A flood of answers that appear superficially correct but that aren't right on closer examination...

...how will that be different from Stack Overflow with human users?

That's not just a posit... that's mathematically how things actually work.

(Well, until we get to cases where strong gravity is involved. Then, we don't really have a good theory that describes everything.)

It's good to use frameworks and libraries because you don't have to "reinvent the wheel".

The thing is... it's often good to reinvent the wheel so that you get *just a wheel*.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Of course, it's the nature of the open-source world that there will be a bunch of different projects that more or less all function similarly.

Quoting the original article, in the "Linux Mint" section:

"but replaces them with dodgy bits of its own, such as a confusing choice of not one, not two, but three Windows-like desktops,"

This is what led me to say that the article seems to consider having multiple desktops available a flaw.

I have this problem that, unlike what most people seem to think is obvious, I *don't* want my desktop to operate like Mac. I find using a Mac desktop is like using a text editor other than my preferred one (which is increasingly necessary as text editing is moving to being whatever javascript monstrosity is attached to the collaboration or notebook platform you're forced to use); I'm always fighting with it and trying to work around it's little assumptions that are different from what I want.

Lots of the Linux desktops have been moving in directions that are nominally to make them more Mac-like. I think they often don't really do, or they *would* if everybody else did what they thought everybody else should do. But, as a result, I recently went back to FVWM, because I can make it work the way I want to. I used xfce for a number of years, but as time went by, it was getting harder and harder to configure it to do what I want. Giving in to what I find as the extremely annoying trend of "client-side decorations" was the last straw for me.

FVWM's configuration system is *exactly* the sort of thing people point at when they try to say that it makes Linux unusable on the desktop. And, it's exactly what makes it usable for me.

The broader point is: the original article seemed to indicate that having a choice of desktops was a *flaw*. It confuses users, or something. But, from my point of view, having a choice of desktop managers is the killer feature of Linux on the desktop. You aren't stuck with the default assumptions of either Windows or Mac. Yeah, there are still a lot of default assumptions built in, but there's a lot more flexibility than you find in other worlds. The ascendence of GTK (linked with GNOME) and the assumptions it's trying to force on the LInux desktop world are not healthy, in my opinion, as it's going to make it harder and harder for people to configure desktops if they don't like the built-in assumptions of GTK. But, at least for now, you can still get things to work the way you want if what you want doesn't happen to match either the majority, or what somebody has convinced the majority to think they want (or at least accept).

The US Government made the mistake of thinking that it was in charge of the country, instead of Amazon.

Amazon will set them straight.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.