Even if you want to eat healthy, there isn't really much "fast" food that isn't something like burgers and fries.

If all you look for is burgers and fries that's all you'll find. It's easy in most towns and cities to find Mexican, Italian or Chinese take out if you just make a little effort, and other ethnic foods as well once you're living in a real city. All you have to do is look.

I didn't "make it about you." I pointed out that if you understood how copyright works, you wouldn't have had to ask.

Maybe before you try discussing this situation you should take the time to learn what copyrights are and why they were invented because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

And this is why patents and copyrights are for a limited time, after which they enter the public domain and are free for anybody to use. Yes, the Bern Convention extends copyrights to an unreasonable duration, but even they eventually end. You may or may not agree that morally what the AI companies are doing when they use copyrighted material without permission and without paying royalties is theft, but that's what the law says, and that law should be enforced.

The AI industry is based on copyright infringement and plagiarism. If they stopped using copyrighted material and limited themselves to stuff in the public domain, all of their training material would be decades out of date and then where would they be?

Linux desktop environments (DEs) are generally fairly easy to configure the way you want. And, if you find it hard to get it looking the way you want, or there are things you don't like about it, there's nothing to stop you from trying a different one. My suggestion is to find out which DE the Linux diistro you're considering using ahead of time to avoid any sudden surprises after installation.

At this point, we know how important proper hygiene is to our health, but we don't know, yet, what the results are of having all that microplastic inside our bodies. It's probably not good for us, and getting rid of as much of it as possible is certainly a Good Idea on the basis of better safe than sorry. Still, it's probably too soon to assume that it's dangerous.

Yes, there was a time that the 5.25 floppy, DSDD, was king, storing a whole 360K. However, not everybody used that storage format. I had a TI 99/4A that used an external 5.25 drive and formatted its floppies to 390K. Good luck using some sort of PC to read those if you don't know about the oddball formatting!

And the remaining coal companies, in the ongoing war on coal MINERS, keep adding more automation.

I know that when you write about a war on coal miners, you're only being rhetorical, but that wasn't always so. Take a look at what happened a little over a century ago when mine owners tried to break up a miner's strike in southern Colorado and ended up with the Ludlow Massacre. That day's toll was 21 dead, mostly miners and their families, out of an estimated total of 69 to 199 people killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews declared it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."

Bollocks. The "Linux desktop" been downhill since 2008 or so when GNOME 3 was introduced, creating a desktop that wasn't intuitive, didn't use CUA mechanics allowing easy discoverability by people who were familiar with Windows or Mac (...or Amiga or GEM or... etc... etc...), and was just plain awkward.

I take it, then, that the only Linux DEs you've tried are Gnome and Mate. There are others, you know, and some of them very easy to configure. When Gnome 3 was announced, I took a look at what it was going to be and was appalled. Not only was it hard to configure without third party addons that might stop working at any time, it needed more RAM that I had, and things like paying my bills and putting food on the table were more important than hardware upgrades. I took a quick look at KDE, and couldn't find anywhere on their website that told me what was so great about it, just "Try it, you'll love it!" and similar advocacy.

Then I found Xfce, and rapidly fell in love with it. Not only is it lightweight, it's highly configurable and easy to get it to look the way you want, especially if you add Compiz into the mix. Of course, Xfce isn't for everybody and it doesn't work, yet, with Wayland, but again, that's part of it's being lightweight. Personally, I use Fedora, and if you want to do things the easy way, Fedora has an Xfce spin that you can use to try it out, and if you like it, you can install from the LiveMedia.

If the people using copyrighted material to train their AI aren't making a profit, that will just make it less desirable for them to "borrow" other people's work without asking or paying royalties especially when you consider how much public domain text is out there and free to use.

That may have been their excuse, but I'd bet that the real reason was for correcting grammar and being right.

Yes indeed. I'm constantly appalled here by posts written by people who have (or at least imply that they have) at least one college degree and possibly more but write like a high-school dropout. Poor spelling, (Can't they use their computer's spelling checker?), misuse of it's and its, using the various forms of "their" seemingly at random, constant syntax errors and punctuation put in by guess work. Now I only have a high-school diploma and two years of college before I ended up in Uncle Sam's Navy, but at least I don't have to be ashamed of my writing skills. I only wonder what Henry Higgins would have to say about the writing standards here.

Maybe it was just rash and defensive locker room talk? Maybe you wanted to provoke a response for a conversation?

That wasn't some sort of BS trying to make an impression, it was the reaction you should expect from a soldier or sailor defending an Allie from an invasion. If you can't, or won't understand that, we can never have a meeting of the minds.

I notice your memories don't involve people. And you suggest it's easy to kill them.

The only reason I might be lonely here is would be that all of my friends live about 1,000 miles away now that my sister and I live in our retirement home in a different time zone, but oddly enough I don't feel lonely. And the reason the memories I listed don't involve people is that I don't know you, I don't know what kind of experiences you'd understand and decided to stick to the type of thing that would make sense to anybody reading this. As an example, I have many good memories from the time I spent as a seeing eye person for a diabetic genius who'd gone blind because of diabetic retinopathy and keeping him working at JPL as a computer programmer until he had to retire because of kidney failure. Would you understand why I like remembering getting three cheers every year at a LASFS meeting, first as a Patron Saint and now as a Sacred Object? As you can probably see, my best memories aren't exactly mainstream, but they are my memories and I cherish them. Now, why do you feel that you have to denigrate everything in my life trying to prove that you're better than me? And, as far as it being easy to kill people goes, stop putting words in my mouth.