A few months ago I had a poster complain that I'd removed the beginning and end of a sentence of his I quoted and replaced the missing parts with three dots. Apparently he didn't know what an ellipsis is.

The primary goal of political campaigns is to turn out supporters because most elections are decided by who turns out.

Don't you mean that all elections are decided by those who turn out? Unless you're suggesting that there's ballot box stuffing and other fraudulent methods of affecting the outcome of an election going on it's rather hard to see how those who don't turn out and vote can have the slightest effect on the outcome.

Long before I worked, briefly, at JPL, MOPS, the Maneuver Operations Programming System was written for an IBM 360, in assembler. When they moved up to a Univac, it was re-written in whatever version of FORTRAN was current and worked very well. In fact, I'd bet money that that package is still running there because, like the old COBOL programs, It Just Worked. I know this because I had the privilege of working with the late Dan Alderson, the last member of the team that migrated the package still at JPL when I was there.

In the almost three years that we worked together, I only saw him presented with a bug in the package once, and it turned out to be a user error. The user was trying to calculate the perturbations on Voyager I caused by 11 of the Jovian satellites, either to calculate their masses, or at least the maximum possible, causing the program to crash. It didn't take long for Dan to find the problem: the data for the satellites was kept in an array, and being written in FORTRAN, the array was designed for a max of ten objects. He suggested that the user edit a copy of the source to enlarge everything and use that instead of the regular program.

I take it that you've never had to deal with code from back in the Bad Old Days when self-modifying code was the norm. For a classic example, take a look at the story of Mel, the real Programmer, either from Wikipedia or FOLDOC because the explanatory text is different in each.

Yes, COBOL is wordy, but were you ever told why? It's so that the language is self-documenting and the bean counters can follow what's going on well enough to be able to spot any attempts at embezzlement.

...it's a Waldo, not a Robot.

I don't think so. Traditionally the term waldo has referred to equipment that allows you to manipulate objects in a place that the operator can't go to for whatever reason. Here, there's no physical reason that the operators couldn't go to Japan and do the work in person; the barrier is social, not physical. If what you wrote were right, drones would be called waldos, but they're not.

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.