despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Pretty sure that's not a new bug, but the old anti-unicode stance that the slashdot libertarians so boldly took 20 years ago in the name of the empire. Clearly that has turned out well as enrollment keeps climbing and everyone uses this site on a regular basis.

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

Of course it's well known how much money some artists make through their tours. People are willing to pay the price to see them, so good for those artists.

However, at what point will it no longer work? At some point the prices will be too high to sell out arenas. Big acts have been able to demand $1,000 or more for the best seats at giant arenas. Like so many others I can't name a single act that is active currently that I would pay anywhere near that much to see. If prices - and fees - keep going up the number of people in my camp will increase. Maybe the premium experience will be enough to offset that, but at some point demand side economics will take over.

If I can buy every single album, LP, single, and special edition an artist has ever released for less than 1/4 of what a ticket goes for - or for that matter less than just the fees for a ticket - the system seems a bit broken. Sure the live experience is different but is it worth that much?

No, people are leaving because the system is destroying their way of life. With scientific funding constantly being attacked, it becomes more difficult for scientists to advance their careers. Eventually they cross a threshold where they can't justify staying here any longer.

And assuming that Trump will leave in 2029 is a huge gamble right there. He never acknowledged losing the 2020 election. He has surrounded himself with people who would support him if he refused to leave, and he has been attacking the constitution with even greater vigor since the start of this term. I would not count on him to leave.

The choices we - and our government - are making are driving out many of the people who we most need here to move our country forward.

• We're attacking science and science funding - so scientists are leaving.
• We're attacking academia - so academics are leaving.
• We're attacking labor - so laborers are leaving.
• We're attacking free speech - so journalists are leaving.
• We're attacking medicine - so physicians and nurses are leaving

This is not the start of the brain drain, merely the acceleration. It certainly isn't nearly the end of it either.

Crowdstrike has such a strangehold on corporate IT that we will only see more - not fewer - occurrences of their software itself taking down networks. We all remember the fairly recent event where crowdstrike did billions of dollars in damage to networks around the world with a faulty update. Since then even more companies have adopted it.

I work with many large companies who run crowdstrike. When I ask their IT folks how it works - or even how it is configured - I get blank stares back. Presumably someone knows how to configure it, but that someone is never the person I get to interact with. If I'm doing an installation and just need to connect a USB drive to a new PC it can take hours just to get permission to do so. If I install our software first (before connecting the new PC to their network at all) and then they install crowdstrike, crowdstrike can render the PC completely unusable without warning - leaving us no choice but to nuke the PC and start over from the OS installation. If they install crowdstrike first it might lock out so many ports and services on the PC that I won't be able to install our hardware and software at all.

Again, virtually nobody on the IT staff know how to handle the issues. I'll spend hours at the keyboard with them, with them using various admin accounts, and we won't get anywhere. And there is no way to predict which setups will go sideways with crowdstrike installed first versus which will go sideways if it is installed later.

One important thing I have learned - crowdstrike updates and policies are far, far from instantaneous. IT will install them and it may be an hour or more for everything to take effect as the updates and policies come down from the server. Something that works at 2:30pm might suddenly be irreversibly broken at 2:40pm, without warning.

This is not how IT security should work.

What would that look like in practice though? Would all MAGA iconography be banned? Would Trump and his family collectively become persona non grata? How do you distinguish between MAGA and anything that is too similar to it?

If we look to Germany for parallels, we see there are nationalist right wing movements still there, they just don't call themselves Nazis. What criteria would be criminalized?

Eliminating is a strong term. While the way they have entrenched themselves into all aspects of US political power can make it seem like there is no other way I'm not fully convinced. If the dear leader does cancel midterms then it will likely be time to eliminate the MAGA party. If we instead actually have something approaching free and fair elections then there may be hope for a less radical solution.

Very true.

I actually suspect we may be approaching the end game of the two-party system. While our democracy was never designed to work this way, it has been locked into this for far too long. In 2000 the democrats became subservient to the GOP, now it has essentially be codified as such - hence we really have only a one-party system.
Br> If we could rebuild our government with at least 4 or 5 parties we could possibly prevent a situation like this - where one party takes over the entirety of government and locks out everyone else - from happening again, though I don't see that as being an easy reformation.

I can understand the desire to demonize the MAGA party, especially considering how much effort they have put in to demonization of everyone who isn't in their party. However I really see it as counterproductive. Nobody is going to get traction in this country by only declaring themselves to not be MAGA; they have to have a coherent platform (even when the MAGA platform is spectacularly incoherent).

While perhaps the conservatives who wield power - currently or in the past - are all of the MAGA mindset now, I have met plenty of conservatives who do not align with everything MAGA. There are conservatives out there who are voting only reluctantly for Trump and the rest of MAGA, generally more as a vote against the opposition than a vote specifically for anything.

In fact I would say that the majority of those elected from the MAGA party likely don't support everything MAGA. However they want to keep their elected positions and they know they can't do it without the support of their Dear Leader. As a result many of them are supporting things that are counter to their own beliefs, simply because they want to keep their cushy elected positions.