With that said, not all regulations are equally good. The fire safety regulations we're talking about here, are good regulations, and I'm glad they exist. That doesn't negate the existence of other regulations, some of which are considerably less good.

Yeah, I immediately thought of the Triangle building as well. Although, if I understood the summary correctly, this situation differs in an important way. (Specifically, if I read it right, the residents did have the ability to let themselves in and out; they just had to use a key to do so, presumably due to lack of a proper working push-bar door. That doesn't meet current fire codes, for sure; but the situation in the Triangle building was markedly worse.)

It really depends where you live.

We do *have* some apartments where I live (Galion, Ohio), but it's really not that many relative to the size of the community, and there are always vacancies. 70% of the homes in this county are owner-occupied, and I'm pretty sure all of the apartments fall into the other 30%, because there are no condos in the area that I'm aware of. But I'm also pretty sure most renters, rent actual houses, though I don't have the percentage number for that.

Part of it is that housing was really affordable here until recently. Housing prices never recovered from the "market correction" (circa 2008), until some time after the start of the Ukraine war. (Then housing prices suddenly doubled, in the space of about eighteen months. But that's sufficiently recent, that we haven't yet had a lot of time to accumulate people who can't afford a house because of it.) As recently as 2021, it was possible to buy a two-story house here for around $50k. Under those conditions, a young person who is willing to stick it out living with their parents or on a friend's couch for a year or so, can scrape together a decent down payment, even working for minimum wage. So renters around here tend to either be people who don't want to be home owners because of the burden of maintenance (which is mostly the elderly), or people who are really bad at financial planning (which, admittedly, is fairly common; but some people just don't run in those kinds of circles).

San Francisco is, rather obviously, a completely different situation altogether. Opposite end of the spectrum, pretty much.

> Being poor in any big city kind of sucks.

Well yes. Frankly, living in a big city kind of sucks even if you're not poor. Though it's nice to be within driving distance of one, so you can go there a few times a year, for things like concerts, exotic food options, etc. But yes, it's disproportionately worse if you're poor.

I meant the side that is not visible from Earth, yes; it is traditionally called the "dark side" in mainstream English, because language is weird sometimes. This nomenclature is admittedly rather counterintuitive, and "far side" is more clear and therefore better terminology and is thus the wording that I ideally should have used. Sorry for any confusion.

That would be pointless, though.

Doing something that another country has already done long ago, doesn't impress anyone. If they want to be perceived as advanced leaders in scientific research, they have to do something that has NOT already been done decades ago by other countries, especially hated Western countries.

If there were any conceivable way they could send a manned mission to Mars, that's what they'd be doing. The dark side of the moon, is the loftiest space-exploration goal they thought they had any realistic chance of achieving.

> Whatever happened to the goal of Windows 10 being the last version of Windows

That was never intended to actually be true. They said that because IT people with actual discernment were looking at Windows Ten and going "Eh, this version is pants, I think we're gonna stick with Seven for now and see if Microsoft can get their act together for the *next* release." And that would be a disaster, because then they (and more importantly their companies) might not pay Microsoft any money for upgrade licenses for Ten.

Once just about everyone who ever pays for software upgrades let go of Seven and upgraded, the "Ten is the last version" line was promptly dropped, because it was no longer needed.

There is one significant way in which Eleven is better than Ten: the "is your PC ready for the upgrade" check is significantly more realistic about system requirements. Ten will happily install on a system with 8 GB of RAM, which is less than a quarter of what is needed to run it at an even vaguely acceptable level of performance, and it doesn't even *warn* you that there might be a problem. The result, is that the system can't be used for anything because it's too busy swapping, because the core of the OS doesn't fit in physical RAM, let alone any applications (and the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem is even more pants than the NT/XP/Vista/Seven one). Eleven doesn't have this problem: it actually tells you your PC isn't good enough.

I still say Seven is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it ends up being the best one Microsoft *will* ever produce.

WhatsApp is owned by the same company as Facebook.

There has never been another company in the entire history of the Earth, that has been caught violating its own stated privacy policy and doing things with user data that it had specifically promised *not* to do, more times than this company.

I'm not saying they're the most evil company ever. They're not. There have been companies that have done worse things to people. Like, participating in genocide, for example. And there are companies that are in bed with totalitarian governments and directly exploit user data for Orwellian surveillance purposes (*cough* ByteDance *cough*). Which is not great.

But when we're talking specifically about whether the company will distribute your data to various third parties after promising that they wouldn't do that, *nobody* has ever had a worse track record for that, than Facebook/Meta. In particular, if a company comes along and offers them money for some user data, for marketing purposes, the only reason the deal would ever break down would be if they don't offer *enough* money. A little thing like "our privacy policy says we won't do that" would never get in the way.

I actually wrote my own text editor, in Emacs lisp. Unfortunately it was pretty much the first thing I wrote for Emacs back in the late nineties when I was a rank newb, so the code is absolutely terrible, and so I have never distributed it. But I do still use it. Maybe someday I'll do a proper rewrite and make the code available.

Is it even possible to run systemd on Emacs? I thought it only ran on systems with a C API. (Emacs has a lisp API instead. Which is better. Fight me.)

That's Poettering for you. His lack of self-awareness is legendary.

This is why I use Devuan.

When Poettering wrote code for Avahi, I didn't notice any problems, because absolutely nothing relies on the protocol Avahi implements, for any purpose whatsoever, so if it doesn't work, the situation is exactly the same as it would be if Avahi worked perfectly. There's no way to notice the difference, without actually attempting to use wireless zeroconf for something, which as far as I am aware not one person in the entire history of computing has ever tried to do. So if he'd stuck to working on that, we wouldn't have a problem.

But after the pulseaudio debacle (in which Poettering's software screwed up the sound my system so badly, I wasn't able to get it working again even after completely uninstalling the package that caused the problem and reverting to my former configuation, and so I ended up reinstalling the entire operating system distribution from scratch), I swore off ever installing any software written by Poettering on any computer ever again. And then somebody decided to let him rewrite the init daemon, which is *kind* of important. Nope. Hard pass. That is NOT going to be a thing on any of my computers, or any of my employer's computers, or any other computer that I ever have to touch.

That was a deliberate choice.

Slashdot was always intended to be an American site for technically-inclined people who are comfortable conversing in ASCII. After it became popular, lots and lots of Europeans started reading it, and commenting, and stuff; and many of them started asking for better foreign language support, which at that time probably would have meant ISO-8859-1. (This was a while ago; almost nothing supported Unicode at the time.) Slashdot said no, and has continued to stick to that answer decade after decade, because we don't *want* junk like Microsoft SmartQuotes, and foreign languages, and dumb emoji, and all the other things that Unicode support enables. Do Not Want.

DO. NOT. WANT.

Take your weird characters to Reddit. We don't want them here.

Right, I'm just saying, I can understand why some otherwise reasonably intelligent people might imagine they needed to involve their bank in the process of stopping the billing. Even if they don't have personal experiences with needing to resort to such measures, they've probably heard horror stories.

We're talking about the China market, so yeah, it's gonna be price. The Samsung model has whatever price it has, and there'll be a Songsom (or maybe Sumsang) phone for 30% less, and a Huawei one for less than that (because it's subsidized), and various trash brands no one has ever heard of selling for *much* less (because they have no QA at all and cut every corner it is possible to cut).

Unfortunately, our society (and, particularly, the lack of meaningful regulations regarding how complex the process of canceling a subscription is allowed to be) has trained a lot of people to believe that it's going to be extremely difficult to ever get a company to voluntarily stop billing you every month. Netflix may not be guilty of this, but enough other companies are, that it's what people *expect* based on their past experiences.

I came to the comment section on this story, expecting people to be talking about tactics like opening an account with a different bank and closing the old account entirely. It didn't even *occur* to me that the answer might be "click a red cancel button on your account page".

And, I mean, it's moot for me, personally. I have zero interest in Netflix, and also I don't use credit cards, at all. (I'm... atypical in some ways.) But Netflix actually making it easy to cancel, is not what I expected to read in the comments.

If it won't run on the 8008, I don't understand why anyone is even interested.

Ahem.