FFS, roughly a third of human-caused methane emissions come from CAFOs (feedlots for cows and pigs raised for meat) and TFA only speaks in local percentage increases, so I've no idea how much extra methane this is in absolute terms, but it's hard to imagine that it's anything more than a rounding-error compared to the impact from animal agriculture and other industries. Leave the beavers alone and buy locally-raised beef and pork instead of buying it from a big-box grocery store. It's more expensive, so you'll eat less of it, and be more healthy to boot.

Yeah, the earliest microbial life can be traced to between 3.7 and 4.1 billion years ago. The Cambrian explosion (540mya) would be interesting, but not as interesting as the process(es) whereby inanimate matter became cellular life.

If one already has good security in place, VPNs really can't increase that, but they *can* make it harder to find someone's identity from an IP address, if, and only if, the VPN provider doesn't know who you are. In other words if the VPN provider gets their data exfiltrated, and that data contains IP addresses that are linked to you personally, then you can (potentially) be ID'd by an IP address, just like if your ISP "leaks" that same data. Some VPN providers make a big deal about deleting logs and big ISPs like comcast don't, but how can you ever know for sure? I mean if your life depends on iron-clad anonymity, you really need something better than just a commercial VPN account purchased with a credit card that can be linked to you.

I just logged into my xfinity account. No prompt to change my password. Their site is a shitshow. Not surprised they got owned. Most of the "leaked" data is pretty ho-hum at this point, since it's all been "leaked" so many times for most of us that it doesn't really matter, but the million dollar question: did the leak include customer IP addresses? TFA doesn't say. I realize that comcast probably already sells that data to the highest bidder, but now if it's "out there" for anyone to grab, anyone can use that data to identify LOTS of people by IP address...

I'd love to use Jellyfin, but it's persnickety about folder structure, and I don't feel like renaming and moving stuff around, since plex doesn't care about folder and file names at all, it (almost always) just works with whatever I throw at it. I might switch someday, but for now plex still works, and *does* work when my internet connection goes down for streaming local content from my local server. I keep seeing people saying that it doesn't, but that's not the case for me. The plex client pauses for a few seconds when first connecting if the internet is unreachable, but after that, browsing my local media server works like always.

Regarding this newest development, if you share your media library with other people, don't load or watch media that you don't want them to see and/or turn off all the crappy features you don't want.

I agree that PHP (still) sucks, but the alternative is to completely rewrite legacy PHP applications in another language, which isn't practical, especially for time-tested, reasonably well-written code. It's (much) easier to keep on top of breaking changes in the language than it is to start from scratch, especially when dealing with only a few thousand lines of (more or less) modular code, since starting from scratch is going to create a lot more bugs than renaming/rearranging a few function calls. Most of the abominations from the PHP3/4 era have been removed completely from PHP at this point so I'm hopeful (?) that breaking changes going forward will be less common, especially in code that has been updated continuously over 5 major versions of the language already. Having said all that, would I choose PHP for writing a new project from scratch today? No. I would not. Though to be fair, when I look at the landscape of "popular" languages today, I'm not sure I'd want to use any of them. I'd probably want to use Perl 5. If Perl 6 had an implementation suitable for production applications, I'd want to use that. Now get off my patch of wild plants (I don't have a lawn).

Migrating PHP versions isn't *that* bad... If you're lucky enough to have not used stuff that gets changed... I have code I've carried all the way from 3 to 8. There were a lot of gotchas: basic behaviors that changed. Insane things like changing parameter order for built-ins and syntax changes for working with arrays(!) Most of the changes have been "good" in terms of making the language less bad, but no fun if you have to maintain (really) old code.

PHP has had "namespaces" since 5.3, though I've never used any of that.

Totally. Even PHP 7.4 will continue to be semi-supported (at least security patches) on most "server" distros at least through 2024, even though the PHP devs stopped officially supporting it already. Upgrading for the sake of upgrading is never a good practice, though it's never good to be left high and dry either...

There are already treatments for migraine using TMS:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

If TUS is more precise, and can be made to do similar things to the brain, it's possible we'll see it also used to treat chronic migraine.

I'm not a candidate for TMS migraine treatment, since (thankfully) mine are not severe or frequent enough and (also thankfully) they seem to be diminishing with age.

NSAIDs are hit-or-miss for me with migraines, unless I take an ibuprofen (neither acetaminophen nor aspirin work for me at all) before the migraine progresses. It's likely that the generic ibuprofen you have does contain the active ingredient, but it is probably a different (cheaper) formulation.

Lucid dreaming is a relatively simple thing to learn to do for some people. I can see how it would be possible to use a device like this as a shortcut to learning the technique, since that requires a lot of trial and error and practice. One of the existing shortcut techniques for lucid dreaming is an external stimulus, which, if you don't have a fancy TUS gizmo with machine learning, is a less-fancy, non-brain-stimulating device (which can be a person watching you sleep or any number of devices that have been available for decades) that is capable of detecting your entry into REM sleep and stimulating you.

I don't care what anyone says, this is really cool, and anyone who doesn't think so needs to turn in their space-nerd card, if they have one.

I see what you're saying, and I agree that's a deficit, but isn't an issue for me, and as you say, there's a workaround, but life in windows also often requires workarounds for pretty basic things, so at least for me, it's still not worse than windows. As long as the easy things are easy and the hard things are possible, I'm happy, especially if critical stuff doesn't randomly and annoyingly fall over, which for the most part is the case for my install at this point.

I've been using LMDE 5 for a few months now as my primary desktop. I've used linux almost since there was linux, but never as my main desktop; always as servers or secondary machines, with a primary windows (or mac, long ago) desktop. Every flavor of Linux as a desktop I've tried (and I've tried most of them) has always had fiddly bits that got in my way more often than I liked, or just plain didn't work out for me, usually only in edge cases, but still, it was never quite there. I'm sure I could have gotten used to the warts, but I didn't have to, so I never stuck with it. Mint pretty much solves all that, for me at least, along with QEMU for the few things I still need windows for. It really is almost zero-config unless you're running leading-edge hardware (I had to install a newer kernel for full GPU and some sensor support, which was easy with a debian backport, though I still don't have fan speed data, but I'm living with that for now) or just want to mess with stuff, which I've done a ton of, but I think most users could switch and never care about windows again. I'm kind of surprised that people aren't switching from windows in droves now. I guess the inertia of windows is huge. Cinnamon isn't better than windows, in terms of functionality, but it's also not worse, which is good enough for me. Looking forward to upgrading to LMDE 6!

Good point, that too.

If it's big enough and fast enough, there's no need to ever delete anything, just write the data you need to update in a new location. I'm pretty sure the ssd in my 10 year old machine hasn't written anything even close to a yottabyte in it's lifetime.

The solution is simple, if an employer wants office workers to come in to the office, they pay for the employee's time, maybe time and a half (hazard pay) for the time spent commuting. Commute time to work is work time. Remote work might start to look better to them then.