Exactly.

Ubuntu is dropping things that Mint doesn't use. Why would that suggest any uncertainty about Ubuntu?

The base that Mint uses doesn't appear to have any shift in direction. Well, Wayland instead of Mir, but that's down the road and may end up in Debian as well at some point.

Yup, TT-RSS replaced Reader for me as well.

There are sites that I *intend* to go to directly, but I never remember. Having the RSS reader on my phone means that I can keep track of what's going on there when I have a free moment.

You'd be wrong. I'd say the number of people who even *own* the refillable cup is tiny, and the number who actually use it regularly is smaller still.

It removes the convenience. You'd have to dump the grounds and clean it, and then refill it. If you're doing all that, why not just do a pour-over?

And a sideslip isn't a bank anyway. You have crossed controls -- it doesn't send you around a curve, it causes the aircraft to fly sideways (slightly.)

I'm not a current pilot. My last flight was in 1988.

But I can tell you that when I was current, a two mile in diameter circular runway would have made me uncomfortable. A typical *small* airport runway is half a mile to a mile in length. A large airport often has a runway of two or more miles in length. That's *straight*. A curve with a radius of one mile is a pretty sharp turn by comparison.

Landing gear really aren't designed for side loads. Turns on the ground are usually made at pretty slow speeds. During the transition between rolling and flying, you're trying to accelerate as fast as possible to a safe flying speed, or trying to decelerate as fast as possible to a "not-flying" state. The easiest and safest way to do that is in a straight line. Don't complicate that by trying to drive/fly a curve at the same time.

You got that right. This wasn't job related, but I've run across a couple of phone apps (fitness apps, both of them) where you enter your age by scrolling back one month at a time to get to the month of your birth. There was no option to simply enter the damned thing in directly.

That's over <mpphh> hundred taps -- if you tap too fast, you trigger accessibility features (like a magnifying lens) -- needless to say, I didn't continue with those apps. And no, despite my "advanced" age, my vision is fine.

Its 15.6" *default* display is 1366x768. The upgrade to 1920x1080 is about $100.

The 3520 has a trackpoint. The XPS does not (that didn't surprise me much, it's an ultrabook) and neither does the 5520. It looks like they're shooting for "slim" on the 5520 as well.

Years ago, even if you could find a vendor like Dell who would sell you a Linux version, the Linux version ended up costing you more than the Windows version, if for for no other reason than the kickbacks the vendor got from all the crapware that came pre-installed on the Windows version. Either that or you had to choose completely different hardware for the Linux version, and the Linux hardware was always inferior.

With this generation of of Dells, choosing Ubuntu as the OS actually cuts the price, on the same hardware.

Hmm. Many of my students write like this routinely. I wonder...

Exactly. All this talk of politics is a red herring. Firefox is becoming irrelevant because they have abandoned the features that make them valuable and embraced features that really don't matter. Or are annoying.

Firefox is still my browser of choice, *despite* all the "improvements" they've made over the last few years. To borrow a phrase from long ago, "It sucks less." At least compared to all the rest.

There are no good browsers anymore. Firefox used to be one, but they're driving the "It sucks" bandwagon as hard as they can, and by the time they finally vanish, there will be nothing left to mourn. For now, they're the best of a bad lot.

Their politics is fine. Good, even. It's their software choices that are the root of their downfall.

Very much so. You see advocates of the new, ugly paradigm disparaging older interfaces as not being "modern."

I pretty much stopped watching TV during the last writer's strike. By the time they finished their strike, I realized I didn't miss it, and never started back up. A couple of discs a week from Netflix more than filled up my time -- even that tends to be more than I have time for.

Phone thinness is stupid. I don't like cases, so a too-thin phone becomes just too damned fragile.

I *do* got to theaters. Once or twice a year, maybe.

Most of my movies are discs from Netflix, largely because the streaming selection is pretty limited. But I don't have a ton of time for TV or movies, so I don't get a lot watched, and I don't put a lot of priority on *recent*. Right now my Netflix queue is at about 5-7 years behind, and I'm just fine with that. Maybe I'll catch up after I retire -- or maybe not. Doesn't matter much.

In any case, I never put much stock in seeing movies the moment they came out, so this wouldn't be especially valuable to me.