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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • We have a political environment that lacks credible independent commentators (e.g. Walter Cronkite), so anyone presenting themselves as independent who calls bullshit on a politico is immediately labeled as biased.

    What mechanism do you think could overcome this and pull the mic plug to reduce the incentive to lie without immediately being vigorously attacked?


  • There are thousands of programs for Linux… but you should be warned that relatively few programs run natively on both Windows and Linux. In some cases there are ways to run “Windows programs” on Linux, but in general such successes are special cases. If you absolutely must have Windows you can run it in a virtual machine… but you will most likely be happiest with Linux if you aren’t chasing after such things.

    I use Windows for work because our IT department only supports that… but I use cygwin and wsl to get a smidgen of my familiar Linux tools that I use on my personal computers.




  • NPR sez Florida law would disallow him voting, but he wasn’t convicted in Florida, so they defer to the law in the state where he was convicted. New York allows felons to vote up until they are imprisoned, which doesn’t seem likely to happen before election day since he is appealing. Skin of teeth again.






  • Using sudo when it isn’t necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su… Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files… and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental “sudo rm -rf /” command.

    Seriously… sudo is not a “habit” to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.


  • Its more like a kind of claustrophobia… in Japan, men’s urinals are often visible from the door because the Yakuza used to use that as an isolated location in which to kill their target. (And despite the high cleanliness standards and widespread availability of public bathrooms Japanese people avoid them like the plague.) So it it a cultural expectation that women will get assaulted by men if they find themselves in a small space.

    Yes, irrational. But people often don’t behave rationally.


  • Noob question?

    You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

    But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

    Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.



  • Bullshit. That is like saying adding more lanes to a freeway will reduce traffic congestion… it just encourages more deforestation.

    If the fertility in a rainforest is in the biomass, learning to live with that biomass in place will be necessary if people are to live there. But there were very few people there before people started their land grab… it may not be possible even when the biomass is restored.

    If the rainforest is valued for the ecological impact it has, then it is more likely that people will have to move out. Not attractive to the people who already moved in, but when they are starving then they will eventually migrate away anyway, and keeping them there with false promises to make cleared land usable will only make things worse.