I usually download Linux on my Raspberry Pi and install it on a new x86-64 laptop. The RPi is my random tasks computer that is hooked up to one of the ports on my living room TV. The RPi comes in handy because it has some I/O ports I can use to hook up experiments. And I have some emulators installed. And I have a wacky arcade joystick hacked together and plugged into it.

If I were to install Windows today, I'd have to download the disk images from Microsoft using Firefox on a Linux computer. I think theoretically it would work, but I have no idea if I'd hit any roadblocks along the way.

Both solid choices. Debian is also a nice option that I fall back to.

Zorin is for people who want to pay Zorin instead of Canonical for nice installer and some roadmap for long-term hardware and security support. With Canonical and Red Hat being the stronger choices for the latter.

What's an example of a common task? Copying files onto a USB stick? Formatting said USB stick? Editing a WAV file? Playing movies and MP3s? Ripping a CD? I think Linux and several other OSes have covered these particular common tasks for quite some time now.

Of course, if you're used to Windows or a Mac, the steps and names of the programs are going to be different on Linux/*BSD. But at a high level it's going to be a very similar process to complete any "common task".

I run Zorin on two machines, I went for it because they tweaked the UI a bit in a way that I thought might be nice. Overall happy but there are also things I wish they would change.

XDG and other Freedesktop.org specs are careful to identify the concept of a Unix-like operating systems. And nothing in the spec requires it to run on UNIX specifically, although the spec does identify features from UNIX that it depends on. Implement those features and you can implent this spec. Linux and several others have done so already.

D-K just describes the phenomenon. It doesn't excuse the behavior. It's basically an observation that low performers are poor at self assessment of their abilities. This should not surprise people today, and it did not surprise philosophers of ancient Greece.

I'm not aware of such a dementia diagnose. Do you have more information? Sounds fascinating if it exists outside of your own head.

Epidemiology covers the study of this. You would be better served having a population with broad immunity in order to protect a small population of those that lack immunity.

In short, no man is an island. And we need to quite trying to solve every problem as if we are individuals that have no duty or consequences outside of our own doorstep.

Or white mothers are making a lot of noise about nothing. And black mothers are complaining due to systemic problems in the system, problems she faced herself, and she now sees her child facing.

You can't dismiss the "race card" because from the outside the symptoms look the same for all races (parents complaining).

"Of those who responded to the survey, 40 percent of those in the U.S. House of Representatives who have school-aged children, and 49 percent of those in the Senate who have school-aged children, send or have sent at least one of their children to private school.", source: Heritage Foundation

That organization has an agenda to represent the position of so-called "school choice", so I think if anything they would pump the numbers up higher for private school (kind of already have in the phrasing: "at least one of").

That said, I'm willing to accept that 41% of Senators use public school exclusively. That seems realistic. For politicians at the state and local level, it's going to vary far more than a small group that lives in D.C.

I know of some local politicians who have kids in the public school system. But I live (or used to live) in the SF Bay Area, which has several good public schools and many bad ones. Live near a good school, then why wouldn't you send your kids there. If you paid a premium to live in Cupertino, part of that is because it is desirable for its school district (Monta Vista, etc).

No, let's have bands of uneducated losers that have nothing better to do than breaking into our houses and steal our stuff. Then we can invest 10X more money in our police force than we would have in icky socialist public education.

On the plus side, these uneducated rabble will have the right to vote and to own to fire arms. So perhaps after a few generations of this nonsense they'll overthrow our great-grandchildren's regime.

Journalists kind of suck at communicating science to laypeople, in part because journalists are laypeople themselves, and in part because they suffer from Dunning–Kruger syndrome and are too stupid to realize their their journalism degree doesn't mean their expertise extends to all areas.

Under the Biden administration, you'll see several phrases from the CDC that are more measured. Such as "a path forward" or other variations using the key word "forward". I don't know why anyone would pick up some random journalists, especially one like Maddow who has been more about shock titles and opinion pieces, over some sort of expert, such as an epidemiologist. I guess picking sides based on Left versus Right politics is just how some people's brain works. Forgive my harshness, but that's a stupid way to operate. Rather viewers/listeners should invest in weighing if someone is wholly unqualified to comment and doesn't belong in the discussion (with Maddow*, she rarely belongs in a serious scientific or economic or military discussion).

* Maddow's partner is a wonderful woman and I enjoy her art (photography but abstract?)

Annoying and overly literal puzzles are my generation's jam. And really any generation going at least as far back as those who read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or the Oz books.

I still haul Zork out once a decade and play at least the first one. I rarely have the energy to power through the second or third. I also occasionally pick up Return to Zork (1993) which is more of a full motion point-and-click game. A genre that really has no equivalent today and is perhaps more obsolete than a text adventure, as the low-res videos and acting have not aged that well.

No, but 30 years ago people thought I was being paranoid, a crank, or just being difficult (troll, contrarian, etc)

Are you suffering from memory loss or "brain fog" ? I'm not sure how months of telling people to wear a mask, stay home if they are sick, and get vaccinated translated to 100% cure in your head.

(effectiveness of last year's vaccine show it to be high in children, 79% and lower in adults, 34%. source: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/downl... )

Make whatever claim you want. But if it's not supported by evidence then you're just flapping your gums.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there is a faction that wants to intentionally erode the public's trust in government services. To dismantle a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And replace it with a very different sort of government; one that eschews pluralism, reserves individual liberty to those with power(money), and establishes a rigid hierarchy with a unitary executive at the top.

For the most part, when the media talks about "math" in primary and lower secondary school we're talking about arithmetic. I remember learning Calculus as a teenager, and it was confusing and not intuitive, but once I got it there was very little more I needed to do. That was a completely different experience compared to multiplication, where I had to drill with flash cards before I had enough of the fundamentals in order to do arbitrarily large multiplication problems, and later it proved to be a vital prerequisite for long division.

Not everything stuck with me, despite practice. I'm really slow at polynomial division, I don't have the basic process down in my head and I use it so rarely that I tend to have forgotten steps when I eventually do need to do it.

I think by the time someone enters high school, they ought to have a basic skill in arithmetic. They don't have to be the fastest at it, but it's going to hold them back in the sciences if not mathematics.

Do you want a nurse that can't add 0.15 mL and 0.35 mL ? Processes in a hospital avoid putting people in the situation of doing arithmetic on the spot, but it tends to happen and people screw it up.