When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.

When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.

Ha! Unlike (some of) you plebs, I live in a very exclusive time zone with less than a billion people in it.

You can skip 3 of these adapters if you upgrade to the latest libraries, downgrade your microcode, turn off WiFi, and bench press a goat. It turns out it was the goat involved I’m the process, rather than the sacrifice, that made that stuff work.

“Graphical UI” it is

Systemd is trying to stop a service. To do an action to a service (or any unit), it runs a job. The job to stop a service is called a stop job. Once the stop job is taken off the job queue, the stop job is running.

The method of stopping a service is configurable, but the default is to send a kill signal to the MainPID, then wait for the process to exit. If it doesn’t, after a timeout, the kill is reattempted with a harsher signal.

In the area I live, this would mean you could be standing right next to the pizza cooking bore, and still be outside of the delivery range.

Whenever I’ve been on the hiring side of an interview, the people seated in the interview aren’t given any special “Keep the company safe” training, but the HR person coordinating always have been. I suspect that’s why it works much better to ask in the interview than after it.

Brain one way, but other brain other way. Chemical stuff is making brain stuff happen. Makes see different.

If you’re in the US, run for Congress, win, reform the medicaid backed doctor residency program, with the aim of opening it up so many more people can become doctors. Then watch as the new supply brings down salaries, and eventually gets lazy/ineffective doctors fired. Revenge is a dish best served nation wide, as they say.

It could be a case where 1 7-Eleven car crash per day is the median, but not the majority, with 0 and 2 or more combined being more than 50%, so they mean (but communicate poorly) that most days have 1 or more cars crash into 1 or more 7-Elevens, but they couldn’t say that most days have 1 car crash into a 7-Eleven. The only additional information that that would give above simply reporting the 1.14 average is that it’s not highly concentrated on a few days, like if 300 of the annual car crashes into 7-Elevens all happened on 7/11 when people jostle over free slurpees.

In short, “average” has too many meanings for its average use.

I’m mentally well, I just like thinking about hypotheticals. I have no plans (nor any desire) to fight any number of squirrels to the death, and I do not condone doing so as entertainment or sport.

There are details missing in this question that matter tremendously. Squirrels are faster and more agile than us. If they are well coordinated, and behave optimally to win (without concern to their individual survival, only the group’s success), I think it would take only a small number of squirrels to brutally murder most people, something like 5. I think their best strategy would be to go for the eyes first, then inflict bleeding injuries and escape again before the person can react. Without tools, and without backup, this approach wouldn’t take long to wear down most people.

If the squirrels don’t care about their own survival, but make straightforward attacks, I’d think closer to 10-20. The person’s injuries will still compound quickly, but once thet have a grip of a squirrel, it wouldn’t be especially hard to lethally injure.

If the squirrels still behave like squirrels, and are instead attacking because (for example), they are starving, then the number probably doesn’t matter much, as they’re more likely to go after each other, and the person would have the opportunity to plan and ambush small groups at a time.

Arch Linux is a spectrum mean it says tomorrow

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

I’ve seen a few projects rename during major version upgrades, when everyone has to read the release notes and make changes, anyways.

Plenty of old deployed systems may continue using master/slave terminology, and of course some projects will stick to that language even decades in the future, but it was once more prevalent than it is now, and that declining trend looks like it will continue.

I think very few people mind changing it, and a few people want it changed, so it’s slowly shifting across various use cases. I’ve only discussed the change from master/slave terminology with one person that affirmatively supported the change, and they didn’t know that there’s still slavery in the world today.

I don’t know what to make of that, other than to say ending human slavery ought to be a higher priority than ending references to it.

If you take the sun out of the equation, the planets fly apart in all directions. Hope that helps ;)

“Bigger” is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There’s also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

As for controlling more of our lives, I think it’s significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don’t fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch “street food” videos, that doesn’t exist in the US because of our regulations.

Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren’t even free to access.

On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

It’s very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

Modern operating systems have made it take very little knowledge to connect to WiFi and browse the internet. If you want to use your computer for more than that, it can still take a longer learning process. I download 3D models for printing, and wanted an image for each model so I could find things more easily. In Linux, I can make such images with only about a hundred characters in the terminal. In Windows, I would either need to learn powershell, or make an image from each file by hand.

The way I understand “learning Linux” these days is reimagining what a computer can do for you to include the rich powers of open source software, so that when you have a problem that computers are very good at, you recognize that there’s an obvious solution on Linux that Windows doesn’t have.