If desktop users need to have any significant interaction with the init system that's already a failure in itself. By all means if you want to talk sysadmins and such but then it seems to me Linux is doing quite well in the server space particularly all the SaaS bits as spinning up and down Windows instances is a licensing nightmare. If Microsoft delivers on WSL2 with GUI support & GPU acceleration I think a lot of people will skip the barebones Linux install completely.

That it's bad now does not exclude the possibility that it was worse before. We'll never have good data on that, but human beings tend to be a lot shittier when they think nobody will know and it's strange to think policemen are an exception. Even if said shitty behavior would get covered up and you'd face no real punishments most like to pretend not seeing it.

Whether you agree with them or not there's long been a small contingent on /. which has basically declared that taxation = theft. If you want to go there NASA money is government money aka stolen money whether it's going to SpaceX or the Space Shuttle. Despite the satellite/Starlink business they'll always see the company as sucking on the government's teat. And they're not exactly wrong but well you could take pretty much the entire military sector, systems for the police, IRS and so on

Dune 2 doesn't need a level setting, Harkonnen = easy, Atreides = medium, Ordos = hard. Or rather hard, very hard, almost impossible. I still remember finally beating the campaign with Ordos, despite the Emperor, despite the nuking from Harkonnen, despite the endless waves of Freemen. Only through insane exploitation of the weak AI is it even possible, all your units are wimps and you should totally be crushed. Fortunately the AI likes to send its units one by one to the slaughter...

Well wouldn't it be better to actually win at something "small" instead of constantly chasing the next big thing. It's 20 years later and I'm still using Outlook and MS Office at work. Photoshop is still the industry standard for photography and digital art. Sometime around Windows 8 the open source community drank way too much of the same kool-aid Microsoft was drinking and decided screw the desktop, touch and tablets are the future and the old stuff wasn't sexy no more. The result was a generation of software (Unity, KDE 4, Gnome 3) that could have kicked Microsoft in the nuts but instead chased the same rabbit hole they eventually had to back out of "unradicalizing" Win10 and pulling out of mobile. Open source is not nimble, developing software on a "scratch itch" schedule is slow. You're not going to get there first, more like the glacier slowly but surely pushing closed source out of the market. Embrace that and open source would be so much better off.

That argument gets flipped on its head all the time, if a fringe candidate is not elected he's too radical, too controversial, too willing to raze a flawed system to the ground and throw the baby out with the bathwater. While the delegate count for Trump was flattering converting 5000 votes in Michigan (16 delegates), 22000 votes in Pennsylvania (20 delegates) and 6000 votes in Wisconsin (10 delegates) would have put Hillary in office so it's not like she lost by a landslide. Would that have been proof people want the establishment and change is unwanted? I feel this is like this is a bit of a Goldilocks argument that can be tailored to give any answer you want.

Probably for the same reason you see the names Kennedy, Clinton, Bush etc. repeat itself. It's one thing to say it's the voters that decide in the end, but to win a presidential nomination you need a vast number of campaign staff all over the country to work for you personally. Maybe you have some fame in your city or in your state, but what does the average voter in Nevada know about politicians from Kentucky? Very little I would think. So unless you're very rich, very famous, have family backing or have been working your way up the political system for decades you don't got the support network you need.

In many other countries it's more of a political process, you need to convince other politicians in the same party that you're the best candidate to put forth and then you have the party's resources at your back in the public campaign. What you need is mainly to be an attractive candidate and they bring the marketing budget. In the US it's a massive personal effort to make a bid for the presidency and for most it's a once-in-a-lifetime shot. So you keep putting it off until the end of your career and it becomes a "now or never" shot but a pretty strong one at that. I wonder what the statistics are for first vs second+ run for nomination/presidency.

Of course there are exceptions for the rule, like Obama "should not" be able to pull that off after three years as a senator but that guy could probably sell sand in Sahara. Also even though it's an election every four years you'd be nuts to challenge the nomination of a sitting president, plus you have to consider the possibility the voters are fed up and think the grass looks greener on the other side so realistically good chances might only come every 8-12 years. It's better to go all in once and succeed than try and try again. It hasn't worked for Clinton, it hasn't worked for Bernie, maybe it's a human flaw but I think people are likely to go with this election's fresh breeze over the candidate they rejected years ago. Even if they're a better candidate now.

There's two parts to this, one is worst case performance where you have to assume any idiot can do anything physics permits. The other part is being a "normal" driver picking up on common hints and cues without being spooked by harmless events. If you practice defense driving - or just driving in general - you're very rarely at the edge of the control envelope where only a full emergency stop can prevent you from hitting the pedestrian crossing the road. You start braking down as the likelihood goes up, sometimes you catch it early and break smoothly other times you catch it late and break less smoothly. A human drives quite differently if you look like you're 95% likely to cross or 5% likely to cross. It doesn't mean you run down 1/20 pedestrians.

Uh, making sure the person in the photo is the right person and not manipulated in some way? Here in Norway to renew my passport I have to go to the police station. They have the digital camera, they take the picture and also do fingerprint scans so sending somebody else would be rather hard. Same with our version of the DMV, they take the photo for your driver's license minus the fingerprints. It's at least a decade, probably two since they took your photo, put it on a passport and stamped it as authentic. Sounds like Germany intended to do the same, but the professional photographers objected and managed to become "outsourced" photo takers with a permit. Nobody needs a trained photographer to take stock neutral face photos on a fixed background. It's a makework program, even calling it a jobs program is a joke.

The UK was open to many hundreds of millions of EU citizens, not that many chose to come to the UK. Thinking most people will give up their home, jobs, friends and family that don't qualify to go half-way across the world to start over in a foreign country simply because the border is open... yeah that's not how it works. Not unless China turns it into an actual warzone.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria, younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne? You're obviously being sarcastic but it's hard to see your point. In the past the killing of nobodies like George Floyd would have been shuffled under the carpet. If the rich and powerful got killed, then you send nobodies to kill nobodies to avenge their deaths.

The latter is still true, how many hundreds of thousands have died for 9/11? Maybe it's the cynic in me but I think a lot of the upper class don't really care about Afghan deaths, Iraqi death or even US soldier deaths. They want their safe existence, far from any danger behind guards, gates and alarms but the destruction of the twin towers shattered that illusion of untouchability. Their only goal was to strike back so hard it'd never, ever happen again.

Now obviously they weren't the only ones who felt that, but many people and particularly the poor minorities runs the risk of dying every day at the hands of a cop on a power trip. And it's not like the second amendment is anything but an express ticket to the morgue against a paramilitary force in body armor. Camera phones, the Internet and social media is what make the nobodies matter. Sure MLK did it without all that, but he also got probably 0.01% documented.

Maybe or maybe most people still don't really see Teslas as self-driving yet and actually pay attention. I think it's far too early to say that Tesla has passed peak accidents due to inattention. There's a lot of self-selection in the data where they let the car do the easy driving.

But what's the cause and effect here? I mean you can always begin with the premise that a corporation is an artificial legal entity, so it can't feel remorse and any apology is per definition fake and damage control. I have the distinct feeling there's people here who'd accept no apology of any kind from Microsoft...

Arbitrary limits that approximate a reasonable value can make total sense. If we took away age limits to drive a car and said we'll make individual decisions based on maturity that would be pure hell to enforce with any kind of consistency and there'd be massive attempts to game the system. It's not like you level up and gain any great insight the day you turn 16, but it's easily quantifiable and you don't need to get into any long arguments about every case. Same with a character limit, maybe it doesn't have to be 80 but to me it makes total sense to have some cut-off value, because there'll always be a dude with a 21:9 monitor willing to argue.

There's still ways of triggering the same issue. Much like the definition of kilo I wish they'd left the "equals" operator from math alone and done it VB-style like x := 57 (but keep it as x == 57). Most code of any significance is read far more often than it's written.