In theory Canonical could lock down Ubuntu like that, but it would be the end of Ubuntu. Switching over to Mint or Debian is not a big deal for majority of the linux-users and also Ubuntu would lose all the advantages they can currently pull off from Debian package maintainers. Also I suppose it would bring a ton of headaches with licenses, but IANAL, so don’t quote me on that. And, obviously, that would kill snapcraft too as I don’t see any incentives for developers to support walled gardens for free, so it wouldn’t be all bad.

It’s legal speak. Before judge or jury or whatever they have concludes anything it’s not certain and thus they need to be a bit careful on how they publicly speak about the matter. Just like a murderer is a ‘suspect’ even if they admitted everything with a smoking gun in their hand. Only after conviction they are by definiton a ‘murderer’.

But I’m glad to see international powers in this circus as USA doesn’t seem to have a working legal system anymore. It might be awfully slow for anything to happen, but at least gears are turning.

Philip Morris: 1 pack of cigarettes per day is not addiction.

A slightly different way to think it I guess. I’ve been also learned that intentionally pulling a trigger is not the only way to fire a gun. There’s always a possibilty for the mechanism to trigger if you accidentally bump the gun or drop it or trigger guard can get tangled with something or whatever, so the ‘laser pointer’ part is sort of included in that as you need to be aware at all times where the gun is pointing and how you move around and interact with it.

And it obviously applies to things like chambering a bullet, removing clip from the gun and so on. I’ve personally seen a .22lr pistol to fire when slide was released on reloading, it was a old gun with really dirty mechanism so just the bump from the slide hitting the frame of the gun was enough to trigger it.

But no matter what ever way or analogy you’ve been thaught to work with guns, proper handling does not kill or injure anyone, specially not in your living room.

A pretty good analogy. I’ve been taught that the gun is always loaded and ready to go unless it’s fully disassembled. Only exception is when you personally checked that it is not and the gun haven’t left your hands after checking it. And even then you don’t point it to anything you don’t want a hole in.

And the same rule applies no matter the type of gun you’re holding. A bb-gun, .22 or .308, pistol or long barrel or whatever, they are all always loaded.

Team expects, may be useful, could be used, prototype, are currently investigating and so on. Cool piece of technolgy, but no even mention when they’d expect that to be commercially available, if it’s even possible to manufacture in commercial scale. Like many other new battery chemistries and technologies, it shows promise and makes a good headline, but at this point that’s pretty much it.

That’s just wild from my perspective. In here pretty much everything works with your SSN and some way you can prove it’s yours. Healthcare, pensions, schools/education in general, taxes, benefits and nearly all publicly funded things require that you can prove you are who you claim to be. Hell, I can’t even get certain type of packages out of the post office without a valid ID.

Sure, there’s some burecrautic annoyance to actually get valid ID card or passport, but compared on what you’re saying it’s walk in the park. Last time I renewed mine it was enough to submit application for it digitally and then visit a police station to actually confirm my identity for that application, but in total with traveling it took 2-3 hours.

And also I can verify my identity online pretty easily either via my bank credentials or with a phone service. For me and a lot of other people it’s really convenient, but obviously in here we also have people who can’t (or won’t learn to) use all the new tech so for them some things have gotten more difficult.

A fun side-note is that today my driving license actually doesn’t qualify as valid identification. On some cases it’s still enough and it used to be as good as actual ID card but with a ton of EU drivers licenses from other countries around it’s not ‘strong’ enough identification anymore.

I’m not in the USA, but in here government ID has been a requirement to vote as long as we’ve been independent. Same goes with driving license, registration of a car, guns obviously, bank accounts and a ton of other everyday stuff and it’s not really a problem. Sure, you need to take care that specially the new ID card they hand out is valid (5 years at the time if I remember correctly) since it’s often (one might argue too often) required to validate your identity.

And when done correctly it’s mostly a good thing. Last time I voted it took maybe 10 minutes and I had several days to pick one which suits me. I gave my ID card to the clerk who then checked a box that I already voted (so that they won’t give me second ballot) and then I filled the ballot and cast my vote. That’s it. And of course there’s mechanism so that you can vote even if you’re hospitalized or out of the country or something else preventing you from voting “the normal” way.

Current government at the USA seems to do everything they can to make voting more difficult, but requiring a valid ID to do so isn’t really the biggest issue you have out there.

Armbian works on most, if not all, raspberry pi compatible boards. I meant that support from vendor is often a lot shorter than from raspberry and it can cause problems/bugs with bootloaders and drivers unless vendor is actively working with armbian/kernel development for their chipset.

Orangepi and other “clones” often use rockchip on their boards which isn’t as well supported as Raspberry equivalent so it’s not direct replacement. Also their supported lifespan is often much less than rpi.

I wouldn’t compare Swartz with the AI scrapers. Aaron pulled mostly public domain documents from JSTOR and caused minor issues with the servers which is “a bit” different than pulling everything from the internet to a database over a practically global DDOS-attack. But when companies do it it’s apparently somehow different and Swartz was pretty much publicly lynched and eventually bullied to suicide.

It’s a government thing. I’m not sure when they’ve started to consider alternatives, but that renewal process (as old systems are on EOL) has most likely been on the table for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Peace#Invitation_accepted

I’m at my 40s and that thing has been 5 minutes or less to midnight as long as i can remember.

It’s far easier on multiple fronts for China to just buy their way in Russia. They are already doing that around Africa. They just need to buy (or more likely bribe) their way in with infrastructure projects, promise of jobs and wealth and so on to local governments. When they have permission they can then just build whatever they want, bring in chinese workers and transport materials and/or profits back home. No need for complicated politics, military or anything like that. Just a fun little tweak on western capitalism model.

Ministry of Truth was at least competent and consistent on their work. Can’t really say the same on this clown.

I assume he dreamt about starting 8 new wars but didn’t (or couldn’t or forgot) and thus they were ‘stopped’.

China doesn’t even need to really join. They can just announce “looks like US bonds are losing value and we’re going to sell crapload of them in order to secure our investments”. No need to mention trade wars or do anything else.

Things have been brewing for quite a bit longer than a year, but that’s not the point at least I’m trying to make. Organization has started (atleast based on news coverage around here) only now when things are really getting out of control. There was time, there was easier options but from now on it’s going to be more and more difficult, specially if orange toddler actually manages to stall midterm elections. So, due to the circumstances, the time is essential, and (again, based on news coverage and other limited info I have) there’s quite a few people, to put it bluntly, just talking that someone should do something, while wery little actually gets done.

I am from Finland and while our communities are fairly small I can understand how it takes longer to organize bigger masses, but the whole humanity is still pretty much just 6 handshakes away from eachother. As a member of local council I’ve at least tried to change local politics and from experience I can say that it takes an afternoon or two to individually call trough ~20 politically active people and organize something. Those 20 people can then each call to their contacts and (assuming there’s no overlap) just from those two steps of “pyramid” and few days you can get 400 individuals on board or at least informed what’s coming up. 3rd “step” totals to 8400 people, 4th 160k and from there the number is in millions.

Obviously things in real world don’t work quite like pure calculations, but with a pretty low precentage of active individuals it’s still absolutely possible to reach out meaningful portion of the whole country within a few months.

I have been on strike, I’m a active participant on local community and have been a part of local policy changes. But as I live in a civilized nation I have the leverage of previous generations who did organize and build foundations for strong communities so I didn’t have to start from nothing.

I mentioned it would not be easy as the easy way was voting for Harris. But with that mindset of yours I suppose there’s nothing anyone can do and the game is lost already.

Organization in todays information world is relatively easy. Spreading information and communication with different groups is a very much solved problem. Getting people on board should not be a problem either at least based on what I can see from the news, a lot of people are fed up on the current status and a lot of people are already getting organized. It’s small steps all the way. You get handful of people to join the movement and each of them do the same and not before long your pyramid has quite a lot of people and getting more to join gets easier on every step.

And for me personally, I’m not coming to the US. I’ll stay at home and continue to do my part on my community.