Yup. I don't think I ever met him in person (not positive about that, given that this was roughly 25 to 35 years ago), but as soon as I saw the name, I immediately recognized it both from MkLinux and from NetBSD-mac68k before that. Good times.

For context, I think the last thing I did for MkLinux was hack up the timezone files for the DST changes in 2007.

Pretty sure if anybody tried to actually run it now, it would be a security nightmare. But on the flip side, nobody would still remember how to compile code for it, so maybe not. :-D

Either way, it was cool seeing a familiar name again after so many years.

Completely serious. Native American groups are pretty pissed about this.

But you're right. Calling it racist is a bit of a stretch, because I doubt our POTUS even knows that it's a Native American word, and probably thinks that it was named after a Canadian province, so by changing its name, he's "sticking it to Canada" or some such nonsense, completely unaware that the lake's name came first.

So in retrospect, I should have said that it displays an absolutely ridiculous level of cultural insensitivity and ignorance.

Either way, the effect is still the same, whether it was deliberate or just through a complete lack of bothering to actually learn anything before making decisions.

That theory relies on a very highly questionable interpretation of the meaning of the English language that is rejected almost universally by all but the most extreme wing-nuts.

Yes, it's being served by a Mac Mini in my TV room closet. :-D

Long time, no see.

I believe Linux already supports CPU hot-swap if the hardware supports it. It was needed by IBM so their POWER mainframes could literally do just that.

Unfortunately I don't think there's many x86-based servers that support CPU hot swapping.

Or maybe it was a competitor who wasn't interested in stealing the laptop so much as stealing the game before its release?

In any other timeline, I'd agree. But given Gamescom has been going on for years and such stuff hasn't really been a thing, stealing laptops of some indie developer doesn't really get you much.

I'd think it was more for the hardware - tho laptops may not be worth too much, but you can bet they would have 64GB of RAM and likely a nice SSD, both of which can net you north of a grand. Plus SSDs and memory are tiny and can be stripped from the laptop in minutes.

I suppose we might find out if someone finds a bunch of laptops stripped of memory and SSDs. (If you want to use those Bitlocker exploits it requires the original machine so if the hardware is "discovered" then you know it was just for the hardware.).

The right-wing loonies are coming for the EU too. It's a constant battle, it never ends. There will always be people who vote for hate, everywhere. Countries outside the US are not immune to this nonsense either.

Correct. It's why it's a constant battle. In Europe, the last time it happened was in Germany just prior to WWII.

It is no coincidence that the US voted the way it did because WWII is basically a distant memory and the lessons of the past were forgotten. Especially since the rise of American Exceptionalism that happened in 1956 when the US became the superpower and took over from the UK.

I would depend on my own hands and not someone else's camera to secure the laptop away from the show floor

Usually you're slamming the hood though.

It's probably just encrypted, that provides the security-focused part of write protection, at least while it's not been unlocked for boot.

Computers used to have stuff in ROM, stuff used to be a lot smaller, you used to be able to burn your own ROMs and put them on your own boards and have it be meaningful. But none of that is true today of course any more than that you could put a useful amount of storage on a floppy.

Read/write protection on flash is mostly done in firmware and therefore could theoretically be bypassed, I wonder if there were floppy drives before LS120 where that was also true.

It seems like a better solution would be to virtualize the Windows installation in the first place, and then you can do whatever you want with it later if it's compromised. While IT is checking it over to determine whether it's time to revert it to a snapshot or actually try to gather data from it, you can be using an alternate system of whatever kind. The user ought to ideally be basically unaware that anything has happened (why would you boot into Linux when a user is used to Windows?) except that they don't have access to some files.

The constitution is clear. Trump is ineligible to become president after January 20, 2029 unless he becomes Speaker of the House (the highest line-of-succession post in which he can legally take office) and both POTUS and VPOTUS resign or die, or unless he takes some post even lower in the line of succession and an even larger number of people resign or die. And even that path to the presidency isn't clearly constitutional; it just isn't absolutely black-and-white unconstitutional.

So no, Trump cannot win a third term. He cannot even legally appear on the ballot for a third term, short of him somehow managing to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment and subsequently getting three-fourths of all states to ratify that amendment, or somehow managing to get two-thirds of all states to call for a constitutional convention, neither of which is much more likely than him winning the lottery.

He might, however, be able to win a Senate or House posting, in which case he could continue to be a distracting thorn in the side of proper governance for years to come.

The Gulf of America Act didn't make it through the Senate. It was never codified into law, and the name will be reverted by executive order on or around January 20, 2029 unless the next Congress has enough of a Democrat majority in the house to formally reverse it sooner.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the president the authority to rename bodies of water by executive order. And constitutionality questions aside, this will likely be overturned; it's only a question of whether it happens now or in the first week of the next Congress.

Compounding that is the racism problem. The name Ontario is a Native American word that means "Great Lake". So not only is our president (illegally) renaming the great lake of the Great Lakes, which is bordering on idiotic on the surface, but he is also replacing a word that has meaning to the cultural heritage of Native Americans with the name of a dead white guy from Europe. You can't get much more offensive and flagrantly racist than that.

This is Mt. McKinley all over again, but without decades of historical precedent for the non-native name, and I find it to be an utterly disgusting, contemptible name change by an utterly disgusting, contemptible president. I have never looked forward to any day more in my life than I look forward to January 20, 2029, when all of this racist insanity can start being rolled back.

Debian is four things besides contributors: Governance/COC, license, code, and a network of repos. Debian's code is a tiny amount compared to the overall distribution, but code is not a trivial percentage of Debian.

I'd like to see them be resistant to AI contributions to the code that makes up Debian, I don't care as much if AI is used to do packaging. That's probably a place it could succeed, especially since Debian uses systemd and there will already be unit files which just need paths corrected in predictable ways... and which I will read before bashing init scripts out of other init scripts in five minutes or so.