Well, they didn't have very much health care back then, so a wrong stab wound and...

There's a lot to unpack in your 3 lines of text, but most of it is wrong, you should read some history books. Human sacrifice wasn't practiced in the roman empire. Indeed at the time of the Trojan War it was already old memory and found abhorrent. As for gladiator, it was similar to american wrestling: trained pro athletes putting on a show. Accidents did happen, but killing each other wasn't part of the show. Now prisoners condemned to death sometimes yes, but remind me how many people the US executed last year ?

Downloaded an hour or two ago from the official websites before I made my previous comment. In the meantime, I tested Manjaro further and managed to get the sound working on it after some experimentation using alsamixer, which strangely enough, the exact same method does not work on Fedora or Mint. I find it funny that alsamixer can even correctly identify the sound card model, while the supposedly much more up-to-date GUIs of KDE and GNOME can't even do that, let alone correctly configure the sound channels (the GUI claims to be able, but does nothing).

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

I just tested some live distros here. Fedora, Mint, etc. Guess what, none of them were able to use my sound card (AE-5) correctly, no sound in any of the distros tested. Oh, several “suggestions” on how to fix it via command line, of course. And guess what, none of them worked.

I work in IT supporting about 300 scientists with Win+Linux+Mac, about 33% each, but with Win11 we decided to change policy: deny requests for Windows unless really necessary and give that user a Linux PC for a month. After a month, if they *still* want Windows, okay.

Yes, absolutely right. But the homeschooled US kids I saw had their entire 'social mixup' done in church or at the gun range...

True. When buying a PC if there was an OS option choice [Windows] [Linux] [None] I'm sure Linux would be on par with Windows. Why there hasn't been an anti-trust settlement to enforce this 25 years ago is beyond me.
Disclaimer: 25 years ago, doing technical support to my family (about 10PCs), I got pissed at them for having to clean viruses over and over week after week, so I gave them an ultimatum: I install Linux and provide full support, or you get a Mac and are on your own, or I categorically refuse to approach Windows anymore. 75% took the Linux options, 25 the Mac. And it's been about 10min a week (total) of support via ssh since then. My 60yo parents didn't even notice the change (I put them up with KDE with a Windows look).

Why is it more cost effective to build a new Capitol than to build a water pipeline?

It really shouldn't be a political stance. Psychologists (and common sense) show that children *need* contact with other children. Otherwise they grow up into little cultists of various ilks. I grew up where homeschooling is next to non-existent and when I moved to the US I saw how close minded it turned many adults into.

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

This. Homeschooling should be illegal. Except in rare cases of severe handicap. Or as an option for *additional* credits if not available in the public school where the kid is going. But as you say it's used for control and to keep kids from meeting different viewpoints. Do you think there would be so many young nazi and evangelists if everyone was going to public school ?!?

And BTW I also strongly think that private schools should not exist. Finland closed them all and they are now... #1 in education worldwide. If the rich have to send their kids with the plebe, they make sure it's at least well funded.

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

Developer here with almost the same amount of experience as the other guy.

The problem with Linux is that although it is very good as an operating system, it is still trash as a desktop. As a developer I need a good desktop to work on, where things just work and all applications work consistently. Copying and pasting, for example, should not behave differently in each application you use as happen in Linux desktop.

And then there's the serious problem of fragmentation. If I had to migrate to Linux permanently, I would have to choose between literally hundreds of distros, each of which does one thing or another well and everything else mediocrely. I won't even get into installing new applications, which often has unexpected problems even when you use the standard installation method for the selected distro, and may your favorite god protect you if you have to install from source code (which I know how to do, but depending on the size and complexity of the application it can be practically impossible).

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.