The only one or two power outages I had my entire life in Germany: were planned weeks ahead.

You've been lucky, then. I live now in southeastern Colorado, where it's currently monsoon season. That means lots and lots of thunderstorms, hail and flash floods. (The standard advice for dealing with flash floods is "head for the high ground." We never bother, because we are the high ground.) Lightning and flash floods cause power outages, so they're common this time of year, but generally only for a few minutes.

The biggest outage I ever lived through, however, came before moving up here, when I lived in Los Angeles. That was caused by the Northridge Earthquake, back in '94, a real E-Ticket ride! One of the side effects was a better look at the night-time sky than I'd had since I left the Navy.

I'm retired, and it's long been my habit to update my Fedora box every morning while making breakfast. I agree with you that the kernel's getting updated far more often than it used to be. Recently, it was updated at least three times in one week (maybe four, I'm not sure) which seems excessive. I think that was while they were getting rid of the insecure forms of string manipulation, but I wasn't involved in that and could be wrong.

As a long-time Linux user, I have two questions. First, why does Microsoft insist on holding on to all of these bug patches and security fixes so that they can be released all together on Patch Tuesday instead of being made available right away as Linux does? Second, why do so many people insist on paying money for such a flawed system and putting up with such a slow update pace?

They MIGHT even have to HIRE!

I get that the ancient (32-bit) PC computers are pretty much worthless now and that's mostly all of interest in the old IBM sites (wondering what the current state of the Sloatsburg location near NY 17/17A in Orange County is like - I drive past it at least once a year).

What gets me are the schools more than the malls or offices - all this talk of teachers having to buy school supplies (and now no longer getting a tax break for it), and yet every one of these buildings we see the reels walk through are full of things that current teachers could use. Why is nobody willing to connect that dot and save their county (and teachers) money?

I have a physics degree and I was aiming for a +1, Funny. I guess since we're joking about global warming, it counts as "dark" humour.

It's particularly bad because as we all know, dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones.

I mean it's roughly 30 years past the "Year of the Linux desktop".

And that's because Windows fanbois moved the goalposts and people either didn't notice or didn't realize what was going on. Back then, "the year of Linux on the desktop" meant the year when Linux was good enough to be used on a desktop as your daily driver, something that's been achieved decades ago. However the Windows lusers started using the term to mean the year that Linux was on the majority of desktops, something that clearly hasn't happened yet and Linux users let them get away with it.

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

Actually I do want to memorize. But not random idiotic key strokes that have nothing to do with the action/command they execute. EMACS is a prime example for that. ^G for example, what has that to do with "help"? Good, ^H is backspace, so during normal editing not available ...

If you want to memorize the commands, knock yourself out; nobody's stopping you. And go right ahead and use ^H as backspace, as that's what it does in nano. I'm not saying that you must, or even should be using it, I'm explaining why I've been using it for the last quarter of a century.

I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

wine you have to install and setup, while there are tools to help. steam itself install the proton and do the setup...

I use Fedora, so I can only talk about that. With Fedora, Wine is in the standard repos and all you need to do is tell the appropriate package management program (I use dnf, the CLI program, because it gives me the control I want.) to install wine, and away it goes, finding and installing wine and all the needed dependencies without any further work on your part except accepting the transaction. I'd think that most if not all of the mainstream distributions do the same, although the details change, but unless you really want to do it the hard way, there shouldn't be any need to descend into Dependency Hell.

But you don't need to memorize it; all of the most common commands are listed at the bottom of the window. And, if you need one that's not listed, there's always ^G, the first command listed which gets you to Help, a complete list of commands. Nothing to memorize unless you want to.

4. Volunteer for the military in a related field, or even in a general occupation. A two-year military enlistment qualifies for the GI bill which will fund your 4-year degree with perhaps some left over for other education.

The GI Bill is important, but it's not the only thing this gives you that will help you for the rest of your life. You also get VA medical benefits that never end even if you come out without any Service Connected conditions. And, judging by all the complaints about the high costs of Health Care that I see here, it's a good thing to have.

As a personal example, back in early '22 I lost my balance on a patch of black ice and came down on my right knee like a pile driver. That led to two weeks in a hospital and I still have a rod in my femur. As I was already retired at the time there was no way I could have ever paid off that debt, but as I have my VA benefits I ended up not paying for any of that care.