Except for the women. ;-)

How many women on Slashdot??

Enough to make a difference, I'd say.
While this is not meant to be some call-to-arms for cancel culture, and I am not a woman who is out to rage against male tyranny, I think recent social trends should act as a reminder to question our own assumptions about the status quo.
Yes, I have no doubt that there are more men than women on Slashdot, but a rather dismissive comment implying that we can ignore women is a step in the wrong direction.
In the past there have been a few Slashdot topics on women in the nerdly world of computers and high-tech where a number of female Slashdotters have posted comments, leading me to think that there must be quite a number of Slashdotters who never mention their own gender, don't make it obvious from their Slashdot handle, and whom we might easily, but mistakenly, assume that they must be male.
I mean, imagine if some other minority was being dismissed, like:
"[insert news item here] This is great news, except for people who work at Oracle." "Well, how many people work for Oracle??"
or
"[insert comments about some software bug] This only affects you if your birthdate is on the first of the month." "Well, how many people are born on the first of the month??"
Yes, I know you probably meant it as a light-hearted comment, but unquestioned assumptions are the basis of systemic discrimination and microaggression .
Despite great variability in the maturity level of Slashdotters, I view the Slashdot community, as a whole, as having a more enlightened view of the world, our society, and ourselves, and I'd like to see us move past these self-defeating assumptions.

Yes, I think we must not lose sight of the fact that just about half of the country voted for Trump. In fact, one of my family members supports Trump, although he is not American and did not get to vote. I asked him why, but he refused to explain.

I can't figure it out. It seems irrational, but all these people voting for Trump. I think the best guess for it is this: although overall Trump is very bad as a president, he does something or other that fulfills one of our fantasies, whether it is telling China off, whether it is being direct and crude, or otherwise doing something that we secretly wish people in high office could do but would be unprofessional and which we think would probably never happen. But Trump does it, and doesn't really care that it breaks decorum, he just goes ahead and does it. And he would be the only president unprofessional enough and rude enough to do it. so somehow or other some sort of need is fulfilled in Trump.

That's the only thing I can think of to explain why all these people are voting for Trump.

There are much better solutions for online schooling than a video conference suite.
https://www.vedamo.com/
Beats them by mile. Shared whiteboards. Teacher controls. Specifically designed for classroom and remote learning.
My daughter's weekend language school has been using it for some of the lessons since Xmas and has switched to it completely after the lockdown.

I checked the web site for Vedamo. The maximum number of users in a conference is 25.

My child has also been attending school remotely, and yesterday (which would be typical) there were 39 participants on the meeting.

I don't know what fraction of schools have class sizes under the 25-person limit implemented by Vedamo -- I suppose private schools for the well-to-do would have a lower student-to-teacher ratio -- but it is not surprising at all that people don't use Vedamo, especially since they pretty much tell you that it's only free for a while before you have to start paying for it. (Not saying that paying would be wrong or bad, only that it explains why people don't choose Vedamo over Zoom.)

Here is how we solved that problem.

We still use our iPad 2. Yes, it's an old iPad, and big and clunky compared to the newer more portable iPad minis. But its large size made it perfect for displaying piano music, which doesn't need any sophisticated features of the newer iOS's. Unfortunately, the built-in PDF reader requires horizontal scrolling, is unable to display the bottom half of the previous page with the top half of the next, and resets the zoom level every time you turn the page. We wanted to install Foxit PDF reader.

Unfortunately, the iPad 2 maxes out at iOS version 9, and Apple has said it will never upgrade it to iOS 10 or beyond. Foxit Reader required iOS 11 or newer. But I found on the web how to get the App Store to install an older version of the software.

You need an iDevice (iPhone, iPad) that has an up-to-date version of the iOS, signed into your account. We happened to have an iPhone 6, which does get updates to the newest iOS version. If you don't, you might want to borrow a friend's, and temporarily sign on to your Apple account on the App store. Then install the newest version of the app (in our case, Foxit PDF Reader) on the newer device, which *is* able to accept the newest version.

Then you sign on to the App Store with the old device, e.g. our ancient iPad 2. Instead of searching for the app by name, browse through your already purchased apps. There's an icon to download the app in question (Foxit Reader) since you have already "purchased" the app (even if just for $0 in our case). Then a message pops up: "Awww, poor guy, this app is too new for your iOS version! But you *are* entitled to a copy, so how about we give you an older version as a consolation prize?" And there it was, an older but compatible version of Foxit PDF Reader on our old iPad 2 that we use daily for piano music.

This only works if there is still an older copy of the app on the App Store. I hear that some app developers take down the older copies or force you to upgrade, and then I don't know how to get around that.

Hope this info is useful for you.

How is that different than the Travelling salesman problem [wikipedia.org]? Surprisingly I've never seen the Seven Bridges scenario.

Really? This is rather well-known. The Travelling Salesman requires that you hit all the vertices (destinations). The Seven Bridges problem requires that you traverse all the edges (the routes between the destinations).

What I don't get is, why don't they combine the various unlocking methods?

I don't like fingerprint unlocking, by itself. But I would love to have a setting where, after I enter my PIN#, my phone still doesn't unlock unless it detects my finger on the fingerprint sensor. Or, in a similar vein, it would detect my face -- or maybe it's really just a photo -- but then it still needs the PIN#, my fingerprint, or some other source of authentication.

5) Two Sim cards are not in demand because businesses do not want you to combine your personal and work phone. They would rather you keep them separate so they can easily confiscate your work phone without worrying about you having transferred stuff from your work sim to you personal sim.

Aren't Dual SIM phones easy to find? I've been getting them, and I neither specifically looked for nor use that feature.

Here, at a casual browse from Amazon, are some dual SIM phones:

Here's one that's cheap, about $50

https://www.amazon.com/BLU-Adv...

Don't want a no-name brand? Here's one from a Well-Known Korean Manufacturer:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...

Not expensive enough? Here's one that's north of $700

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...

After my last two cheap phones, I got a Google Pixel 3XL, and it's technically a dual SIM because it can use a virtual eSIM and also accept a second physical SIM card.

You're welcome.

mod parent up: "friend" with ulterior motive

Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false has worked on my FF v62.0.3
I haven't tried adding more extensions yet -- some comments are saying that it won't work -- but at least I get my browsing back.

This is ridiculous that my browser depends on some online certificate. What if I take my computer offline camping/on the airplane while I use my browser to look at some local file? (E.g. I generate my own photo thumbnail index as a HTML file that I view in Firefox.) Whenever there is a feature that relies on something online, there should be at least a warning and a choice to mitigate ("Continue in insecure mode anyway?") rather than just having everything fail.

This is going to piss off a lot of users.

I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet.

"The Underhanded C Contest is an annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. ... The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil. Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers."

Some of these entries are downright scary.

Yes, there's a role for GVIM.

I got called out for this on the Vim forums, saying: You're such a wimp using GVIM! Just use a terminal like a real man! They challenged me to name a single case where a real geek would need to use a GUI for VIM instead of doing on the terminal.

So I told them my use case.

Then they shut up.

The use case is: sometimes I switch from the Latin alphabet to Chinese. I need to change the font and the font size. At the usual font size for Latin characters, the Chinese characters are not clearly legible. If I increase the font size so that they are legible (in fact, my own preference is to increase it to where they look calligraphically beautiful), the Latin letters are far bigger than they need to be, and you can't squeeze enough information into a screenful -- which is not a problem with Chinese text since each character contains so much more information.

So I have a quick keystroke mapping to switch to a given font with ":let &guifont = g:guifont_chin" etc., and we're happy. Not sure there's a way to change the terminal font from within Vim, and even if there were, that's not the role of Vim to control the terminal font, anyway.

And I don't use a mouse.

"From where I sit, it feels like there are new competitors coming up every day, and we buy them up before they can become a serious threat"

You do understand that getting acquired is one of the most popular exit strategies for venture funded start ups, right?

So, if I understand you correctly, you are agreeing with GP's premise that Facebook is eliminating competition?

To be sure, you are saying that the competition is happy to be eliminated, but that's not the point. Otherwise, whenever some evil villain did something dastardly, like build a fracking CFC-manufacturing plant that spewed acid rain, you could argue, "But it's okay, they paid the city tons of money so they were happy to rezone the area to allow this plant."

No, I would disagree with your statement, although it is technically correct.

When we look for the cause of something, we are looking for an event or action that is the least reasonably expected, and/or one that was by least coerced choice.

For example, if some sniper shoots a car driver and the car swerves into a deep ravine, we don't say that the crash was caused by the driver slumping over the wheel as s/he died, or by the presence of the ravine, because slumping is what a dead body naturally does, and the presence of a ravine is reasonable. We say that the shot from the sniper caused the crash, because that is not a reasonable expectation of driving along a ravine, and also because the sniper took deliberate action.

If you asked, "Well, if there wasn't a ravine there, the car would not have crashed down a ravine, right?" the answer would have to be yes, but to consider that as anything even near to the principal cause of the crash is to mislead one from the true and overwhelmingly unexpected cause of the crash. By that yardstick you could do reductio ad absurdum and say that the cause of the crash was the car manufacturer or the mother who gave birth to the driver.

When we refer to crime and punishment, an event can be considered "reasonable" if it follows morally, even though the chance of that event might not be very high.

When Google does something nasty for which it probably won't be caught, but actually ends up being caught, the cause of the reputation loss is not due to the reasonable prosecution of the nasty action, which follows and is more or less obligatory, but by Google's choice to do the nasty thing in the first place, something it could have chosen not to do.

It's the crime, not the punishment; to say otherwise would be as ridiculous as Anonymous Coward's delightfully sarcastic answer (currently modded 0): "And falls from great heights don't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end."

Not quite what you're thinking of, but I love the Bug-A-Salt, which fires a near-invisible puff of table salt at flying insects. Better than a flyswatter, doesn't splatter the bug, but brings them down. Also good for spiders that sends my lady screaming. Nowadays, when she sees a spider, she screams, and then grabs the Bug-A-Salt and downs the spider. Take that!

It's so great that I actually hope to see some houseflies around the home. Disappointingly, they have generally steered clear.

Question about NextCloud: What do you think of it?

I use OwnCloud. This was just before NextCloud became practical. I considered going to NextCloud when an OwnCloud client for my aging iPad2 "upgraded" and stopped working. Ultimately I stayed with OwnCloud just to minimize complexity.

How is NextCloud in terms of maturity? Is it a drop-in replacement for OwnCloud, or does it have issues? Do you find yourself using features not available in OwnCloud? (Not that I know what those are, but the marketing text sounded promising at the time.)