Yet another example of leveraged buyouts being bad and dumb. The “risk” may be technically on the company you’re buying’s books but it’s really on the employees who actually face the real consequences of the bet failing.

I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.

My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)

I don’t use KDE as my daily driver but it’s on my SteamDeck and I haven’t once been trying to change a setting or something and encountered a window that looks like Windows XP because no one at a whole multi-trillion dollar company could be bothered to update it. It’s way better than Windows 11.

That article doesn’t mention it but the holding area where they drop off the food is basically full and not being distributed for multiple reasons: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-removes-gaza-pier-due-to-weather-it-may-not-return-unless-aid-flow-resumes-officials-say

If Israeli inspections and lack of security for aid workers is the bottleneck, the pier is kind of pointless. You can fail to deliver aid way more efficiently with trucks.

I obviously got it. But not everyone appreciates high culture.

Meh. I’m an American and I don’t hate it here. But I’m from (and moved back to) a culturally distinct place (New Orleans) so I don’t really identify with the dominant culture. I loathe the politics/corruption and how our government is structured. (The amendments are the best part of our constitution and maybe we should think about that for a bit.) I’m deeply ashamed that we’re the world’s biggest arms dealer and oil/gas producer.

That being said, we have beautiful landscapes and individual American people are usually kind, decent people, at least on an interpersonal level. The corruption of companies and elected officials doesn’t usually extend to the middle class. (Like, you don’t have to bribe someone to get a driver’s license or permits or whatever.) There’s obviously loads of advantages to being an American citizen, just as there are to being an EU citizen. I love our national parks. Just the western half of the United States contains enough varied forms of amazing landscapes to keep a person occupied for a lifetime.

So, I wouldn’t say I like America as a political entity. It’s definitely in my top 30 or so countries to live. I wouldn’t give up my citizenship for a random place but, having travelled extensively, there’s a lot of countries that have a better form of government and a healthier balance between oligarchs and labor.

Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?

Are there shared whitelists? It seems like something that isn’t really practical without them. I’m a web developer who has never served one ad but the front-end tools now basically export all JavaScript. You’d probably just get a blank page on any site made recently that’s more complex than a portfolio/resume page.

GitHub owner Microsoft would never engage in IP theft of source code. They leave that to OpenAI and then rebrand it as GitHub Copilot.

Someday, we’ll have the technology to generate an image of a centaur with 4 boobs without using more energy than a small hospital. Very exciting stuff.

We might need to send various regimes, juntas, and “democracies” copies of the Geneva Conventions as a polite reminder of what the rules are when you live in this community.

Spice Rat and Sugar Ghost was one of my favorite Hannah-Barbera cartoons.

Let’s hope this is the end of Netanyahu’s coalition.

This isn’t about internet. This is about landline telephone service and being able to call 911. For those that don’t remember, landline phones work even when the power is out. No big deal if you have a cell phone and service. Very big deal if you live in a mountainous region where you rely on WiFi at home due to bad phone signal and would have to get in a car to drive somewhere with service to get emergency help or, say, report a forest fire caused by power lines snapping.

In the landline era, AT&T agreed to be the provider of last resort and they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got something in return. And even if “superior” technology exists, it’s not superior for “last resort” situations. One day, maybe we’ll all have satellite internet as a fallback on our mobile devices and landlines really will be obsolete. But that day isn’t today.

That isn’t the definition of terrorism. There isn’t one globally agreed upon definition but national and international law and even attempts by the UN to make a definition generally exclude state militaries. (The UN attempts at a definition always broke down over the status of organized militias in the context of national liberation and self-determination struggles.)

The main exception is undercover agents. Like if a CIA agent pretends to be a civilian and does a terrorist attack, that’s considered terrorism.

Militaries can be awful and violent and commit war crimes and even do the exact same things as terrorists. But it isn’t considered terrorism; it’s considered war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism

I do think he believes he’s the best shot against Trump. He’s a politician. Basically every elected official in DC or a governor’s mansion thinks they’d be the best presidential candidate ever. Plus, he already beat Trump once and (according to 538’s polling average) is slightly ahead nationally.

I didn’t support Biden in the 2020 primary and I’m not thrilled with a replay of 2020 but with everyone even older. But at this stage, Biden might be the best candidate. If he did step aside, the convention could easily divide the party and be a total disaster. Do they go with Kamala? A popular governor like Gavin Newsome or Gretchen Whitmer? Could the candidate even put together a campaign staff and raise the necessary cash in time to be a good candidate? They’re already booking TV ad time for September.

I mean, I don’t have an answer to those questions. Maybe voters would be like, “Thank god, someone under 75.” and it’d be a landslide. But it could just as easily be total chaos.

Biden isn’t the “official nominee” yet but under DNC rules, the pledged delegates are essentially required to vote for the candidate their state selected in the first round. Only if no one has the required 1,968 pledged delegates in the first round does it go to a second round. At that point, 739 Superdelegates — party officials, basically — are allowed to vote and pledged delegates can switch to another candidate.

Biden currently has 3,894 pledged delegates. Second is Dean Phillips with 4. So, you’d basically have to convince thousands of Biden loyalists to change the party rules so they could vote for another candidate. And then, in the potential second round, convince the Superdelegates to also reject Biden.

That won’t happen unless he’s literally dead or incapacitated. Both primaries are over and the nominating conventions are a formality. It’d probably be easier to convince the electoral college to vote against the candidate that specifically chose them for their loyalty.

Edit: here’s a link that explains it in detail https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_delegate_rules,_2024

Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.

If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.

I don’t know anything about New Brunswick but according to Wikipedia, “A powerful corporate concentration of large companies in New Brunswick is owned by the Irving Group of Companies.”

They own all types of companies, most of them heavy industry with lots of pollution, but also lots of media outlets. And also:

“In 2016, the National Observer released an eight-part investigation on the family called House of Irving. It looked at many parts of the businesses including the expansion into Maine, its media monopoly, how they intimidate their critics and issues within the family.“

I’m no Scooby Doo but I think that’s where I’d start my investigation.