My take is completely different. If the building blocks of Life are so abundant, obviously, they are forming spontaneously without biological predecessor. We are built from ribose, nucleobases and phosphates, because they are everywhere. (And this throws a big wrench into the idea of Silicon based life, because we don't see the silicon equivalents of our base molecules appearing in comets and asteroids.)

This is entirely the thing. Loki games can or at least could be coaxed to work on Linux with Loki_Compat libraries, but last time I tried to run Alpha Centauri for Linux even that wouldn't work — and I'm even still using X. But add to that, the Linux versions of games are frequently inferior. The Loki games are included in that, for example in AlphaC for Linux you cannot ctrl-shift-a automate formers only near their supporting base. Fast forward to a more modern game like Civ VI, and there's a huge slew of features and even leaders you can't get access to with the Linux version. Meanwhile, the Windows version runs better on Linux than it does on Windows.

I haven't heard the OS/2 thing, what's that about? I figure it failed because Microsoft was already doing "good enough" with Windows, plus NT had relatively meaningful security and OS/2 didn't.

I like having serious conversations on Slashdot at least as much as the next nerd, but arguments on Slashdot can only be taken slightly seriously today. There's a lot of people here who are not arguing in good faith.

I'm in the US, and I remember news articles about this idea. They passed quickly. If you wound up with a textbook with such ideas in it presented as anything other than a possibility which had been or could be researched, that is unfortunate, but it is not indicative of anything widespread.

Nobody is denying that at all. Nobody is even denying that there was a global cooling article fad. What was different about the global cooling scare from AGW's broad scientific consensus is that it didn't have broad scientific consensus.

Your lack of perception is irrelevant.

And now we see what it stems from, a total lack of logic. Run along now.

Again, people with no experience maybe.

The cars I mentioned use 0W40. A car with shorter oil change intervals than 10K is probably not marketable where I live. Given that the average total time on the road is about 18 years, and the average yearly mileage about 10K, this would mean that the average car is driven for 180K miles with those long intervals.

What you said was dumb because what we need is to reduce emissions further than our weak targets. Also automakers do NOT have any trouble meeting the targets. They could have met those targets years ago, but they would have had to make less exciting vehicles. You're putting your excitement over sustainability. This explains why you support a child molester's tampering with the future.

You cannot make a market freer by removing all regulations. That's a total misunderstanding of how markets work.

"R&D is a sunk cost, especially if it was subsidized. Nobody's going to try to recoup it"

Wat

(etc.)

That's all true if your goal is to serve customers, as opposed to spying on them.

It's happening now. There are serious effects now. And there is mostly a lot of thumb-sitting going on.

Yes, for profit.

AI is chewing through NATURAL RESOURCES faster.

We don't have to pretend, we can see it happening right now. Or rather, not happening.

Nonsense.

Why would I care? I don't speak a language for which call quality matters.

Paying three times as much or more for someone else to keep records for you is dumb. My phone keeps records for me.

Using the word "even" here implies that we would expect Microsoft to be competent, but no one with experience with Microsoft expects that.

Because it was a leasing car, and after 5 years, the leasing contract ran out and could not be extended. Colleagues of mine with more road trips put more than 125K miles on their cars before their contracts run out. And the local mechanic who was doing the oil change (five times during my run) was not laughing at all, because it was his everyday work. In fact, I went to the mechanic whenever the car engine light came up and demanded the oil change. Only one time, when I came in after 17K miles, he was a little wary because I was postponing the oil change for too long for his taste.