Yeah, that’s definitely a quandary. But in the case of people who know they might be (or have been previously) targeted with that sort of bullshit, it’s a prudent precaution in the US (and Canada too, evidently)

Don’t need to arrest the suspect if they’re dead taps forehead

Yeah the cops on this side of the pond are crazy, and their leadership staff tend to fall a lot further into the “complete psycho” side of the human spectrum.

Thanks for sharing that story though - the dichotomy is absolutely fucking wild, especially considering we’re talking about Northern Ireland.

A lot of people enjoy solving tricky and nuanced problems, and this is one. The fact that it yields really awesome outputs like this is, to some degree, just a bonus.

You got me, I admit it

They’re fiber optic these days, and often include rebroadcasters and signal boosters. That cannot be considered low-tech.

Automatic (mechanical) wristwatches.

I love the idea of a truly symbiotic relationship between a thoughtfully and carefully designed mechanism and a human. I walk around and live my life, and by doing so, I give it the kinetic energy it needs to keep its mainspring wound, and in return it tells me what time it is. Always. Without fail. I just have to tweak the time if it starts to get too far off, but that’s barely even an imposition. After a good long while, it’s prudent to have them serviced, but if you’re not observing any problems, it’s generally perfectly fine, and will keep ticking along as long as you wear it regularly.

In my book, while snaps are definitely annoying and crappy, Ubuntu entirely lost the plot when they started scaremongering with their Ubuntu Pro “security alert” upsell messages. That’s some Norton Antivirus level shit.

It does, but that doesn’t relate directly to how the thrusters actually operate. You need reaction mass even if you’re using ion thrusters. Thrusters need something to thrust with. We have not figured out energy>matter conversion yet.

It’d be pretty rad (heh) if the next generation of extra-solar probes focused on solar sails, though.

This is part of why I straight up do not trust most “reliable polls”, because tons of them are still conducted via phone, and in the era of constant spam and caller ID, most people younger than boomers just don’t answer unknown numbers, and also don’t even have, and in fact have never paid for, a landline. Not to mention, I still have a west coast area code, and I live on the east coast, and most of my friends have area codes from wherever they grew up, not where they live now, so targeting by area code is often nonsense.

Must be nice not getting like 2-8 spam calls daily (no, that is not an exaggeration)

Skill issue

Because you can customize all of that

As someone who has been working in Python a ton for the last couple years, it’s amusing to me how many downvotes you’re getting for simply noting that good code style and tight, terse, modularized implementation of business logic more or less addresses the issue. Because it absolutely does in the vast majority of cases.

Astroturfing.

Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.

These days, foreign influence operations (often based in authoritarian countries) aimed at increasing the polarization of a target population also play a major role.

lol wtf are you talking about? You can literally take $100 off the price of a computer just because it’s not bundled with a Winderps license - the price is straight up lower because the license cost is $0. You can order some models like this straight from Dell or Lenovo or whatever.

Atomic OSes should be evangelized more aggressively to laypersons. IMO, they’re great for 3 specific use cases:

• gaming (bazzite) - personally, I want my gaming box to “just work”
• thin clients/low-powered laptops used as an entry point to your homelab or other remote systems - again, I like having at least one fairly bulletproof and super stable system to use as a human:homelab gateway/admin machine
• non-techies. If the update fails, just roll back. Can’t remember if that’s generally an automated recovery process or not, but that sort of idiot-proofing is precisely what the general public needs in the context of Linux. Because there are a lot of idiots out there.

• rake in the lake

Makes sense. More polite than the default in Boston, if I’m honest

Fair