Instead we gave them the electoral college so they could have more voting power than they deserved.>>

Actually, if you look at how the Electoral Collage was set up, and the populations of the original states, you'll see that even with the Three-fifths Compromise neither the North nor the South had enough power to control presidential elections on their own. Generally, the south managed to get either pro-slavery or neutral presidents elected right up until Lincoln took office then seceded because they assumed that Lincoln would abolish slavery although he'd made it plain that he was in favor of helping it die out over time.

It turns out that, in French, many of the verb conjugations sound the same even if they are spelled differently, I feel that my speaking and listening skills could have progressed farther without a hyper focus on that baggage.

I feel your pain. I took Latin in high school and ran into five declensions for verbs and multiple patterns for nouns, consisting of different suffixes for different cases. Not only that, Latin uses a construction called the ablative absolute that packs lots of information into two or three words, but translates into English as the nominative absolute that's a lot longer. As an example, in the classic Latin tale of the Golden Fleece, the author packs, "The provisions having been stored, the Argo set out..." into two words. I only remember seeing the English form used once in published literature.

AI summaries even go at the top of search results when they're redundant. What good that a summary when all you're looking for is someplace local to buy something, or a picture to add to an essay or report?

My impression is that these days, it is significantly more difficult to work with Windows, due to obscure errors, non-deterministic behavior, instability and generally crappy and non-helpful diagnostic.

From where I'm sitting it looks like you're saying that Win11 is susceptible to mandelbugs.

I take it, then, that you've never bothered to look around and see what's out there. It took me less than five minutes checking out the results of a web search to find LibreCAD, an FOSS CAD package that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. That means that you can try it out on your current setup without having to install Linux just to test it. HTH HAND.

And it's Linux's fault, is it, that the big popular games need (or at least want) anti-cheat software that can only run under Windows? I'm sure that given time there are Linux programmers who could find ways to work around that if they felt it was worth their while, but all of them have much better things to do.

And how many Linux newcomers do you think there are who know how to perform a netinst on their own without any help?

I use Fedora and dropped Gnome when I learned how awful Gnome 3 was going to be and ended up with Xfce. The default on Fedora is Gnome, but they also have a number of spins based on different DE,s including Xfce. Normally I upgrade in place, but there are times I want/need a clean install, and those spins make it easy. Unlike with some distros I don't have to install with Gnome then migrate to Xfce and try to get rid of everything Gnome insists on dragging in. I can't speak for other distros, but at least Fedora makes it easy to use whatever DE you want.

We're never going to get proper laws passed to put an end to this and any laws we do pass won' have any teeth to them. However, people whose works have been gobbled up by these chatbots without proper compensation can always sue, and get their suits certified as class action suits. Defending themselves from multiple suits is going to cost these scumbags money, and the settlements considerably more. As they're only in it for the money, take away the profits and eventually they'll give up and start looking for another scam.

My point was that the kettle doesn't need any type of mechanism to tell what the temperature is.

Oh yeah we absolutely can. There was rampant collusion going on and it was being done through software so they thought they could get away with it.

I could see landlords in such a case claiming that there was no intent to collude and that the case should be dismissed because the prosecution failed to demonstrate mens rea . If that works, about the only thing the legislature can do is amend the act, making it a strict liability crime.

If you find that the Nespresso's coffee is too bitter for you, add a pinch of salt to it. This trick even makes Starbucks' over-roasted, burnt and bitter swill palatable when I have no other choice.

I live in Colorado and I bought one by mail order five or six years ago. It works really great, and doesn't have problems with the fact that I live at 6100' so that water boils at about 192F, or 89C.

I had that done on a bladder stone about ten years ago and it worked quite well. While I was waiting to be taken into the OR, the hospital's chaplain came over to talk with me and see if I wanted his services. (No, he's Protestant and I'm Jewish.) When he asked me what procedure I was waiting for, I told him it was Laser Lithotripsy. When I explained what that consists of, he was stunned for a moment, then responded, "How...Star Trek."

Vegetables are healthy, stir fried vegetables often are mostly fat and that pasta sauce is probably mostly fat as well.

I don't know where, if anywhere, you learned stir frying,but done properly you only use a small amount of oil, which is why Asian dishes are rarely greasy, and if that pasta sauce is mostly fat, there's something wrong because those sauces traditionally consist mostly of vegetables.