>" quasi-moon near Earth"

It isn't ANY type of "moon". A moon orbits a planet, regardless of what size, shape, or how erratic the orbit. This object orbits only the sun.

According to the paper:
"Meet Arjuna 2025 PN7, the Newest Quasi-satellite of Earth"
"Out of the Arjunas and NOT COUNTING those which can be temporarily captured as mini-moons of Earth, quasi-satellites are our closest companions. Here we show that 2025 PN7 is a quasi-satellite,[...] engaged in a 1:1 mean-motion resonance with our planet, but they are not gravitationally bound to it. "

Clearly, they say it is NOT a moon because it was NOT captured by Earths gravity into any type of orbit, much less gravitationally bound AT ALL, and they call it a "quasi-satellite." But it isn't even that. It is just an asteroid in roughly the same orbit as Earth around the Sun.

That's no moon. It's a space station. :-D

Public schools don't fail int he same way that private ones do. They can't, because they aren't businesses.

It's really sad to have to explain, over and over, that operating public services as for-profit businesses - or worse, replacing public services with for-profit businesses - is literally the whole reason shit is falling apart. The peak of American civilization also had the highest tax rates for the wealthy and the most extensive and functional public services. That was not a coincidence.
=Smidge=

Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.

This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.

>>Even my old mom has used it for over 15 years.
>What about your new mom?
>Sorry, had to! :) hardy, har har

>Which distro / desktop is she using?

Started out as Mandrake then Mandriva then Mageia (kept changing names), all in KDE. Then Mint/Cinnamon.

I do believe that with increased "market share", Linux security vulnerabilities would be found and exploited more. I never claimed it is impenetrable or without vulnerabilities, but it has always been generally very good.

I actually agree with you in principle. I taught math and philosophy at a community college after getting my CS degree, before transitioning to corporate America as a sysadmin on steroids. You do have a point. It’s your classroom, and you’re right that none of us really knows what the future looks like. As Heinlein put it, “Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal—you live and you learn, or you don’t live long.” You rightly grok that grounding students in clarity of thought and persuasive articulation is the right thing to do.

But I want to push back on a couple of your assertions. “Coding” as a universal future-proof skill always felt like a reach, and I’m not sure what stake a humanities professor has in it. More importantly, I don’t buy your framing around autonomous thinking. How autonomous is a carpenter who isn’t allowed to use a saw? How does banning tools make craftsmen better? A tool doesn’t abolish autonomy; it enables mastery. Denying students AI doesn’t prepare them for the future they’re walking into—reread Heinlein's quote--it just deprives them of learning how to collaborate with a force already shaping their world.

AI isn’t a replacement for human reasoning. At its best, it’s a collaborator—an amplifier of judgment, not a substitute for it. The hard part is managing that dynamic in the classroom—keeping the line between the student’s work and the LLM’s work bright and sharp. I agree with your sentiment: if that line blurs, it risks compromising the student’s growth and undermining academic integrity. The challenge is that you’re also in a position to model how to get it right. Preparing students for that reality seems just as important as teaching them to write a persuasive essay without any tech at all.

Disney surely still has trademark on all variants of Mickey and key characters of their old animations. Using those characters in a commercial context could be construed as linking Disney and that commercial enterprise, when there is no such affiliation. They will NEVER approve of it.

Because it's out of copyright, one could freely broadcast the animations, include them in an anthology of old animations, play them on a projector for the neighborhood, etc. That does not mean you can adopt Mickey as your company logo.

I remember when “online classes” were basically diploma mills farming credential seekers who figured an MS or MFA would boost their career options. Nobody who took education seriously considered them legitimate—the same way upper management quietly ignored “University of Phoenix” or “ITT Tech” listed on a résumé. If your education came from one of those places, you weren’t educated. You were just a credentialed cosplayer.

Covid changed that. The pandemic gave online education a shot in the arm (pun intended), and what started as a stopgap metastasized into something our cultural immune system has never learned to fight off. Suddenly, entire universities digitized their classrooms wholesale. And once the line between “school” and “screen” blurred, it stayed blurred.

Now Google, with its Chrome homework help button, has taken the next step—turning the browser itself into a cheat sheet. The tool may be paused for the moment, but the damage is done. Students are being trained to see the shortcut as normal, even sanctioned. What was once a diploma mill has become a distributed millstone, dragging down the very idea of intellectual integrity.

AI isn’t the culprit here. This rot began the moment we accepted that an “online class” could substitute for human presence, accountability, or the messy give-and-take of real learning. Covid forced the shift, and we are left with the consequences: an educational ecosystem where Big Tech sets the terms, and teachers scramble to defend whatever fragments of rigor remain.

The diploma mills at least had the decency to look tawdry. Chrome’s button arrived polished, market-tested, frictionless—and all the more corrosive for it.

>"the reality is that one of the many consequences of this decision will be that, overall, there will be LESS network security. Mom and pop are not about to go out and buy a new computer just because their existing system stopped receiving updates. Microsoft can't disable computers and force them to, because that would be illegal."

^^^ THIS

Not the case for "corporate" or government computers, but for home, student, casual, and many small businesses, which probably account for maybe as many as half of MS-Windows computers, this is often the case.

>"Heck for the most popular desktop Linux you get 9 months of support. MONTHS! Not even a year. And consumers do not usually seek out LTS releases."

Linux Mint is one of THE most popular distros, and there is no short-term version. It has 5 years of updates for each version. And anytime before or after that, you can in-place upgrade to the next version.

And, somehow, Linux desktops do really well with security, without trying to lock the desktop down with TPM.

>"Linux missed this opportunity. It is not usable as desktop for common users."

Wow, tell that to all the "common users" I have set up with Linux and use it just fine as a desktop. Even my old mom has used it for over 15 years.

It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.

• OEM version: Requires a higher minimum level of hardware support for a premium experience
• Retail version (more expensive): Supports a wider range of hardware to the extent that it can

Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.