Not troll! It's absolutely true. Parent post is +1 insightful.

I do but the publishers take most of it and give the authors only a pittance. Unless of course the author is one of the few that has become wealthy from their most popular books.

Is Linux an OS by your definition? A recent slashdot post linked to a web page where Linux runs in webasm. It boots and runs /bin/sh as init. You can run a few basic commands including top. But it surely can't run firefox or anything "useful." Come to that my router runs Linux but I can't run "anything" on it. So it must not be an "OPERATING SYSTEM" then according to you.

Your car analogy is nonsense by the way. The engine is clearly still there. Only the steering wheel and seats have been removed. Car is totally functional though.

Yes when running MS-DOS software you could say it was a shell. But in 386 it ran in protected mode, something that MS-DOS surely didn't do natively. I consider windows 3.1 to be it's own operating system that incorporated MS-DOS as a part of it. I used many MS-DOS shells in my day and windows 3.1 was way more than that. Windows even required its own drivers separate from DOS.

Funny you should mention Amazon reviews. I just posted a review where I point out that the set I was given and indeed nearly all the Star trek TNG box sets for sale on Amazon are counterfeit and buyers should beware. Amazon flagged it as not conforming to community guidelines. Anytime that might hamper business is apparently against their rules.

I honestly don't know what to make of your comment. I understand you are attempting to be funny, but honestly I find the sentiment you express quite frightening because a significant number of powerful Americans actually think that democracy is harmful and people shouldn't have a say because they are too stupid, too poor, or the wrong race. In fact those people have been so successful that only 63% of those registered to vote actually participated in the last major US election And only approximately 73% of people who could have registered to vote did so. That means the election was decided by only 48% of US citizens. Of those who didn't vote we know apathy is certainly a big factor, but GOP voter suppression efforts have been wildly successful and are ongoing. The GOP is certainly not in favor of making voting easier for citizens to do, sadly. They even oppose making election day a national holiday, which is really telling. Voting is a privilege for the upper middle class and above, provided of course they vote GOP. And gerrymandering ensures that large groups of people who do not vote for the GOP get no representation. Pretty pernicious what is now going on out in the open.

China has all one time zone. The entire country of on Beijing time because CCP. If anything it makes all the time issues that much harder. Now you can't just think of time zone. You have to know what time they get up and go to with in different cities. Sounds horrible to me.

I presume they are collecting data over a radio link. Could they not just read the GPS position and use a ground-based ADSB transponder to broadcast that information to nearby planes?

And the land required for nuclear does not include the uranium mine either.

That's strange. I've seen plenty of anonymous coward posts in the last week. Wonder how they got in. Most of them were not moderate up but some were.

I'd like to know what exposure to synthetic resins is doing to my body from composite resin fillings which do wear down with time, relatively fast. In fact my mercury fillings lasted way longer than any of my composite resin fillings. Dentist told me that in the last 30 years they've gone through no less than four different kinds of resins as they try to find one that's more long-lasting. Every last one of my first-generation resin fillings was replaced years ago.

Do they though? In an age of guerilla warfare, they don't seem to even enter the calculus. Russia continues to raise the spectre of nuclear weapons in their war against Ukraine, but that certainly isn't going to deter the Ukrainians. After they are wiped out by nuclear blasts then yes, that would end it for them. But it certainly would be a pyrrhic victory for Putin.

Yes at a matter of fact. They don't act as a deterrent to enemies and they are unlikely to win any wars. Plus if a nuke is used against the US, nuking the rest of the world into oblivion in retaliation seems self-defeating at best.

I'm not convinced federal agencies will ever be effective in any way ever again. Even if by some miracle after all the anti-election machinations by the GOP a democrat does get into office, the damage to these agencies is permanent. A new president would essentially have to do his own complete purge, which of course the GOP would loudly claim, with absolutely no sense of irony or hypocrisy, was unconstitutional and worthy of impeachment, and fight tooth and nail in the courts. And even if a democrat purge was successful, it would just be wiped again when the next GOP trump gets in. No honest American would ever want to work for a federal agency under those circumstances, knowing you'd just get fired at the next election.

I try to explain this to my GOP relatives, but they just don't see the problem.

And open source has to go beyond just the operating system. All the chip firmwares need to be open as well. This is currently a huge problem for any embedded Linux. Even the OpenWRT One flagship router has a proprietary blob firmware. Whether this is because of RF regulations I don't know, but it's not acceptable.

In some ways we live in a golden age of open source, but in other ways, things are much, much more closed than they were decades ago.