And if they find that it's not helpful to them right now, there's no point in learning something about it for the future -- because it's going to change. If it ever achieves its full promise there will be no need to learn how to use it, because it will learn how to work with us.

Well, assuming it doesn't kill us all.

If you're not confused about what company they're talking about, then what's the problem? A lot of nerds were talking like that back when these products were new. Before it was most commonly written into Micro$oft, people were putting a dollar sign into Compu$erve, to the point where I'd see it written that way more often than not, e.g. on Fidonet threads. Then I got into UUCP (first with UUPC, then Waffle, then SCO UUCP, then AmigaUUCP...) and I would see it written that way on USENET. It's tradition.

There were Unix nerds that looked down on Windows. There were Mac nerds that looked down on Windows. There were Amiga and Atari nerds that looked down on Windows. Back then there were still active VMS nerds who looked down on Windows. And they were all correct, and it's still correct. You can obviously do real work on Windows, but it's not worth the pain. Sadly, it became the de facto standard for working with government, and you needed to run it in order to interface with it as smoothly as possible. Its popularity is like the dollar, it's just too inconvenient to do anything else. Except, "suddenly" (decades of fighting/figuring out how to go around it later) it isn't.

Wine and derivatives run a lot of software very well, but indeed run a minority of it very poorly or not at all. Microsoft and Adobe software are the primary candidates for not running even slightly, and if they do, they definitely do not work right. If you need that software, there is no particular sign that Wine will run it well any time soon, though it will run some of it sort of okay. I've tried quite a bit of it. If you need that software, then you will need Windows, at least in a VM.

Specialized software either works great or fails pathetically with little in between IME. Drivers can be a big problem though, because the software can be looking for the drivers very specifically. If you have Windows software to go with hardware whose interface dongle is not mostly just a ch340 or something, you are probably gonna have a bad time.

Practically everything works great with Linux these days, though. Standards have mostly won and Linux is taken seriously. OSS is now also generally taken seriously and even preferred in solutions large and small. The dependency on closed standards and platforms is waning, and while that's no comfort to anyone forced to run Windows for some compatibility reason now, at least it's becoming less of a problem. Even people who think Windows is fine now recognize that they don't want to be stuck with a dependency on a specific version of it.

If you own a publicly traversable road, then it's not surprising that there's some rules you have to follow for placing them out for notifying people of a hazard. Otherwise it shouldn't require any maths

I suspect you do not need to be told what to do to address this, and I am not running Ubuntu anymore so I do not know in any case, but last I checked the solution was to remove the snap for firefox and pin it away — and to install firefox as a deb package from the official PPA.

What loader is needed to take advantage of this? Is there a ready solution that can reasonably be built and installed on a typical system?

Nobody asked you to lie, yet here you are.

Your attempt to equate all politicians is facile and weak, just like Trump's mind.

Microsoft's telemetry is different from some app's telemetry, since it can be spying on everything you do on your computer and the app's reach is comparatively limited. It's also different from most in that you cannot actually turn it off. Even when you think you have turned it off, the system is still phoning home more than can be adequately explained by update checks and the like. You have to take extraordinary measures to disable it, and then Microsoft will just turn it on again when you update. So yes, the telemetry really is part of it, and no, it's not the same as what "every app" has in it (which isn't even true.)

It's relevant in that you cannot trust anything he says, and anyone who does is a big dumbfuck, and their opinion should never be considered valuable on any subject ever again without exemplary evidence to go with it because they have proven that they are willing to believe stupid shit that nobody should believe.

That project wrapped up in 1986, so if I'm wrong, I'm wrong only by one decade out of five. It's been almost four full decades now since that project concluded. How much in tax breaks and other subsidies have gone into fossil fuels since? How much further could we have been ahead in solar deployment if we had started spending that money on it in the 80s, let alone the 70s?

I notice that you didn't provide any counterexamples which is, of course, because there aren't any. No planned economy larger than a few hundred people has ever succeeded. While capitalist economies do go through cycles of expansion and recession (which a well-functioning central bank and adequate regulatory oversight can ameliorate but not eliminate), capitalism consistently makes the entire society wealthier, top to bottom. Yes, it does tend to produce inequality, and that has some negative social effects, but over time even the poorest end up better off than under any other system, assuming modest government regulation to prevent abuses.

There really isn't; definitely not compared to central planning. The results speak for themselves, but it's useful to understand why, I think. When people look at the way capitalist economies tend to produce 10 factories making similar shoes while it seems obvious that one big factory would be more efficient, the mistake they're making is in looking only at what they can see with their eyes: Buildings, machinery, people, all making shoes, redundantly. What they fail to see is the knowledge about how to make shoes efficiently that ebbs and flows through those same enterprises. This is the core flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, actually, which was the basis of Marx's understanding of economics.

The Labor Theory of Value will tell you that the value of a product is determined by the resources that went into producing it, material, energy and labor. But it omits the knowledge required to produce the product and the right knowledge can decrease the resource requirements by orders of magnitude. Capitalism works because it incentivizes the creation of knowledge that enables more efficient production, as well as the creation of better products (where "better" means "optimized to consumer desires in context").

This is why the 10 shoe factories end up being more efficient than one.

But that's not where capitalism provides the biggest efficiency boost to the economy. The biggest boost comes from the knowledge it generates about the most efficient way to allocate capital. Wall Street looks on its face like an incredible waste of money. All of those people generating massive personal incomes by "gambling" on stocks and bonds. In truth, that competitive game is the knowledge engine that no central planning board has come remotely close to matching, and certainly has never exceeded. All of the money to be made in trading incentivizes brainpower to concentrate on solving the problem of making sure that the most productive enterprises have the resources they need.

Any system that fails to replace the knowledge generation capitalism provides will ultimately be far less efficient, and will generate production shortfalls. No one has yet proposed any system that even attempts to cover that critical gap.

So far, the absolute best economic structure we've devised -- as evidenced by actual outcomes, not just theory -- is lightly-fettered capitalism overlaid with a redistributive social safety net.

The most "hilarious" thing is that we have had energy-positive solar technology since the 1970s, but people were still preaching nuclear power in the 1980s. It's even more "hilarious" that they are still doing it today, when solar power is cheap and easy and batteries are unprecedentedly cheap.

Rainforests are generally naturally near net zero. They don't produce oxygen because the rate of decomposition is rapid enough and the environment is wet enough that most decomposition is anaerobic, which means most of the carbon is released into the atmosphere. Their "purpose" is global cooling and filtering, they are evaporative coolers as they emit a lot of water vapor in the process of photosynthesis. Most oxygen comes from oceanic algae. Speaking of which, have you been keeping an eye on oceanic acidification?

This is the biggest problem in computer security, all the critical stuff that depends on a network connection accessible through an internet connection which is writable. Connections between the internet and critical control networks should be read-only. No critical medical or infrastructure equipment should ever have to "phone home" to verify that you still have a right to operate it. The entire idea is not only repugnant, it's literally contradictory to national security.