Absolutely not. Every single employer I've had anything to do with since the early 2000's has required some kind of non-compete, including very small shops. I suspect it's the same for every "knowledge" worker.

I predict this will die a violent death in US courts. Every AG in every red state will be in one or more big zoom meetings by the end of the week preparing to kill this with fire. Don't expect this to be real for years, if ever. They're lining up the judges and injunctions right now. This is fucking with signed contracts and that isn't something that happens in the US without a public law voted on by a legislature, war powers or similar caliber maneuver.

Many of the great names in computing, both hardware and software, were started by motivated refugees from larger outfits, striking out on their own to pursue some market their employer failed to see. If there is an underestimate in any of this it's the positive impact it would have on opportunities for individuals. Just don't bank on it happening: if you make any actual decisions that put you at odds with some document you signed, understand that 10 years from now some corporate lawyer won't hesitate to wreck your world if this is all just an election year legal fiction.

Yes, no hate on Gnome. It's not my cup of tea, but I'm happy if others prefer it. The thing that inspires me, however, is how KDE has prospered, despite huge problems in its past. QT licensing issues back in the day are part of the reason Gnome exists. There was the 4.x debacle. Also, the dominant Linux distros "standardized" on Gnome, or Gnome derivatives.

By all rights KDE should have died long ago. All those issues have since been solved and KDE loyalists have hung in there for years. Now KDE is thriving, the major distros are all supporting it. It's a pretty cool story.

Didn't want that company anyways.

Turns out their guitar cases had laptops in them too, and they can code twice as good as you!

That was the reason I switched to Linux. Of course, I could have switched to BSD, but Debian potato was easier to install.

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

KDE has to be a thing for Fedora because there are a lot of KDE loyalists and distros really can't just forgo supporting them. KDE really is very good and its followers aren't going to tolerate Gnome. Canonical tried to kill Kubuntu in 2012, pulling funding and official support. Kubuntu not only survived it's thriving and is the best choice for Ubuntu based desktops today. Then there is SUSE, which has been tier 1 KDE since forever.

I've heard there are more slaves now than at any time in history. Of course that might not be true if normalized to a percentage of the work force; but the mere fact that it even still exists is of course awful. We've sanitized slavery by re-naming it as "convict labor" or in this case pushing it overseas and wrapping it in layers to disclaim responsibility.

Task: Recite as many digits of pi as you can.

Me: 3.14159. I know there are ways to get more.

AI: Arbitrary number of digits subject only to some hard-coded constraint, as well as able to tell you about all the algorithms for approximating pi along with their strengths and weaknesses, then run the algorithms for you.

Let's see 29 Watts do that.

Sure.

It's all good though. Animators in the West are, doubtless, fully on-board with kumbaya one world goodness, so they have what their virtue insisted upon. Enjoy your subsistence level income.

That's overly specific. How about "can, in principle, be at least as effective as a photon drive". I don't think one can really rule out one that's a bit more effective, even if I've no idea how one would make such a thing. (I believe that a photon drive has theoretic limits on it's efficiency that are a bit more stringent than the more general limits...but there might be some way of generating light that got around those limits...so perhaps "can't be any more efficient that a totally ideally optimal photon drive".)

Even so, I'm not sure. If it's something that can't ever return, most of the arguments about the maximum efficiency fail because there's no way of performing the measurements.

Also there are these cute arguments about drives that essentially require the mass of Jupiter (or more) to distort space-time. Some of those seem to be valid arguments for a drive without a reaction mass. They are just essentially impossible to build.

That said, perhaps these extreme devices...things involving zero point energy, FTL drives, reactionless drives, etc. are really just pointing out a place where the theories are wrong. None of these devices are actually buildable, so nobody can test them, as they all require some form or other of unobtainium. (Constructs with negative mass, portable masses heavier than Jupiter, etc.) I still remember "Rotating cylinders and a global causality violation", even though the plot of the story was a bit ... acausal. (The story doesn't seem to have any on-line references, but *it* was a reference to https://www.franktipler.com/ti... )

More to the point, if they don't collect personally identifiable information, how do they know that you've paid.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

Well, this summary is based on a story from someone quoting a story in The Guardian. Not the best way to get accurate news on science.