Their top guy Murphy is heading up the re-write. :-)

By the time any merger is completed, though, Trump's term will be almost over -- this one anyway. :-)

Agreed. Thanks for expanding on that.

Trump has anyway, though I'm also guessing the next (Democrat) administration will remove all decorations he's done - useless gold trophies and filigree plastered everywhere, pointless signage ("The Oval Office"), the Presidential wall of fame (currently deriding past Democrat Presidents), his name on the Kennedy Center (which is probably unlawful as the old name was set by law), etc... Hopefully the Mar-a-Lago patio and ridiculous ballroom will go too. I will admit, though, that the signage is probably useful for now so Trump knows where he is and what room he's in. :-)

This administration has figured out that "National Security" are magic words to skip (or forestall) legal scrutiny, like here with his ballroom: Trump administration says White House ballroom construction is a matter of national security

Also noting this humorous bit: Trump Admits No One Wants to Build Him a Monument

Sure, but a Fiat 500 and Ford F150 are completely different types of vehicles from a functional standpoint. A Sun vs. HP workstation or SystemV vs BSD Unix vs. Linux, are less so, from a functional standpoint anyway.

On the other hand, I have a 2001 Honda Civic Ex Coupe and 2002 Honda CR-V EX (both 5-sp manuals) and the interior controls are almost identical.

s/Linux/BSD/

Well, I'm a simple guy. :-) But, to be fair, they (still) work just fine. Newer isn't always better.

My Windows 10 system is a Dell XPS 420 a friend gave me (that then had Win7 on it) and it runs Windows well, even with just 8GB RAM. I did replace the HDD with an SSD (and added a SATA-3 PCIe card for it) when the HDD looked like it was going to (finally) flake out and that did give me a good performance boost. My Linux Mint system was built using an ASRock Z77 Extreme3 motherboard, and EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2 PS, a friend gave me, on which I swapped in an Intel i7-3770 and added 32GB RAM and SSD; works great and easily handles a VM or two. Haven't found a use for my Dell PowerEdge T110 w/32GB ECC RAM yet, but will. I have an old HP a6130n (Athlon 64 X2 (B) 5000+, with 8GB RAM), from somewhere, that I repurposed, in a smaller case, as my router with OPNsense after my D-Link DSR-250 router was flagged with an unfixable (meaning, won't fix) security issue. It pulls a little more power than an appliance, but I have the Linux Power Mode set to "Adaptive" and that toned it down a LOT - as measured by a Kill-a-Watt meter.

I'll grant you that many (most?) people get their PCs with the OS pre-installed and go from there and are intimidated by the thought of installing something from scratch - with the associated anxiety of transferring their files, etc... but it's not actually an impossible, or even super difficult, task. When I do this for (or with) friends - installing either Linux or Windows - I always use a new disk so they know their old system isn't destroyed, and then I/they keep it for a while in case anything got missed, and that seems to help a lot. In the process, they do seem to learn a little and get more comfortable with their system.

I'd buy that as an additional argument to an Energy Star certification being an independent assessment - that (other) companies can't lie about. Having to pay for the certification is part of the equation, and not having one would be a detriment when comparing a product to one that does, as well as the various values among those that do.

And this helps explain all the clips of dogs and cats (apparently) actually watching TV. They need even higher frame rates to perceive motion, which many modern flat screens offer. A quick Google search returns various sources saying dogs need at least 70-80Hz and cats at least 100-110Hz to perceive motion, also noting that they, like many animals, see colors differently than humans.

So... Cameron's saying people flocked to it for the frame rate, not the story? :-)

Wrapped in plastic with a hand-written "Use By" or "Best if used by" date. :-)

I'll buy that assertion. Although, I've recently switched from Office (2010 to using LibreOffice - in preparation for switching from Windows 10 to Linux Mint full-time - and found the latter acceptable, though some tweaking and re-work was needed, especially for the spreadsheets. My Publisher files (mostly greeting cards) are another matter and even using Scribus will be a bunch of work to migrate. Having Office on Linux would make things much easier. I don't mind the effort and self re-training, but can easily see how businesses and non-techies might balk at that. Of course, porting Office to Linux wouldn't be in the best interest of Microsoft and their desire to lock people into their ecosystem, which now includes the cloud.

I don't buy the "The Paradox of Choice" argument here. Yes, there are a *bunch* of distros - probably too many - but to each their own. Unless you have a super specific need or want, any of the top 5 or 10 will almost certainly work for you. Just pick one. If you want to try something different, stand up a VM and try it out; if you like that one better, migrating is pretty simple. That may sound complicated for non-techies, but it's really not. A few Google searches - and some actual reading :-) - is all you really need for almost any Linux question. Certainly easier than RTFM that I had to do *way* back in university on the 4.3BSD VAX 11/758 system - Ah... An on-campus VT100, Emacs for work and Rogue/Hack for play (at 3am), those were the days.

I used Ubuntu for a long time, but switched to Mint when Canonical went balls deep into Snap. I considered Debian, but liked Mint better. I've used RHEL and CentOS at work for a bit, but prefer the Debian flavors over the RedHat ones. In any case, there all basically fine and I'm adaptable. I imagine others are too.

I've also installed Mint for friends who have older PCs, that can't run Windows, and just needed some basic things, like a browser and light editing, etc... Mint was easy for them to pick up (and am sure others are too) but I have the same thing at home I can easily help them out if/when needed - which I haven't need to.

As a software engineer and systems administrator I've used a many different versions of Unix, and several Linux, on a lot of different hardware and (a) you get used to things and things being different and (b) that helps you in the long run as it keeps your mind/thinking flexible. I imagine that true for a lot of people here. Admittedly, it is annoying when things are just a little bit different between systems; the various flavors of Unix are guilty of this as much as the Linux ones, and successions of Windows.

Operating Systems: Unix (BSD, Convex OS, Cray Unicos, Digital Unix, HP-UX, IRIX, OSF/1, SCO, Solaris, SunOS, NCR System V, Ultrix), Linux (several Debian and RHEL flavors), Windows NT/2000/XP/7/10 2003/2008/2012, InterLISP-D, VAX/VMS, TOPS-20, NOS, NOS/VE.

Hardware: Convex C1, C2; Cray 2, YMP; DEC Alpha, 5000, System-10, MicroVAX-II, VAX-11/785, PDP-11/44; HP T600, K580, K460, D380, A/L/N-Class and various workstations; Intel x86; Myrias; NCR Tower-1632; SGI Origin 2000, Power Challenge, Indigo, Indy; Sun (E5000, many workstations); Xerox 1108, CDC Cyber Series.

Languages: Ada, BASIC, BAT/CMD, Bash/Ksh/Sh, C, Csh, FORTRAN, Java, JavaScript, LISP (several), Pascal, Perl, PowerShell, PROLOG, Tcl/Tk, VBScript; Assembly: Cray 2, Intel x86, PDP-11, VAX-11. A few others a little here and there.