It means the next time they show up, they'll need a court order to do so.

F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2

Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge would have little or no measurable effect on a neighbouring galaxy as far away as Andromeda is from us (about 2.54 million light years away).

In fact, it's not until LIGO that we have even been able to detect the mergers of super dense and super massive objects like neutron stars and black holes, just to give you an idea of how the inverse square law limits the influences of gravity over very large distances.

I eagerly await the follow up articles on the whereabouts of DB Cooper and the identity of Jack the Ripper.

There's always Debian.

Um - on a geek site I would expect that readers would be familiar with the huge role copper plays in the grid. If you don't know this, jfgi.

Just like the subject says, supersymmetry, an elegant solution to a number of problems, in particular the best theoretical extension to the Standard Model, slides closer to oblivion with each large scale and small scale (accelerator) experiment meant to find these large supersymmetrical particles.

I am a full professor, and at my school apparently I could be assigned any menial task if I cannot reach my teaching load. This is a real issue as we are all being forced to 4/4 from 3/3 next year, as the school canned our research releases.

Professors of marketing and management are not intellectuals. They are ultimately shills for the commercial world, as we see here. Their biggest concern is to shift more widgets.

Ah yes, this moral panic is totally different than all the other times people have been whipped into a frenzy by an almost bon existent problem.

We have real problems to solve. I'll leave the fake ones to people like you.

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

Oh good, another moral panic. If people aren't terrified every waking moment of their lives, someone hasn't done their job.

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.

Facebook offers services, some free, some paid, to citizens of Brazil so yes, their activities can be legislated.

This is where his supporters on /. tell us that voting for Harris would have been voting for foreign wars...