I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

And he certainly can't be held responsible for Brexit, which is why Britain is in the state it's in now. It's fascinating to watch how the Tories, and their fellow travellers across the pond, hold a government that is only been in power for a year responsible for their own actions.

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.

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.

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...

That just about sums it up. Moving drivers into user land definitely reduces the attack surface. As it stands, antivirus software in most cases is essentially a rootkit, just one we approve of because that low level access allows it to intercept virus activity at the lowest level. With a microkernel, nothing gets to run at that level anyways, so microkernels are inherently more secure.

Traditionally the objection to microkernels was they were slower, since message passing has a processing cost in memory, IO bandwidth and CPU cycles. In the old days where may you had a couple of MB of RAM, or even 8 or 16mb of RAM (like my last 486), with 16 bit ISA architecture and chips that at the high end might run at 40-60mhz, a microkernel definitely was going to be a bit more sluggish, particularly where any part of that bandwidth was being taxed (i.e. running a web stack), so Windows and Linux both, while over time adopting some aspects of microkernel architecture (I believe Darwin is considered a hybrid), stuck with monolithic architecture overall because it really is far less resource intensive.

But we're in the age when 16gb of RAM on pretty high end CPUs where even USB ports have more throughput that an old ISA bus, that I suspect it may be time to revive microkernels.