Best President since Jimmy Carter is a low, low bar. We forget that Carter was a neo-liberal who threw labor under the bus. Because the Presidents since have been so right-wing, he looks like a leftist in the rear view. And throwing the working classes under the bus is one of the major reasons we’re here now.

Can we start delivering those 2,000lb. bombs that the U.S. gives to Israel one by one, to Netanyahu’s house, by airmail?

Fascinating how the subtext is always that we should feel comforted because a mass-casualty event that’s a normal part of the system that kills and injuries people every day isn’t terrorism.

“Oh, that’s just the machine crushing orphans. It’s supposed to be doing that.”

There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.

Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.

It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.

This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.

Has it? My complaints are: I have to use VPN software for work that replaces /etc/resolve.conf with a symlink to another location, one that sandboxed snaps can’t access. There’s no way to grant them access; the “slots” that you can connect are fixed and pre-defined. You can’t even configure the file path; it’s defined right in the source code. Not even as a #define, but the string literal “/etc/resolve.conf”. That seems like poor practice, but I guess they’re not going for portability.

Also, I have /usr and /var on different media, chosen for suitability of purpose, and sized appropriately. Then, along comes snap, violating the File Hierarchy Standard by filling up /var with application software.

Minor annoyances are the ~/snap folder, and all of the mounted loopback filesystems which make reading the mtab difficult.

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Yeah, nobody’s buying this bullshit.

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

We talking about 19th century land grabs? There’s a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?

The history of the US—the real history—is wild.

Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

So get to it.

It’s time to move past the salt. For one, it’s not helpful now, and it’s also not even true. There weren’t enough protest voters to affect the outcome. Worse, the latest information I’ve heard from Democratic Party analysts is that his margin of victory would’ve been higher if more people had voted.

One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

Believe as you wish, but if a person works for a boss that they know to be a sex trafficker, doing things sex-trafficking-adjacent, or at least illegal, for him, that’s good enough for me to declare that person a sex-trafficking POS.

Also, I don’t think for a microsecond that goons given this kind of power and impunity over detainees are going to refrain from sexual assault. We just haven’t heard about it yet (this time).

But, well, pick your lane.

It’s the same principle as what you call 9 people at a table with a Nazi. These agents deserve no nuance.

Well, President Musk has been accused of helping Epstein’s trafficking, we know for sure that his Oval Office puppet was involved.