If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.

Yep.

Even without the ownership issue it would almost certainly have failed because TSG (to distinguish them from SCO) discovered to their shock and amazement that Linux had not, in fact, kifed code from Unix. They clearly went into it assuming that a bunch of volunteer hackers couldn't possibly have built a fully-functional kernel, expecting they could easily prove lots of copyright infringement. Failing to find infringement they hoped they could bluster IBM into settling, but IBM was determined to fight it out and had much better lawyers (heh, we used to call them the Nazgul).

Many of us were disappointed when the ownership issue was revealed. We really wanted Linux to get its day in court. As it turned out that didn't matter; no one else was ever dumb enough to try. Today, of course, the biggest tech companies in the world -- which means the biggest companies in the world! -- almost all use Linux extensively. Even Microsoft would probably stand up to defend Linux these days.

Most of Virginia doesn't get all that cold. 30 kids in a room with limited air circulation should suffice, even without lots of insulation. Air conditioning, however, might well be a different matter.

IIRC, there's a decent link between registered gun ownership and the suicide rate. However, a lot of gun ownership is unregistered, so that's probably not reliable.

I might well agree that the current administration is worse, and scale does, indeed, matter. But judging scale when one side is crippling state governments and the other side is removing individual rights isn't clear. The events are too different.

One can say that "morally the crippling of state governments to enfranchise the disenfranchised" is better, but it's still a centralization of control.

I would really prefer the other way around, invoking Windows containers for the few Windows apps that I am stuck running.

The Democrats also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the PATRIOT ACT.

I take it you're in favor of reparations, then.

If not, you have an inconsistency in your worldview. You apparently believe that guilt is carried by groups across generations, even when none of the current group was alive -- and many didn't even have ancestors involved -- when the bad things were done. Thus, the modern Democrats are stained by the racism and pro-slavery views of the 19th and early 20th-century Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are therefore permanently stained by slavery.

No... nobody I know thinks we're "leading the world in banking technology". We're well aware how backwards the systems are. That's likely a big motivator for people to dabble in crypto and to use all the electronic payment systems that popped up, from Venmo to Cash App.

It's endlessly frustrating. At least 20 years ago, I was sure paper checks would vanish because of the utter lack of security they provide people. It seems like they came from an era where one's signature meant something? (If you think about it, that theme runs deep in our Financial system. Every credit card transaction prompts you for a signature. Yet if you ever have to challenge/fight fraudulent charges, you'll find the card companies don't give a crap if your signature matches what they show was scribbled for the transaction. You're still just as liable for it. Sign with a stick figure .... doesn't matter.) But yeah, give me a paper check and now I have your home address, likely one of your phone numbers, a copy of what your signature looks like (should I want to forge it later) and your bank's routing number + your account number. It's pretty common to ask the person paying to write down their date of birth on the check too. How are people ok with this?

Credit card processing is pathetic too, really. I was selling some 3D prints just a few weeks ago at our booth at the local Farmers'/Artisans' market, and a guy gave me a card that only worked with a mag-stripe. I had to run it with Square by manually keying in his card digits! I thought mag-stripe was rendered obsolete by now!

To be fair, both sides have uniformly supported measures to increase the government's control over the citizenry. They tend to support different measures, with different arguments, but both do it. This is basically because people act to make their jobs easier. The differences are because they have (sometimes only slightly) different goals, or "centers of power".

Note that this applies to the Warren Court and the civil rights decisions as well as to the current more blatant authoritarianism.

Just because someone is stupid doesn't mean that they aren't subject to specific protections under law.

Ernesto Miranda, for whom the Miranda Warning is named, was by accounts a terrible person. Miranda's conviction was thrown out on those technical grounds that his confession should not have been permitted, then he was retried and convicted of the crime without his confession as evidence. Once he was released from prison he died in a bar fight.

The point of protections are that they apply to everyone, guilty or innocent, and are supposed to regulate the way that the legal system all the way from the patrolman to the attorney general behave. That doesn't mean that criminals aren't still criminals, but it does mean that the government has to provide proper justification for its actions against persons. If someone really did commit a crime then the government should be able to show cause, and this keeps everyone else from being scrutinized when the government has no business scrutinizing.

I don't wonder what PJ is up to. I can't even remember the site name/URL that originally was covering that and had forums, but when the password restrictions because utterly freakin' stupid for a new aggregator and discussion forum I just stopped bothering to visit.

Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.

Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.

Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.