Well, it’s no longer an illegal lottery. So that’s good.

It’s just a rigged lottery. Slightly different thing. Also illegal, but for slightly different reasons. More unethical and fraudulent than before.

So it makes things better, and then makes things way worse.

It looks like he’s pointing and causing the beard to grow instantaneously. If anyone had that ability, it would be Riker.

If anyone was hoping for women priests, give up on that. The Roman Catholic church would first have to retract both papal infallibility and ecumenical infallibility.

They have made too many definitive statements that women can’t be priests, and they have made definitive statements that their definitive statements are infallible, and must be agreed to by anyone who calls themself Catholic. It’s not even up for debate (unless all of the infallibility stuff is also up for debate).

For example:

I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html

They really painted themselves into a corner. While the rest of society moves forward with equal rights for historically marginalized groups, the Catholic church will be stuck with the effects of their early bad decisions (and some recent bad decisions) because they banned themselves from admitting when they are wrong.

Have you imported the tails-signing.key yet? Usually you can double-click on that to import it using whatever graphical gpg frontend is set up on your system. It may ask you how well you trust the owner of the key. You can answer that question however you want without affecting this verification process.

Next, it looks like you run the instructions from this page: https://tails.net/install/expert/index.en.html#verify

Some of those command line parameters look a little paranoid. The basic command you want to run is: gpg --verify somefile.sig somefile.img

It’s not really an order. Think of it as more like a threat.

My favorite holodeck exit is the ending of TNG S6 E12, Ship in a Bottle. It’s the episode with nested holodecks inside holodecks.

At the end, Barclay says “Computer, end program,” and smiles, satisfied that nothing seems to have happened. But then the credits roll. He ended the program.

We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024

When asking a Republican “Who won the 2020 election”, that is a question entirely about 2024. A Republican’s answer (or non-answer) can be used to predict how they will behave after losing the 2024 election.

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.

If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.

The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.

You are arguing in bad faith.

My support for Palestine means wanting Israel to stop killing Palestinian civilians. This does not indicate my support for Hamas.

You have multiple unbelievable claims that are not cited.

It seems in Texas, if you cannot afford to pay a funeral home to claim your loved one’s corpse, then the corpse will be sold for parts, to raise the necessary money to dispose of it. And you won’t get a funeral.

It doesn’t change the fact they’re getting paid a ton for a comparatively small amount of work.

Palestine has a right to exist.

Beta testers should get a discount, or even get paid, in exchange for writing good bug reports. These people are fools for paying extra for earlier access to a bug fest.

I would never pre-order a game. That just makes it harder to refund it if it sucks.

draw .io is closed source.

Can someone explain to me how this is economical? (The article is pretty light on facts, and the few facts that it has are suspect anyway due to the article’s technical mistakes, like measuring capacity in “megawatts”.)

The maximum price of electricity (that I could find) in California is $0.66/kWh . That means, if you charge at night, or at some theoretical time when electricity is free, and then sell at that maximum price every day, your round-trip profit is $0.66 for each kWh of battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries, if I’m being generous, last up to 2000 charge cycles. Let’s say they don’t lose any capacity during that time, either. That means your profit $1320 per kWh, for the whole life of the battery.

The cheapest grid-tie batteries I can find are about $3000 per kWh, so about twice as much as the total lifetime profit.

Is there something I’m missing?

The civilian:soldier death ratio is unacceptable for both sides.

But Biden is giving weapons to one side.

You can tell it’s a dead mall because it’s tilted. Functioning ships and stations are always coplanar with the galactic plane.

If you are Microsoft, then yeah. You’d go to jail when a Windows vulnerability is found.

In all seriousness though: it would be more likely to be just a civil penalty, or a fine. If we did want corporate jail sentences, there are a few ways to do it. These are not specific to my proposal about software vulnerabilities being crimes; it’s about corporate accountability in general.

First, a corporation could have a central person in charge of ethical decisions. They would go to prison when the corporation was convicted of a jailable offense. They would be entitled to know all the goings on in the company, and hit the emergency stop button for absolutely anything whenever they saw a legal problem. This is obviously a huge change in how things work, and not something that could be implemented any time soon in the US because of how much Congress loves corporations, and because of how many crimes a company commits on a daily basis.

Second, a corporation could be “jailed” for X days by fining them X/365 of their annual profit. This calculation would need to counter clever accounting tricks. For example some companies (like Amazon, I’ve heard) never pay dividends, and might list their profit as zero because they reinvest all the profit into expanding the company. So the criminal fine would take into account some types of expenditures.

This is stupid. Their justification is an “unusual degree of vulnerabilities.”

So why not outlaw vulnerabilities? Impose real fines or jail time, or at the very least a civil liability that can’t be waived be EULA. Better than an unconstitutional bill of attainder.