Just rotate the paw marks 90 degrees and they suddenly look a lot more like capital 'E’s. That’s a lazy designer.

Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that’s designed to keep people watching – stuff that’s sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn’t happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.

In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don’t pay directly for healthcare, but they don’t really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That’s why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.

I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it’s an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.

The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it’s virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn’t matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.

Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there’s only 1 other option. It’s so much easier to retain power when there’s only one other option.

So, you can’t get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don’t know that things could be different, and because they know that it’s hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn’t benefit the wealthy donors.

I think one reason I really like Lemmy / Mastodon is that they remind me of the days when people ran their own IRC servers, and/or Jabber servers and when that was a normal and standard way to communicate.

What distro do you recommend if it’s a machine mostly used for gaming?

Yeah, it’s true. I don’t think that’s by accident either. The “evil” in Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto was at least somewhat inspired by Microsoft. Now, you can argue about how evil Google has become, but even very early on they saw Microsoft as a prime adversary. That meant not tying themselves to Windows in any way, and it also meant building a lot of capabilities into Chrome that made it so that people weren’t tied to Windows. That has opened the door to SAAS being a thing that happens in the browser, and not in GUIs written in Visual Basic, or something that is tied to the MS platform, which means you’re more and more able to do your normal work on Linux.

Shit just works (mostly).

That’s the “damning with faint praise” that has been the bane of Linux since slackware came on 500 floppies.

Sometimes that “mostly” is just “oh, you have to do this simple thing that is in a FAQ once and then you’re golden”. Other times it’s “oh, that hardware isn’t supported, so I guess you don’t have a usable video card”.

I think what many of us are hoping with when it comes to SteamOS is that a few of the remaining really sharp edges get sanded off. And, just maybe, there will be a tipping point where the smoother the experience, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the smoother the experience will be.

Among consumers, sure. But they also have put decades of effort into understanding how business buy and pay for software and computers.

Forecastle: In medieval shipbuilding, a ship of war was usually equipped with a tall, multi-deck castle-like structure in the bow of the ship. It served as a platform for archers to shoot down on enemy ships, or as a defensive stronghold if the ship were boarded.

I’ve never heard of a Foreseigetower though.

The sad thing is that at the beginning he had a little tiny bit of justification for not liking what WP Engine was doing.

What WP Engine was doing was completely legal. They were completely following the requirements of the WordPress license. But, it was true that they could have done more to benefit the WordPress community. Instead, they were building a huge, quarter-billion dollar business based on WordPress without either helping pay for its development or contributing meaningful code themselves.

A competent project leader could have used the goodwill they’d amassed over decades to mount a subtle pressure campaign to get WP Engine to do more. But, instead, his approach has somehow made a private equity backed for-profit company to almost appear to be the “good guy” in this fight.

affecting

horse

Depends on the context.

“Hey Brian, were you making out with a dude last night!?”

“Haha, no, that was Annie, she’s a chick, she just has short hair.”

Dude(s) and Guy(s) can be gender neutral or male-only. Girl can mean a female child, or it can mean a woman, depending on the context.

In parts of the south “y’all” is singular. “All y’all” is plural.

I don’t think Canada could do much of anything to stop a US invasion. OTOH, I don’t think America could do anything to stop Canadian guerillas after an invasion.

Imagine trying to stop a population that is essentially indistinguishable from your own citizens, in a country where your own citizens are allowed to walk around carrying essentially the same rifles used by the armed forces. And that’s not even considering that probably half the US would be on the side of the guerillas.

If you work for Facebook, you almost certainly have options. Choosing to continue to work there means you value your stock options more than you value being a good person.

Are you trusting that what the cops said happened is what actually happened?

Oppenheimer may be well known, but I don’t know if anybody had any idea it was produced by James Woods. He’s not known for that movie by any stretch.

It is what James Woods is most known for.

And Matt Damon is best known for Thor: Love and Thunder?

Yep, it melts at something like 660C, so pretty low.

It was always bad.

Windows 3.1 was bad. It was ugly, it was slow. The Macs of that era looked better, although their multitasking was even worse than Windows, somehow. It was pretty clear that 3.1 was just a desktop GUI over a text OS.

Windows 95 and 98 were bad. They were graphical improvements over 3.1 / NT, but they were so brittle and janky. Remember bullshit like “TEXTFI~1.TXT”?

The latest versions are all terrible too. Like, try to make a change to a system setting and you get the Windows 10/11 themed settings menu. But, if you try to make any kind of advanced setting change and you’re taken over to a GUI that shows that under the hood it’s still effectively running Windows XP components.