One should not be disappointed when people or things reveal themselves.

Part of the cost is to allow you to support the alternative, privacy-oriented, OS.

At one time, Slashdot was full of people who wanted things like this.

Protect your customers, or sell them out to criminals? It's hard to stop selling them out when the criminals are willing to pay so much more for the data.

Come on, now. The way it always works is that the in the end, the empire outsources the military too.

But there is no reason to use power-intensive bulbs to grow cannabis these days - so it makes no sense for the police to look for them with helicopter mounted infrared cameras. And lots of industrial processes generate lots of heat, so searching industrial parks based upon heat emissions is a waste of time.

And any sensible electric utility does look at the relationship between metered power sales and purchased input power. It changes based upon weather and other factors but they should be watching it constantly. And of course the lines are inspected regularly and unauthorized unmetered taps are going to be found. About the only way to steal power in an industrial park setting would be to open a wall and steal your neighbor's power, and then the neighbor would notice the bills. Sure, it's easy to overlook 100w, but this would have been something like 30,000W or more.

Let's not get to focused on how the power might be stolen - the point is, why would a cryptominer bother with stealing the power in a setting where getting caught is likely? Why risk the entire operation for 1000 pounds/month?

There are other odd things: "police were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit": Why would lots of people visit either a cannabis farm or a computer cluster? Presumably any industrial center leased property is going to have some traffic - why would this one have so much traffic the police would become involved?

The point is there is more to the story than has been told.

Why on earth would anyone growing cannabis still be using power-intensive incandescent bulbs?

Is there really any reason not to have switched to LED bulbs sometime during the last ten years? And if no one is still using incandescent bulbs, why are the police looking for them?

And what kind of fool would steal thousands of pounds of power and not expect the power company to notice, thereby disrupting one's profitable mining operation?

I expect there's more to the story than appears here.

The organizations created to advance free, open-source software present a target for parasitic individuals and groups once they acquire funding. Their purpose evolves into the support of the parasites; the people who write the software then need to be eliminated in one way or another to justify defunding them. Cancel culture is currently the popular way to effect this change but the process is inevitable and next time it will be something else.

For free software to continue it will need to shed the organizations created to fund it from time to time. Perhaps next time more effort should be made to ensure the money and control of the organizations doesn't get deflected away from the original purpose so quickly. Of course with rare exceptions like RMS the people who like to write software don't think much about this.

Meanwhile, perhaps it would be best if, instead of giving money to organizations and letting them try to dictate who can't contribute to the production of free software, we looked at how efficiently these organizations distributed money to the actual contributors - and didn't give money to those that had other goals.

If he'd add mandatory minimum sentences to the bill - say 3-5 years - he'd get lots of additional donations from the prison industry complex.

Perl started as a combination and extension of sh and awk. It was amazing and innovative, as all of Larry's projects were. I ported perl 1 to the PDP-11, and I loved it. Things that were hard to do became enjoyable. Most of you have no idea what things were like before perl.

But as the years went by one kludge was pasted atop another. The language became unwieldy with horrible quantities of 'magic' incantations. It went from a wonderful extension of the Bourne shell to something dreadful. The endless extensions added vital functionality but made the language ugly and strange. It became a horrible mess.

Larry used to wonder what would become of it, hoping of course that his child would prosper. Well it did, but now it's decrepit.

What would be good? Well, keeping the important elements learned after many years of development but creating something new, designed with all that knowledge and experience. This new thing would most certainly not be backwards compatible. Perhaps it would be like Python but without invisible things only the computer can see to parse. This was probably a reaction to Perl's awful and noisy excesses of '$' and "::' and so forth.

I still love perl for generating reports and for small projects. I would not use it again for something large; there are better options.

Perhaps the time has not yet come for this new language. Perhaps perl 7 should be more about discovering what should come next than cranking out code. Perl really was about discovering what should come next all along. Thank you, Larry (and all the rest of you).

This is exactly the wrong path to follow.

I would guess that injection molding would be faster and cheaper.

One of the troublesome limitations of systemd is that all its i/o requests go through the kernel. Moving some of the device drivers directly into systemd will improve the speed and reliability of Linux. There are many functions that should remain in the kernel, but the kernel should depend upon systemd for resource management - not the other way around.