Yes. That makes sense too. (And yes, I am reading with sigs enabled. Some of them are hilarious :mrgreen:)

Very lucid. Thanks for this. One of the things I've wondered is why it's not usually mentioned that "GR [may not be] the correct theory of geometrodynamics." I mean, why dark matter? Why not, "we don't understand gravity yet"? Or, we don't understand all the possible forces of attraction well enough? What about the Casimir Effect, for instance? What happens if that's somehow additive at cosmic scales? What if we've missed something? (Wouldn't be the first time.) It's probably very obvious that I am NOT any kind of physicist.

But you also sort of answered that. It would take a lot more ad hoc assumptions given our current understanding.

To be cheap and cheerful in the US you need an MVNO that works on the GSM networks here: ATT or T-Mo. dslreports.com is another good resource for user feedback in the forums about the services. I have lycamobile, which would be expensive if you're a heavy data user. It uses T-Mo, which is fine where I am (Los Angeles), but coverage can be spotty. Don't know anything about Canada.

There. Fixed that for you.

MOD PARENT UP! Up, up, up. I haven't seen that noted anywhere else yet. And that strikes me as pretty damn critical in the current environment.

Yup. 29 breaks tree style tabs. It breaks the UI more than any other UI breakage they've done, which is saying a lot. Calling that "very customizable" is sort of like Wheeler saying that breaking the internet into toll roads is net neutrality.

Stay the hell away from it.

My personal solution has been to go to Iceweasel and put a hold on that, just in case they decide to follow FF to perdition.

Alternatively, hold the FF you've got (listed earlier in comments): sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en.

If you're on windows, people are recommending Palemoon.

It might be a bit cumbersome to have that process for all changes. But I couldn't agree more about the principle of the thing. FOSS is supposed to give control to the user.

Not to the marketing department. Not to ad space. Not funneling users toward trackers. Not even puffing up some dev's ego.

And as their UX crumbled, I'd take as much time as it took to get it working right for me again. I loved Firefox, loved the openness, user control, the community. I converted everybody I could to it who wasn't already on it.

Well, not any more. "Precariously one step away" from more Mozilla idiocy about sums it up and I've had enough. This time I'm not spending hours fixing everything the UX'tards broke. I've moved to Iceweasel and locked the version. You may want to try that too.

Maybe that solution will work for enough years (generations?) for open source browser devs to remember that open source was supposed to be about user control and choice.

That would be "B." Any hardware will become unable, at the software/DRM level, to render the previous content.

Exactly. So much for it not being a safety issue. Homicides are a safety issue.

Mod parent up!

Or something. For people with zero brains about software, security doesn't register. There's this object they need, and so long as they don't kick the legs out from under it, it should work.

Then along comes the seller (the whole "licensing" concept doesn't register either) and says "I'm gonna let people into your office to smash up your table. And all the crazy stuff you put on top of it."

That's just Not Done in the world of tables, and likewise for software in a lot of people's minds.

Add something about, "Pay up. I wouldn't want anything to happen to that nice little business you got there." and to plenty of people it's going to look like extortion, not the obvious result of the fact that software is not actually like a table.

(Personally, I'd want to say, "Move to open source. You can do what you want there." But I know that's even stupider than Microsoft. What are the chances someone who doesn't want to move from Windows to Windows is going to move all the way to some extrasolar weirdness?)

[Google] doesn't somehow fucking get that their company exists only because they are in the business of data gathering.
Exactly. Now that it's all out there, now -- gee whiz! -- they want it to stop. (Note: then turn off the tracking on your own damn servers. See? Simple.)
The time to stop it was years ago, when some man of wealth and taste first suggested it in a meeting.

It takes about five years, lots of concrete = lots of CO2 emissions, to build a 1GW reactor. You'd need to complete about one per week for the next 35 years to replace ONE-SEVENTH of the energy we now get from fossil fuels. (Pascala and Socolow, Science pdf 2004) (Stanford pdf on implementing sustainable energy.) Finish one reactor per week. Good luck with that.

And if you managed that, you'd run out of fuel for those reactors within a couple of decades. (Don't start with the but-but thorium!, or fusion, or god-knows-what-all. The testing and permitting on new tech would take us way past peak oil.)

You'd have to take care of the expected waste, plus the unexpected waste from accidents, for ever.

Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.

The more time, effort, and money we waste chasing nukes, the less we have for a real solution.

There are no snake oil salesmen. Fast food companies promise fat and pimples, not skateboarding youth and beauty. And when there's a 4-wheel drive SUV on a mountain peak, they're always careful to show you the helicopter putting it there.