I am not capable of judging whether the pressures against Greenland/Denmark and Canada are real, strategic noise, or a joke. The tariffs are a different matter. Anti-US tariffs and anti-US ownership laws are commonplace, and Trump's tariff actions are being used to force mutually reduced tariffs or a level playing field.

The US has not been trustworthy to allies for at least 50 years, and not trustworthy to its own citizens for more than 90 years. There are a great number of countries that have never been trustworthy.

The U.S. could be a net exporter of vegetables in a couple of months if it stopped converting corn into ethanol.

I have space heaters with a switch on the bottom that turns off the heater when it falls over or is lifted off the ground. Imagining lidar or an ultrasonic detector on the bottom of what was previously a $30 space heater gave me a good laugh.

Imagine how good Voyager would be if those people actually were geniuses, instead of just having sex with geniuses.

A few years ago I ported some legacy device firmware from its ancient Sun-based development environment to gcc (68k cross-compiler) and Linux. Most of the code compiled reasonably as-is. Some of it required a bit of hand-holding, like telling gcc that I really did need to store four characters one at a time rather than a single long when talking to a dual-port RAM interface.

Some of the low-level OS code did in fact require assembly. So be it.

...laura

I accept that no matter what I do at airport security it will be wrong. This is, according to some sources, by design. Keeps the bad guys on their toes. Something like that.

As a Canadian the only biometric ID I have is my passport. Despite the pressure to do so, I do not use it for domestic flights. International flights only. For U.S. domestic flights I use my drivers license. For Canadian domestic flights, my pilots license.

...laura

maladroit: "Covid vaccinations saved lives and reduced the severity of cases."

Mirnotoriety: "Vaccination didn't prevent you getting Covid."

maladroit: "And now you're just lying."

If "Vaccination didn't prevent you getting Covid" is a lie, then vaccination prevented COVID in all cases. However, your first statement was "Covid vaccinations ... reduced the severity of cases." It is not possible to have a reduced-severity case without having a case. You have contradicted yourself.

Mores (2 syllables), societal standards. Morays are eels.

My experience with KDE has been that some changes irreversibly break existing behavior. Window toolbars disappear along with the mechanism to restore them. A second desktop task manager appears with no mechanism to move it or remove it.

I may be mistaken, but it appears that KDE has an update mechanism independent from Fedora's dnf, and I've found no way to disable it.

The official documentation is inadequate and seldom applies to the version I'm using. I often have to go to reddit to find cures, although as expected they work less than half the time.

That's at least 3600 Calories a day. He will remain very sick.

Money is what is traded for goods and services. If there aren't enough goods and services, no amount of money suffices.

Have any of these people ever been to England?

...laura

The gym where I work out has Sirius XM as their background music, variously Hits 1 or The Pulse. If you told me it was all pre-recorded loops and/or AI I wouldn't doubt it.

The gym's soundtrack has nevertheless introduced me to some neat new music, duly added to my workout playlist. In that sense it's served its purpose. It's also exposed me to some truly dire excuses for music. People buy this garbage?!

The radio-friendly versions of songs are sometimes inadvertently amusing. "My give a craps are on vacation" "I'm a real tough kid I can hannnndle it"

...laura

Hubble has provided a spectacular return on its investment, both in science results and in PR (i.e. pretty pictures).

Is it worth additional refurbishing? Is it worth bringing back to Earth? Both decisions are way above my paygrade. In many ways JWST is "better", but will it capture the public's imagination the way Hubble did? I doubt it.

...laura

Apart from the brain, that doesn't grow new cells.

That is an old claim that has been shown to be untrue. Search for "brain cell growth" and look at some of the results.