I have nothing Microsoft at home.

Yeah, sure, I'm an IT geek, but it's probably the first time that's happened since I first used a DOS disk back in the day (as before that all my computers weren't PCs at all but small home computers).

Windows 11 literally forced me off Windows at home, I haven't run Office at home in decades, and I now need to be paid to manage Microsoft systems of any kind.

Microsoft told me that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. And you know what? In my case, they were right.

The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.

That was the rebound year from Covid. It's a statistical anomaly, and chosen by a lot of news reports to highlight the severity of whatever point they're making.

Comparing today's employment against, for example, 2019 is also difficult due to the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants that entered under the Biden administration. For example, today there is about 4.3% unemployment, the average is 5.7%, so we're doing pretty good on that front.

Statistics can lie. Our 4.3% represents 7.4 million unemployed workers, while the 2019 3.5% rate represents 5.8 million unemployed. When you bring in 10 million undocumented people, it's easy to see how 5.8 million unemployed can swell to 7.4 million.

Statistics lie by comparing our employment to a year that had record values because of an anomaly, or compare the number of unemployed by number to a year before we closed the Southern border.

I think the most FOSS friendly today is Lattice. I'm a little sorry I didn't go with them from the start.

If you develop a mixed software-hardware solution, you may need to run on Linux, as that's where (realistically) the development tools for the rest of the project are.

You're assuming that having a healthy life is the primary goal, but it's not. It's secondary.

A healthy life is one of several secondary goals that you have in order to achieve your primary goals, whatever they may be.

For example, having a family/children is the goal of many people. Do you want to see your grandkids grow up? Have a healthy life.

Having enough money for retirement so you can travel (or just have fun) is another goal many people have. Want to enjoy your retirement? Have a healthy life.

Goals go hand-in-hand with motivations, and one way to increase your motivation for doing something is to identify how it contributes to one of your life goals.

So for example, that college course you're taking to get your MBA - are you doing that just for something to do, or does it contribute to where you want to be in 10 years?

It turns out that doing something "just for money" is not, by itself, a motivational goal. Doing something "for the money" that you will need to eventually start your own business, though... that's a motivational goal.

So no, living a healthy miserable life doesn't make much sense if being healthy is the goal.

Living a healthy miserable life *does* make sense if it lets you see your grandkids grow up.

I like updating my Vivaldi browser.

The apt version just sets a flag during the update and any currently-running Vivaldi browser picks up on it and shows a small "update" button in its browser bar.

You can just carry on using it, obviously. Or you click the small update button and it will update the browser and carry on.

I love the way that it's a) part of the entire apt system so still under your control, b) apt upgrades don't need to kill/restart applications (Windows really needs to learn this), and c) it just detects an update underneath, lets you know, and waits for you to decide when your want to close your browser.

It's very subtle and very simple, but it's a whole world of difference compared to Windows, and a show of how an application and an OS update mechanism can co-operate to the user's advantage.

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump's 2017 travel ban from nations that didn't have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that's not thought to be beyond the court's jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there's an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don't have to worry about it.

Too little, too late.

I moved on to better OS when you started messing with stuff and REFUSED to even give me an option to put it back how it was.

Modern Windows UI/UX literally and actually hinders my workflow because of enforced nonsense that I don't want.

Boils down to one thing:

Teach them.

Homework doesn't teach them - that's "independent learning" which, though a skill, isn't something you can really instil in them, but which they have to bother to learn themselves... it's also, incidentally, how private schools achieve results. They encourage independent learning, and they more use it to PREPARE, rather than after-the-lesson chores. "This is what we'll be doing next week, read up on it now so I don't have to explain all the minutiae when we get to that part."

But without a teacher in the class, the significance of where/what they learn is diminished and turns learning into a chore. The biggest assets in a school - any school - are not budgets, facilities, fancy tech... it's parental motivation, and teacher skill. Private schools already have parental motivation ("I lose 30k if you mess about", says Dad, and the school won't tolerate you risking their 600k of tuition income across that class just to keep your 30k).

His last paper was a multi-year study on the different methods to teach boys and girls science (especially physics) and maths in Kuwait (where they have segregated classes for such things) to achieve best results for each... I'll see if I can dig it out.

Well... I think "delivered" is stretching it somewhat.

So far only Pepsi has some hand-built models. It's gonna be years before their earliest larger orders are even close to being fulfilled.

RAM isn't the issue.

But some software is trapped forever in old, outdated (and insecure) versions and never gets updated.

Some software is trapped in a "bottle" and you can't explore the filesystem (e.g. you can't save your downloads / other files created in it anywhere sensible without tweaking a load of things).

And some software just plain doesn't work but it's still on the store.

If I were to introduce a newbie to Linux, they would be led to use snap, and so much would be incredibly frustrating / out of date / not work that they'd think it was awful. I think snap does Linux a MAJOR disservice. I would have to recommend people switch the Ubuntu store to prefer apt, for example, before I could just leave them to use it on their own.

My father-in-law is one of the most highly-educated people I know (several PhD's in education, etc. plus any number of bachelors, masters, etc. in all kinds of subjects), and teaches all over the world and is HIGHLY sought-after. Chinese schools were offering him huge sums, Kuwait, the US, Spain, UK, all over.

He has a bunch of published papers on education, and has been teaching for over 40 years.

He has always, and still is, against homework in all forms.

Same guy, for reference, who took a job at a school in Spain purely to get my daughter a place in one of the top private schools there. The condition of him working there was that she got a free place. They agreed.

He took the worst classes and transformed them within a year. To the point that the school accused him of cheating on the exams. So, because his students loved him so much, he had another teacher set another exam, and the same students VOLUNTEERED to come back under exam conditions, sit a similar exam, in invigilated conditions, without any influence, connection or presence of him... and they all passed on their own merits... every one. Not just passed. A's all around.

Then he left, because he was insulted by the accusation. But he just needed to prove his point.

Any number of doctors, lawyers, etc. owe their education to him, all over the planet.

And he hates homework and never sets it or, if he's forced to, it's always pathetic and he doesn't bother marking it. He thinks it's an absolute waste of time.

As someone who has, similarly, spent their entire career in education... I can't say I disagree with him on that.