Life imitates art I guess. Aunty Wainwright did this back in the 80s in her shop on Last of the summer wine. Although her method was a bit more hands on and personable.

No Samsung ad-displaying fridges? That's good news.

Trump was not elected by the majority of Americans. He won at most 50% of the vote. Turnout was 63% of registered voters. And registered voters is approximately 75% of eligible US citizens. All told that means at most 25% of Americans voted for him. That's still shocking of course. But now you can see why the GOP is all about making voting as difficult as possible so that a mere 25% of the country can continue to force their will on the rest.

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

My brother likes to say Star Trek also has a lot to answer for. TNGs ubiquitous touch screens are now a widespread infection in nearly all devices today including refrigerators, washing machines, and unfortunately automobiles. No one thought to ask "but is this actually a good idea?". Also Star Trek's talking computer with a conversational interface is now becoming mainstream with llms.

The big three hardly make any cars anymore. It's all SUVs, crossovers, and trucks.

That's hilarious calling me a soft lefty.

It's no dig by the way. It's reality. As a conservative voter I reserve my harshest criticism for them since they are ostensibly "my kind of people" and they know better. While my values in most ways align most closely with many who call themselves Conservative, I would be willfully ignorant to not call attention to their many failings as a party, as well as the rank hypocrisy that so often accompanies right-wing politics these days. I've been a party to some very honest discussions with our local Conservative representatives in the Legislature and Parliament. Our local guys are generally honest but do get caught up in the Party line rather than represent the actual needs of their constituents, as do all MPs from all parties.

I may have little in common with [Ll]iberals but I can understand how they come by their positions.

The problem with midsize trucks is that they aren't actually much smaller than a full size truck now, except that for some inexplicable reason the box is about an inch too narrow to put a sheet of plywood in the back. Also these midsize trucks are nearly as expensive as the full size and, like you say, they don't get significantly better fuel efficiency than the full size truck. Given these facts it's no wonder North Americans prefer the full-size trucks.

As for the Lightning, it is a reasonably good fit for the farm. I burn tons of gas putting around checking on irrigation. Electric would do it except for a couple of issues: curb weight and overall price. The weight alone gives me pause as I drive in soft fields and don't want to get stuck all the time, or leave horrible ruts.

Ironically the people that actually work for a living and need trucks are such a small market compared to those who just want to drive around luxury trucks as as status symbol. So we end up having to buy trucks that really have way more bells and whistles than we need (carpet for one). Trucks that are meant for trades people do exist and they do sell pretty well. They also tend to be just one color, white. But I'm glad I still have some options.

The reality is far more nuanced than that. Despite Trump's attempts to make it otherwise, the economies of Canada and the US are deeply intertwined as are our banking industries and law enforcement. As a general rule, Canadian companies and the Canadian government cooperate with American authorities on issues of copyright infringement and other intellectual property issues. The US commands a tremendous amount of extrajudicial power over its allies. You can argue whether this is out of intimidation or out of a sense of shared, common values. This includes, often, extraditing the accused after a certain amount of due process in Canada.

One thing that's always bothered me is that the Conservative Party has always rolled over to every American demand. Since both American political parties are to the right of any party in Canada, I guess they deeply admire American muscle and what the US lets corporations get away with. I suspect this propensity is the biggest reason they lost the last federal election.

Not troll! It's absolutely true. Parent post is +1 insightful.

I do but the publishers take most of it and give the authors only a pittance. Unless of course the author is one of the few that has become wealthy from their most popular books.

Is Linux an OS by your definition? A recent slashdot post linked to a web page where Linux runs in webasm. It boots and runs /bin/sh as init. You can run a few basic commands including top. But it surely can't run firefox or anything "useful." Come to that my router runs Linux but I can't run "anything" on it. So it must not be an "OPERATING SYSTEM" then according to you.

Your car analogy is nonsense by the way. The engine is clearly still there. Only the steering wheel and seats have been removed. Car is totally functional though.

Yes when running MS-DOS software you could say it was a shell. But in 386 it ran in protected mode, something that MS-DOS surely didn't do natively. I consider windows 3.1 to be it's own operating system that incorporated MS-DOS as a part of it. I used many MS-DOS shells in my day and windows 3.1 was way more than that. Windows even required its own drivers separate from DOS.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."