarettes with meal rations. During our generation (I'm a later Boomer.) we sort-of knew better, but the cigarette companies didn't actually admit they were lying until well into my adulthood. For this generation there's no doubt about how bad cigarettes are, but if anything smoking seems to be on the rise.

I wonder if Hari Seldon would have said that masses of people are stupid, as well as predictable.

I wonder how much a standing desk would really help. Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.

Movement is a spectrum, the question here is where is just-standing on that spectrum between sitting and the known-good brisk walk. Also, how do you fit onto that spectrum the known-good and known-bad thresholds?

Subject says it all.

The three distros in the Subject line do not use systemd, though Gentoo does offer it. They may well be the dig-in-the-heels distros that will stay that way, driven by people like you. Moving to one of those distros is a smaller/easier move for you, and doesn't preclude moving to a BSD in the future.

Years back I thought about moving my server to OpenBSD, based on reputation. However after some thinking I realized that potentially the safest server is the one you know best how to administer. I was probably better off knowing how to administer Linux well across my home cluster than to divide my efforts. I know OpenBSD is supposed to be "secure by default", but don't know how I might accidentally mess that up by mis-applying Linux knowledge to it.

I remember when the 8086 came out, Intel also brought out the 8087 FPU and the 8089 I/O Processor. The former got bundled into the CPU a few generations later. I don't rememeber details of the 8089, but it seems to have withered away. Nor does Wikipedia say much about it, once you differentiate it from the Hoth Wampa Cave Lego set.

I liked David Brin's "Tank Farm Dynamo", which featured a space station made from used external tanks. Part of the premise was that ETs were deliberately discarded the way they were, so that they'd burn on reentry and not become space debris. For negligible cost they could be brought the rest of the way to orbit, available for use there.

Every first stage ever made and flown has been simply thrown away after one use. FIrst stages are quite a bit different from whatever is on the top of the stack.

For that matter, "lander on legs" is a different thing on Earth than it is on the moon or Mars.

I will agree that there is a decided anti-NASA attitude around here, though.

Right up there with seeing a perfectly healthy person with two free hands hit the handicapped door opener button, rather than open the door by hand.