A lot of (I would argue most) really good comedy is dialogue-driven and small in scale. Hell, a lot of it works on radio, let alone TV let alone cinema.

Comedy in the cinema is fantastic when it works. Communal laughter can be an amazing experience. But it's unpredictable magic, it relies on individual quirks and is hard to bottle. And we don't even agree on what's funny half the time. I can see why it's no considered a safe bet.

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Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. -- Terry Pratchett

Soon all they will have left to steal will be their own excrement.

I was certainly annoyed when first moving to 64-bit Windows that 'edit filename.txt' didn't work. I guess this fixes that. Having said that, a small batch file called 'edit.bat' that calls notepad (or notepad++ or one of about 1000 other options) also works -- or you can just get used to typing 'notepad' at the prompt.

Launching a GUI editor from the command line doesn't work if you text ssh into a Windows box instead of connecting via VNC or RDP or similar. I have done that, but I cannot pretend I do it regularly, and when I did it was only to work out where some files were stored so I could use scp to pull them down.

Alternatives -- there must be heaps. I mostly use Vim and TDE (http://adoxa.altervista.org/tde/index.html). A few people have mentioned edlin. I would just mention that edlin from FreeDOS is still maintained and compiles effortlessly on modern Windows (https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos-edlin/files/freedos-edlin/). (It also compiles on other platforms, including Linux!)

Environmentally, what a bunch of pricks.

Both countries are bullies for a long time. Ask any countries in the Pacific or in South East Asia about bullying by China.

Trump's tactics are nuts, but the Chinese market and currency manipulation and IP theft are real. The CCP is, indeed, far more subtle and measured in their bullying, but it is just as real.

Like all bullies, China punches down, so it does not bully the US, but just ask Australian wine, crayfish and other producers about trade bullying.

From what I've seen, a lot of humans -- all of us at times -- essentially repeat a version of stuff we've heard elsewhere, and choose the moment to say it based on pattern recognition of the situation we're in, rather than what you might call thought.

The Venn diagram of what a human brain can do and what a computer can do has a region of overlap (both can add 6 and 5 to get 11). These days that region is bigger than ever. At some point, it will be big enough we'll have to consider the machines conscious, I guess. The Turing test is one of the things that is now within the region of overlap.

My own opinion is that it all has to be in terms of what these algorithms things can do, not what they 'are' ('are you conscious?' 'I don't know, but I can do all this stuff that people do.')

I mean, people's brains differ. Some people don't have an internal dialogue. I find that really weird, but intellectually reasonable (what did people do before language was invented?) So if it looks like a duck, etc, even if it claims to not be a duck.

Agree. I put Debian -- not the most user-focused distribution -- on an Acer laptop a couple of days ago. Default installation, as little brain thoughts as possible on my part. Touchscreen works, sound works, wireless works. It all 'just works'. Linux is sorted as long as the hardware is not too exotic.

Linux updating is _easier_ than Windows because it's all just one command. Or one click in your GUI package manager (_once your learn what that sentence means_.)

The problems people (by which I means people who don't want to know anything about their computer beyond how to turn it on and get to the desktop) have going to Linux are not about Linux. The problems are about Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint and now SharePoint and Teams. Businesses and governments exchange Word and Excel files and collaborate via SharePoint after they have their remote meetings in Teams. Getting off Windows is not about the OS. M$ has done a good job of moving their big clients onto SharePoint/Teams. It works and works well -- if you buy in. You can do most of it in a browser now, but the web versions of Word and Excel are not yet equal to the desktop apps, and these are programs that organisations have built their workflows around for 20+ years. For a lot of orgs, shifting off M$ Office would require a 10-year strategy. For them, Windows is only a platform for running Office.

As far as installing Linux goes, well ... A lot of people would not be able to install Windows. So any difficulty in installing Linux is moot. Linux does have the disadvantage of giving users choice. Most of the installers I know eventually get to a screen that asks about partitioning, or about which window manager or desktop you'd like. At which point the average end user who wants to browse the web and use Facebook is going 'WTF?!?'.

Yeah, MS tactics suck. It's like they don't care about anything but making money, or something. Who'd have thought?

The hardware requirements of Windows 11 are enough to cause me to avoid it where possible. The policies of companies like Apple and Micro$oft that seem designed to generate e-waste don't get enough criticism. Computing hardware from years ago is easily powerful enough to do everything the average user needs to do. If Windows 11 was (a) not wasting so many processor cycles on unproductive and counter-productive tasks and (b) more flexible on the hardware it would run on, that would probably have saved many many tonnes of waste. It ought to literality be a crime. Apple's no better.

Anyhoo, I use Debian with MATE desktop at home, where I have discretion over it, so that must be what I prefer. I've tried various Unices, and I always end up installing Debian with MATE. It's faster on the same hardware, than Windows, and does not come with the sticker shock and lousy long-term upgrade cycle and limited hardware choice of mac os. Debian used to be too slow in bringing in drivers for newer hardware, but these days there's usually little need for backports, and I don't see the point in the various prettified distros that are built on Debian.

Of course, work is something else again. Most norms use Windows, at least at the front end (I'm ignoring phones here). My government clients all use Windows, all send me Word files and so on. My corporate bosses have settled on Teams, SharePoint and Office 365 as the basic tool set I have to use. My work computer is a locked-down Windows 11 Dell laptop. (When I used to write code and do numerical modelling, back then I used Linux...) When I do some lecturing for a local university, I'm still in a Teams/SharePoint/365 universe for anything to do with the education side of things (of course researchers are much more split).

Now, you _can_ install Cygwin without administrator privileges, so my work computer is not as bad as it could be ...

I reckon a voter's gotta vote _against_ even if no-one is worth voting _for_. I might not want either, but I can _always_ rank them in terms of the damage they are likely to do, and pick the one who'll do the least.

Democracy is about how we all have a tiny, tiny influence over where our country goes, and a duty to wield that tiny bit of influence for the common good. Always vote, even if only to downweight the worst of the options.

Maybe a nation (a people, perhaps) gets the leaders it, overall, deserves, but people don't.

Why face the charges when there's no chance of a proper trial? I don't believe he would have got a proper trial.

1. I agree that Assange/Wikileaks had an agenda that influenced what material they released and how.
2. So does every other journalist and publisher. I mean, I'd like to see everyone at Fox from Rupert on down get their comeuppance, but they are not outsiders. I'd argue the right-wing media assistance to Trump (etc) has done more harm to the US than a hundred Assanges could do.
3. If the US had got hold of him earlier, they would have found some excuse to put him some place where the usual rules don't apply (a la Gitmo) and he would no doubt have been even worse off than he was.
4. The Australian government should have gone in a lot harder a lot sooner. They just knuckled under so as to avoid pissing off their #1 ally. At the expense of one of their own citizens.

Arguments about whether FreeDOS is better than DOSBox or whatever miss the point, I think.

It does not need to have a use beyond personal satisfaction. If no-one but Jim wanted FreeDOS, it would not still be going so strong. There are always new projects cropping up on the FreeDOS website, and updates to old projects. And it both informs and is informed by DOSBox and other projects. Choice is a wonderful thing.

Yes, Intel is going to eventually strip out the legacy stuff that lets FreeDOS talk to newer hardware, so yes, it will cease to be an option on new bare metal. Of course, second-hand stuff with enough grunt to run it will be around for a very long time, as will emulators. I expect FreeDOS to fade out when people who grew up with DOS fade out.

For my part, I like FreeDOS a lot. It combines nostalgia with the simple satisfaction of really feeling like you are in control of your computer and close to the hardware. I can still read and send my email, and use old software that I still find productive for a few niche tasks, or which just makes me smile when I use it.

Ocean acidification is a major problem as well, and simply blocking out sunlight without reducing atmospheric carbon will not help with that. (Well, it will help a bit because a warmer ocean dissolves more CO2, but the higher concentrations are what mostly drives it.) Indeed, if we start to think we can stop warming in such a way, and so reduce efforts to lower CO2 concentration, that would be a backward step.

Further, acidification is largely from dissolving CO2, so dealing with methane alone won't fix it. There are a range of things happening from increased CO2 levels apart from warming. Some are good -- some plants uptake more CO2 when there's more in the air -- some are less good, like the effects on some shellfish and corals.

Surely this is a bit like saying, I never read that book, so I'm not going to see the movie based on it, which would rule out around half movies, some of them pretty good. I mean, games are a kind of interactive fiction, in a sense.

I don't play games at all, but I saw the D&D movie with my kids and it was a reasonable piece of entertainment.

Since the form began movies have plundered other media for ideas and stories. And since movies began, having some name recognition in the marketplace has been seen as good for marketing. This is just more of the same, using yet another source of ideas and characters and ready-made audiences.

The bigger problem is how formulaic almost all big-budget movies are. The plot beats, the reversals, the need for characters to learn lessons. The problem is not the franchise the movie is based on, but that too often the movies are predictable once the setup is complete. Some Marvel films are good, some aren't. Some movies based on Jane Austen are good, some aren't.

We will all go back -- that is, the people who read websites like this one. I work in a non-tech firm, and 90% of people there use Chrome without even thinking about it. Most of the rest use Safari because they have Macs. And the remainder use Edge because it came with Windows. They don't care. FF has lost mind share outside of people who are actually interested. I guess that's your 2 to 5%.

It seems to me (as an ignorant desktop user) that using the browser supplied by the company that serves a lot of the ads is buying into a manipulated, inherently biased ecosystem in which the primary drivers do not push for improved user experience, but for optimised advertising income. Google/Chrome have a conflict of interest that of course is going to affect the properties of the browser.

It's classic monopoly behaviour. You give people what they (think) they want, you drive the competition to the wall because you have deeper pockets, then when you're the only game in town you can do what the hell you like. We're in the phase where the competitors are being pushed to the wall. Mozilla sprang out of a morass like that in the IE6 days, and succeeded because Microsoft was not giving people a good experience. Google won't let that happen. They will optimise the balance of user experience and ad exposure to maximise profit.