I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

CO2 has the properties it has, and trying to shift or deny that is a sign of either a liar or an idiot.

I'll let others decide what you are.

Oh look, another denialist trying to sidetrack a pretty verifiable statement of fact.

We all saw the video. We all know what it meant. We all know Musk's background and upbringing. You can quit gaslighting us. We all saw it.

These are awesome and I would absolutely embrace the upgradeability and open standards fully if they had the devices I use: a rugged laptop (rain, snow, drop, etc proof, covered ports, washable like my Getacs) with upgradable, fully Linux compatible hardware would be awesome. My trackpad and touch screen are both generic mice according to Linux.

Then, pls, make a phablet with optional LTE/baseband (or none, not a phone at all). Short range radios, but zero base band, otherwise a rugged, reliable, durable, upgradable phone-like form factor, super extra bonus points for interchangeable camera modules. Double extra bonus points for easily removed/swapped battery. Add a LoRa radio instead of LTE, why not?

There have been a few projects to make a good Linux phone and while the PinePhone is impressive engineering, it falls short of being a usable replacement for a flagship phone. There's a solid market for brick/tank phones and they have plenty of room to provide usable, all day battery capacity for a Linux device but the current collection from vendors like Blackview, as nice as they are with very useful features like thermal imagers or NIR illumination/sensors and excellent durability are all Android Certified and the Droidocalypse is going to effectively brick them all in September.

Any aggregation of radioactive elements is inherently dangerous, always, no matter what safeguards, simply as a material that is hazardous to health. Most radioactive hazards associated with fissile materials represent health risks with atypically, even for poisonous elements, pernicious qualities. Not many people would be sanguine with health-impacting quantities of fissile materials in their environment, unlike say, lead or arsenic, both quite awful but a whole different scale of awful.

Any intentional aggregation of fissile material is intrinsically a risk to human health and safety. Nuclear advocates (many of whom would qualify as frothing fanbois) dismiss such concerns claiming they know of a "safe" reactor design, some of which are quite clever and are, indeed, intrinsically quite safe when operated correctly. Such fanbois will sometimes make the entirely valid point that the rate of death from even older reactor designs is way below the mortality rate induced by burning coal (true) and that nuclear power is much less carbon intensive than fossil fuels (also true).

There are compelling arguments about a diversity of sources, above the reliability of fissile power, about the longevity of investments, and about immunity to a range of possible weather (storms, extended rain) or geopolitical constraints (international fuel shipments), all of which (and more) have merit and should be considered carefully.

I consider four counter arguments that should be considered when contemplating the relative merit of fissile power generation over other methods:

1) Current advanced nuclear power plants have a projected LCOE of $0.11/kWh (DOE) standard new at $0.118-$0.192/kWh (lazard) while solar currently runs $0.05-$0.06/kWh (lazard) and $0.086 (NREL) for battery-backed 24/7 solar, declining to $0.047/kWh by 2050 (NREL). The economic justification for nuclear power is weak in all but a few geographic locations occupied by humans.

2) Uranium is a finite resource, the cost of which is rising and currently $86.8/kg (tradingeconomics). The total proven proven reserves are sufficient for about 2 years of total human consumption in standard light water fission reactors. Breeders and advanced systems have significantly different total reserve values, but such systems come with significant risks, either in proliferation (breeders) or technological (advanced reactor designs). While it is an entertaining speculative argument to discuss technologies that might extend fuel supplies, solar panels and storage (PSH or grid-scale battery) are well proven and widely available today.

3) National security policy: defense against external antagonist: any centralized civilian facility is a target and nuclear reactors, even intrinsically safe ones, are a particularly tempting target. While containment structures are designed to be robust against, for example, the impact of a large passenger aircraft, they are not robust against "bunker buster" style munitions. Consider the consequences of a relatively trivial drone impact with the Chernobyl sarcophagus. As these sorts of attacks are democratized by the proliferation of low cost, long range, difficult to attribute munitions they will inevitably become more common and the only practical mitigation is decentralization. While nanoreactors such as the Zeus (1-20 MW) might make targeting more difficult, they're still vastly more expensive than a few more drones making them juicy asymmetric targets for any NSAG and proliferate the next concern:

4) National security police: defense against extremist state takeover or occupation: "safe" nuclear reactors assume operation remains in the hands of moderately responsible, reasonable people, an assumption not supported by recent history. There is no fission design that does not rely on a concentration of fissile material, intrinsically radioactive. There is no such concentration that cannot be widely dispersed with a properly engineered application of conventional high explosives. Every nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, is a pre-emplaced nuclear munition. To quote the (poor) AI transcription of Serhii Plokhy from the Economist's Intelligence podcast https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40 "The taboo on the occupation and military attacks on nuclear sites that existed before 2022 had been broken. It is gone. Now, the war in Ukraine is the war of drones more and more. And the non-nuclear country. Can very easily go nuclear by attacking somebody's nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants." Chernobyl is occupied, Zaporizhzhia is occupied, the Ukrainians got close to taking Kursk; if an occupying force is forced out, might they be tempted to salt the earth they're forced to leave with fissile debris? Might one of the many political parties animated by an Armageddonist eschatology consider a nuclear reactor an inexpensive and readily available doomsday munition, a sort of clarion call to whatever deity they are waiting for? Even if they're wrong about the level of doom a conventional detonation of a fissile core might achieve, the consequences would be far more lasting and terrifying than a fuel depot or even grid-scale lithium battery fire.

Well, first of all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and carbon makes up something like 0.5% of the total observed mass of the universe (it's the fourth most common element), so along with other trace elements like sodium, phosphorus and the like, we're simply looking for places where there is sufficient energy to create the necessary reactions to produce organic compounds. No lack of energetic sources, in particular stellar system formation. Indeed many comets and asteroids host a lot of precursors, indicating that some fairly sophisticated organic chemistry was going on early in the solar system's development.