I don’t know, I thought it was kind of fun that they mixed things up for a change and had the protagonist be the villain and the central plot be about his triumph over the antagonists who are the heroes; the movie ending with him relaxing and enjoying the sunset now that his great work was over and so he could retire and put down his burdens was a really nice touch.

Sure, but what’s the end game supposed to be, then? Just making the same request over and over again indefinitely?

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.

Speaking personally, it’s consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I’ve installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn’t true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)

I also really like its “Refresh Install” feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I’ve used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.

In a way this naming makes more sense, because an important aspect of the virtual worlds in science fiction that many people seem to idolize is that they were as appealing as they were due to a large part because the real world was such a dystopia that they were desperate for an escape from it, even if it meant living inside a world that existed only inside a computer.

Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn’t care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it’d be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.

this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading

I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the “not stressed” end, so I’ve gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.

That isn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn’t working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the “not stressed” end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren’t saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.

I got a Thelio and loved it–despite being incredibly powerful, it is so quiet that I can’t tell whether it is even on or not unless I am near it and listening closely. This is only true when running Pop!_OS, though; in Windows or other Linux distributions it’s a lot noisier, presumably because Pop!_OS has carefully calibrated their kernel to make this work.

However, even on non-System76 hardware I’ve been using Pop!_OS as my It Just Works Linux distribution, and have generally had success with it, including for most of my gaming needs. There have been a couple of times where an upgrade borked things so that the system no longer booted, which is definitely not a good thing, but fortunately one of the installation options is “Refresh” which replaces all system files while leaving everything else in place so I’ve gone from unable to boot to back and running within 30 minutes, which is a big deal because I’ve had other Linux distributions spontaneously bork things before but I’ve never had it be so easy to recover when this happens. I did have to reinstall some system software packages, but the largest things on my hard drive are my games and those didn’t have to be reinstalled because they live in my home directory so it wasn’t a big deal.

On the flip side, just so you don’t think I’m a System76 fanboy, I tried their Oryx Pro laptop, despite it being incredibly expensive, because I love my desktop and was expecting a similar level of experience, and it was terrible; sleep mode was buggy because it only ever worked when I first plugged in the laptop and then unplugged it, which makes the feature pretty useless when you’re on the go, which is exactly when you need a working sleep mode, and even then it only used a partial sleep mode so it would consume 10% of the battery per hour. I tried contacting support about this and got really bizarre responses about things that were completely unrelated to my questions, as if they weren’t actually reading my tickets. The whole situation was so bad that within about a week or two I just sent it back. A little while later bought a laptop at less than half the price which runs Pop!_OS just fine and more than meets my needs so in a way I’m glad that the more expensive laptop didn’t work out.