It is a vast majority. The midterms won't go like people on the left expect. There's one group that's hated more than just about anyone else in polls of Americans: Democrats. They manage to be less popular than Trump and less popular than Republicans.

People may not be terribly happy with Trump and the way things are currently going, but it won't take too much to remind them how much worse things were when Democrats were in control.

Despite his current negative approval rating, Trump manages to be one of the most popular politicians in America right now, even with a net negative approval rating. That mostly because Americans just do not like their current politicians than Trump, but ultimately, there's a reason Trump won in a landslide. Americans may not really like Trump, but they loathe the alternatives.

No thank you.

That is all.

Plenty of trucks and other vehicles have little or any effective view directly out the back. To be blunt: If you need to look through your rear-view mirror to not kill someone, you either need better side mirrors or you need to learn to drive.

No, full stop.

The problem with software freedom, at least when it comes to sufficiently powerful entities like governments, is that they have access to treasure troves of data that the general public does not. They have the power to massively abuse privacy in ways that, once done, cannot ever truly be undone. They have the ability to stick AI technology onto a drone with machine guns and use it to assassinate random people anywhere in the world from miles away.

Absolute software freedom can, in a very real sense, result in the deprivation of other types of freedom, up to and including life itself.

When it comes to software that has massive potential for abuse, such as AI, there are good reasons for blanket licenses to not allow certain categories of use. It's not that those uses should necessarily be prohibited, because as the summary says, some uses in those areas can promote equality and freedom. Rather, the existence of banned areas in blanket licenses allows the creator to ensure that only those uses happen, while not allowing uses that do the opposite.

The existence of a license does not preclude use of that software in those areas if licensor agrees to make a specific exception on a case-by-case basis, based on who the entity is and how the technology will be used. Make the exceptions A. time-limited, B. scope-limited, and C. carefully monitored for abuse. For example, you might require an oversight body of AI ethicists who don't work for the company/government in question to review the project once a month with full access to everything they are doing with the AI tech. Allow that group to call for a shutdown at any time, for any reason, including getting even a whiff of evidence that information is being hidden from them.

For any project that comes within a nuclear bomb's range of any usage area with high potential for abuse, it makes sense for some technologies to require careful scrutiny, rather than blanketly licensing them to anyone who says "I want to connect your AI to a missile launch controller" or whatever.

You get the point.

Did. Past tense. Before technology evolved to be efficient. Being inefficient was a lot more excusable in the 1800s, when nothing cleaner existed, than now, when cleaner technology exists and is easily available.

Yeah. In relative terms, 50% more isn't a lot. We don't need to reduce emissions by 30%. We need to reduce them by more like 99%.

For comparison, the worst countries have 5x or 6x China's use, which is not great. But China has 231x the use of the lowest per-capita CO2 country on the list. The difference between the least-polluting country per capita and most-polluting country is a factor of 1565. Orders of magnitude matter. Anything within a factor of two or three is just about lost in the noise by comparison.

I think you must be talking about different people. The people we're talking about the ones who when asked about *every* individual issue say that they don't like what he is doing, but when asked about the overall person, say that they do.

I mean, it is possible that some people like him overall, but that distinct subsets of those people dislike each area. That said, that theory is pretty dubious, because the percentage swing on each issue is quite large, and if you add up the size of those dips, the resulting number approaches or exceeds his total favorables. Such extremely different groups usually don't get together in politics to such an extent that such numbers would make sense.

You think other OSs are safe? No.
https://www.theregister.com/20...

That's not even remotely true. Right now, though, the U.S. stands at only around 12% of annual GHG emissions. And even if you use cumulative numbers since the 1700s (most of which is not still in the atmosphere), the U.S. still only produced something like 20% of cumulative CO2 emissions.

The current largest CO2 emitter is China, and by a very large margin, coming in at about 35% of all world CO2 emissions, or almost three times the next worst (the United States).

Per capita, of course, the U.S. is worse than China, though not be a lot. But by that metric, the U.S. goes from being the second worst all the way down to the #16 slot. Per capita, the top ten biggest CO2 emitters are all either in the Middle East or are islands or other tiny territories. Even if you ignore the tiny countries, the U.S. *barely* makes the top 10, behind Australia, Russia, Canada, and six countries in the Middle East.

I assume these are the ones who don't really care what Trump does, as long as he "drains the swamp", "tears down the establishment", and "sticks it to the libs". They don't like his changes, but they like that something is changing, because something has to change, and this is something, so this has to change.

That's certainly true for the OS, because the OS releases are tied to hardware releases. But features do sometimes get pulled. Apple Maps is a feature. So IMO, that's not a great argument for Apple Maps shipping in the state that it did.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that the internal divide between iOS engineering (Forstall's fiefdom) and OS X engineering (everybody else) was probably a big part of why Maps didn't work as well as it should have initially (less internal testing). Forstall's departure tore down a lot of those walls, and IMO the company is better off for that change.

Here, it's $2.87 per therm, 41 cents per kWh once you hit a certain usage threshold, and most households are above that threshold already. So adding a heat pump (e.g. to replace a gas water heater) means that new usage would be billed at that higher per-kWh rate.

Plugging those numbers into Maine's calculator, it says electric is cheaper. So that has I guess improved since I last did the math a year or two ago. Tankless natural gas is still cheaper than heat pumps with tanks, though. No idea about tankless electric, but the power consumption makes them infeasible unless you already have 200A service, and maybe even then.

With compilers, it does, or at least it can.

When you build GCC for the first time on a new architecture, it builds a limited miniature version of GCC using the system compiler, and uses that to compile the actual version of GCC, so that it is always compiled with itself, not with the system compiler, both to minimize the risk of system compiler bugs causing bugs in GCC and to minimize the risk of someone using a malicious compiler to create a modified GCC that introduces security bugs in code compiled with GCC or whatever.

After that, you can at least ostensibly delete the system compiler, because you'll never need it anymore to build future versions of GCC or anything that GCC can compile.

Could we bring back core memory? Having our phones come back instantly when you plug it back in after the battery dying would be awesome. :-D

To a very limited extent, their tax breaks, ignoring that they help the wealthy far more than the poor. But that's about the only thing, and even that is helping the poor at the expense of their kids having a country with deeper debt that they will eventually have to pay, or at the expense of the government not having the money to do various things, likely some of which help the poor (or at the very least are designed to help the poor).