Patching other programs' memory was a feature in those days. It did make the system quite insecure of course, but it was already quite insecure. Meanwhile it let you do fun tricks. The Amiga was another platform where the lack of memory protection was a virtue. On the other hand, it also made it infeasible as a general purpose computing system going forwards. We did have some pretty good virus scanners, but we needed them.

I am running XFCE and Compiz on a system with a 4060. It's lovely. The animations could be a little smoother, but I am absolutely loving the high quality mipmaps that are missing from KDE. You can really see what is going on in the icon hover previews. My CPU is a 1600 AF (Pinnacle Ridge) which is pretty poky by modern standards, but it was replacing a FX-8350.

Now I just need to finish building avant-window-navigator. The XFCE4 dock is pretty meh. The fucking clock stopped updating for over an hour this morning...

I think most people follow brands and don't think. They don't wanna think. It's tiresome. Maybe they have to do it at work and then they wanna let their brain rest, most of them don't seem to think much at work either though.

Japanese cars have been the best on the planet since they first got their shit together in the late eighties, except for this brief moment where Tesla has had the best EVs because they were the first to put together a bunch of available technologies in a convincing way. Anyone who had R/C cars could tell you that it was time to do it. We just didn't all have emeralds in our pockets.

What is your plan for what to do when they aren't able to meet that responsibility? You need to have one, it's all of our responsibility, "Simple as that."

You want to pass judgement, but I'm betting you don't have a plan for how to make things better. I can have respect for ideas, but not for a lack of them.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

Google is a known member of unconstitutional citizen spying program PRISM operated by the NSA.

Ok, YOU explain why they would rather shut it down and get $0 than sell it and make some money. Remember, your explanation has to make sense, you can't just repeat whatever their PR department is saying.

You can't see why a corporation would say things that aren't true?

KDE3 is the one I like to describe as an explosion in a widget factory.

4 had promise but didn't develop it until it became 5.

5 has a bad bug with wine programs, some of them will only run in the background. Haven't tried to see if 6 has the same problem...

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

They're laying out their plans for up to the end of the decade. You think this is just a fraction of their NA plans, that they're hiding things from their giant "Look, We're Doing EVs!" press release?

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.

Of course there is force.

When your basic needs are tied to employment then you have to be employed to have them met.

Thanks to ongoing improvements in productivity, less work must be done by humans to provide for those needs than ever before, but the owning class has sucked up all of those improvements so that they can make ever more money instead.

If employers are allowed to run off with all those profits and make workers work longer and longer hours then there will be more and more unemployed people whose needs aren't being met. This can, does, will, and will continue to have negative effects on everyone but the ultra wealthy.

Therefore it is not in the best interests of The People to allow it to continue.

The government's job is to ensure the welfare of the people, and if it can't do that then it's worthless at best.

Restricting the number of hours an employer can require you to work is therefore in everyone's best interests, since even the wealthy will lose if the system collapses. They are simply too stupid to realize this.