lucky 10,000!

Time to go down the Panspermia rabbit hole!

That the primary motivator towards forcing the sale wasn't the algorithm as such, it was the probability that the PRC would use TikTok as a propaganda tool.

The Republicans aren't conservative in any sensible meaning of the word. They are radicals. The Democrats are far more conservative than the Republicans these days.

Lots of medical workers, especially in rural hospitals, are on H1-Bs.

I never stopped coming in to the office. Before that I worked in industrial automation, and that work couldn't be done remotely either.

"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

Yes, buying. I lived in Cedar City Utah and first encountered Linux in a RedHat 2.0 beige box at a gaming store in Red Cliffs Mall in St George. Probably in 1994 or 5. Came with a couple of manuals, a boot floppy, and a CD. Had the 0.95 kernel. Getting dial-up configured was interesting since the ISP only knew about Trumpet Winsock... Then leaving it running for a few hours in the evening to update everything.

Within a week I was at the local BN buying O'Reilly books.

That's really interesting, thanks. Probably explains some of the weirdass trace routing I've observed on older boards, sometimes going the long way around.

Back a few years I was wondering why Mint, being glorified Ubuntu, ran so much better than Ubuntu. Turns out Mint was running (by actual count) 1/4th as many processes. Gee, I wonder how that could impact performance...

I didn't much like Devuan until they borrowed the PCLOS desktop and general way of doing things... now it's a lot slicker.

348 square feet per person.

To power all of India, 20,000 square miles (if I didn't slip a digit).

If any of we peons proposed such mass environmental destruction, even of the middle of nothing and nowhere, we'd be jailed.

Yeah, same here, first crawled into a PC's innards in 1993, and nowadays I have a houseful built from salvage and scrap, but none of it started life low-class. Absolutely right, Windows problems are rarely Windows, but rather shit hardware or shit drivers. Absent that, I'm accustomed to Windows uptimes measured in years. (Linux, well, I find it also depends on the distro.)

Even so... we who build our own desktops are a small minority. The real market isn't even home PCs, it's business contracts where they buy 'em literally by the pallet, or the truckload. Or why there are a zillion Dells on the salvage market.

The more-space argument doesn't wash. They reclaimed a whole lot of space going from HDD to SSD to NVMe to eMMC. I have a 14" thin laptop whose working innards entirely fit on what amounts to a Pi board (it's about 4" by 6", and not cramped). Even counting it as a minimal unit, that's a lot of space left to work with.

Tho I can see the no-one-upgrades argument; that's almost all PCs everywhere. We DIY types who promptly max out RAM are an anomaly, a tiny sliver of the market.

Of course, they use that to say, "Base unit, $AttractivePrice. Unit with enough RAM to function as you need, add 3x the aftermarket price for that RAM."

Funny thing, Montana is a big grain-producing state, and we have possibly the most unpredictable, and definitely the most absurdly-variable climate in North America.

https://montanakids.com/facts_...

Oh, and we also grow potatoes, but only in very limited areas (potatoes need more predictable conditions), whereas grain is grown here pretty much anywhere the ground is near enough to level.

I don't know about real Macs, but I have a Hackintosh that's ... um, OSX 10.8, on a midrange i7 with 8GB RAM and a fast SSD, and even doing nothing much (file manager, system settings and the like, no browser) it was sluggish to occasionally painful. Gave the system 32GB and suddenly it was much better.

If a version of OSX however-many-years-old is that bad with 8GB, I can't imagine current-OSX being pleasant.