>"In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes."

This is one reason why I drop all my outgoing mail (mostly bills) into a locked US Postal Service box at work, rather than mailing from home.

>"Well, if by "many, many, many" you mean "about five". Red Hat provides longer support terms, but not for free."

Yes. Maybe I put too many "many's" in there :) But then you can do in-place upgrades. I have done that multiple times with Mint on different systems and it has worked perfectly every time. Although I am not waiting the full X years before doing so.

>"True, sort of. Assuming the upgrade works, which it often does... but not always."

Probably better than MS-Windows does in-place upgrades, though :) I can't say it will always work for every case on every machine or distro, ever. But it seems pretty solid nowadays.

And then there is the "rolling distro" concept.... although I am not really a fan of that, some Arch/Manjaro people swear by it.

>"That means there are still hundreds of millions of active Windows 10 installs, but those machines will be up to date for at least an additional year."

And they could be up to date for many, many, many years if Linux was installed on those, instead. Then updates would be fast, easy, free, installed when and how you want, not suddenly change things you don't want changed, not slow your machine down, and not require any "subscription" service or even a login. And then after those years shift from a "update" path to an "upgrade" path and have many years more.

I regularly use 10+ year old machines (some even much older) that work just as fine now under Linux as they did when first purchased. RAM use has increased a little, which is to be expected, but overall performance is just as good. The days of needing to upgrade hardware every few years to have a good experience are long gone.

>"China doesn't need to catch up to the US. They can simply invade and take over Taiwan where all the chips get made these days."

Not necessarily

1) Taiwan is perfectly able to sabotage their factories or key technology parts if they are invaded.
2) The USA/allies could do #1 if needed.
3) Taiwan has been working to diversify production into some other countries, so not all their "eggs" are in one "basket".
4) If invaded, there could be severe sanctions by the USA and many other countries.
5) Some key components are supplied by the Dutch, and it is likely they would shut off all support if Taiwan was invaded.

If it were easy and risk-free, China would probably have done it already.

>"Maybe, though we seem to have got on without it for a while. You've got an amazing immune system we don't understand that well. And your sticky hairy nostrils were designed for filtration."

True. But we were never "meant" to be locked inside with lots of other people, continuously breathing recycled, stale air over and over and over again.

>"I'd put them in hospitals and doctors waiting rooms first, very dirty places, full of sick people."

For sure. But it makes sense for other areas, too. Should probably be a standard part of building codes for business and retail areas.

>"It might help us with the next pandemic, after covid I expect massive resistance against infection control measures."

Indeed. Massive government overreach, misleading info, politicization of everything. Having passive systems behind the scenes would help a lot and require no tensions or buy-ins. Just quietly working 24/7 in the background. And, like I posted, it has lots of other benefits as well. I missed also saying it keeps air coils clean, which also helps with energy efficiency.

>"How about basic affordable health care for all by making the billionaire class pay some reasonable tax rate?"

The tax rate is not the problem. Hiding what would be taxable income behind loans and such is, and should be addressed.... However, no matter how much money you take from billionaires it won't solve anything. It would be a drop in the bucket. And in the process, if too extreme, severely damage much of the economy (through loss of employment, capital, innovation, etc). More than half of Americans already pay no net taxes at all. And the 1% already pay almost half of all the income tax.

The overwhelming problem is a government spending (and waste and fraud) one. Spending that also causes/caused debt, and servicing that debt is now insanely expensive every year. We are wasting over $1 trillion a year in debt service now, with the expectation that will DOUBLE in just a decade to $2 trillion per year. That current $1 trillion debt service would cover 60% of Federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid (not to mention the over 10% of estimated annual fraud in that spending).

>"large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces."

I am a big fan of this. Not only will it help with viruses, but also bacteria, mold, allergens, smells, and general dust. Lots of wins, and completely passive. Several technologies in the space- mechanical filtration, electronic/ionic filtration, UV sterilization, as well as energy-efficient fresh air exchange. Also some design tweaks, like having more returns and in strategic locations to pull return air more directly up or down, so it doesn't travel so far across other people, in key high-traffic areas.

>"Walmart will buy 176 megawatts of power from the plant over a 15-year period"

That is not a measurement of power. It is an instantaneous level. Did they mean 176 megawatt hours over 15 years? If so, that is only 32kWh per day which doesn't seem like that much.

Or did they mean a full 176 megawatts CONTINUOUSLY over 15 years? That would be 4 GWh per day, now that is a lot of power.

>"making it difficult for recipients to follow conversation history."
>"so forcing users to think about what they actually need to include is no bad thing."

Yeah, we kinda used to have such a thing. It was called "trim and inline reply" (bottom reply). Kinda like I JUST DID IN THIS POSTING. But, alas, that was not the Microsoft-way. So it turned into full bottom quotes just being added forever with top replies to 10 questions with no context.

>"Maybe, but I wonder why the thing that's ostensibly there to boot my system even needs to know what users there are on it. Its job is to get you from nothing to login - what happens after that is, frankly, none of its bloody business."

I guess you haven't encountered systemd-logind.service yet
https://www.man7.org/linux/man...

>"The real issue will arise when applications start requiring that date to be verified (and the fork won't help then, either)."

Bingo.

Except it won't be FOSS applications. It will be on-line crap. Having the field or not doesn't matter at all. It will be a whole matter of "chain of trust" again, where you don't actually own or control your own system. Linux/FOSS will not meet that requirement and will be rejected. Just like it is rejected in a small amount of DRM games than want to control your system.

At least with the DRM crap, it is not government-related/mandated, so market pressure can be brought to bear on such companies trying to force it. Especially relevant as the Linux "market" keeps growing and starts carrying more clout.

>"SystemD wants to grow up into a REAL despotic gatekeeping process that locks you out of your own hardware for idiotic reasons that only its developer thinks are important, just like the big corporate offerings do!"

Even if present, there is nothing requiring the user actually use a birthdate field. Or that it even be accurate. Could it be a slippery slope? Maybe. But FOSS, like Linux, is ultimately not controlled by corporate dogma or government whims, so it is unlikely that use of the field could be mandated. As long as it is up to the system owner how it is used, that should be good enough.

>"I grew up on the simplicity of Linux's three tenets:"

Those are actually Unix tenets, that Linux just inherited.

But yeah, I generally hate the idea of systemd because it is trying to be all things and in ways that make understanding and configuring things more difficult.

>"So when the battery dies, you can throw the whole device away!"

Indeed. And then it is also extremely difficult to try and recover the battery for recycling, as well, I assume.

So these devices become toxic, non-reusable, non-fixable, highly flammable, dangerous messes.

>"In no way is it a "first class" anything when it's only for GNOME and only in a snap. [...]There's a 0% chance I'm going to use GNOME or snap."

^^THIS

If it were a project that mapped to many/all Linux distros, using a native package (not container, especially not a SNAP container), worked on any Linux desktop environment (and yes, X11 too), then it would be far more interesting. I might even check it out and give feedback.