I hate it when legal stories don't post a link to the actual decision, since they are notoriously hard to find for new decisions.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.courtlistener....

Correction, Mint had KDE and dropped it with Mint 19. Which, actually, makes my point.

This is, unfortunately, the largest challenge of FOSS. Developers who work on it for the love of it are often disconnected from normal users, and, well let's call a spade a spade, from reality in general.

...since no Plasma developers enjoy living on or testing old branches...

Developers on FOSS often write because it's something they want to use. Which is ok, but a developer/power user has very different needs, wants, and skill level from the general class of users. You want to know why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is so cliche a joke, that's why. That's why right there. Users don't enjoy living on the bleeding edge. They want and need it to just work, and to work for a longer period of time than the day they install it.

No one wants to have to operate a bleeding edge development rig to RUN this shit.

So we decided to strengthen our messaging that users of KDE software on LTS distros should be reporting issues to their distro

Jesus... are you actively trying to get distros to drop your product? This is how to do it:
- Step one, blame the user for not wanting a rolling-release home-built Linux From Scratch via Git rig.
- Step two, pawn off the responsibility for maintaining YOUR software to the distributions. Because the volunteers at Debian who package this want to have to know your software better than your own developers and have so much extra time.
- Step three, watch the distros you are giving the finger to run and your adoption tank.

KDE already has a far lower uptake, and is declining. There's a reason that Mint never released a KDE version. Maybe this is just KDE's way of ceding the user-space market they are losing anyway, and to focus only on the bleeding-edge crowd. I just feel bad for normal users who get sucked into KDE not knowing it's a mine field.

Agreed!

Also spoken as someone who is young and hasn't had to waste a significant period of his life on needless upgrades, or who lives on his computer (or in his mother's basement or both).

I use LTS because I want my software to work and to work for longer than the day I install it. I sue LTS because I have better things to do than chase down upgrades or live on the bleeding edge of essentially a rolling GIT release of my whole system because some developer decides that my desktop can't live without a library feature that's four hours old.

First of all, drawing a parallel to holocaust denier because I used the word "denier" is repugnant and sophistry to the extreme. I said nothing about holocaust denying. I said what I meant.

Secondly, don't you dare equate denying children vaccination with protecting them. That is more repugnant than your holocaust misdirection and is nothing less than neglect. Any parent who refuses to vaccinate their children should be charged with neglect if their child contracts any vaccinatable disease. Parents have an affirmative responsibility to provide the necessities of life, and denying them to your child because of fear and ignorance is not an excuse. This is literally no different from the religious nuts who try and refuse necessary blood transfusions for their children - something which the courts have repeatedly intervened in to stop and/or prosecute.

So your answer is to turn the tables and blame the victim. Your answer is to lock up every family with a newborn until, what... let's call it three months (two month plus the time for the vaccine to provide actual immunity) for DPT, or seven months for MMR. No, I think not. How about if we just sequester all you Typhoid Mary's who make yourselves menaces to society.

There will always be some who legitimately can't get vaccinated for actual (not ignorant) medical reasons, some who are too young to get vaccinated for a particular disease, where a vaccination's immunity is waning (the old, those who are approaching but not yet at the age of their next booster, etc), and those who for whatever reason a particular vaccination just isn't effective. The intentionally unvaccinated post a danger to themselves, and to all the above.

How about you just suck it up and do your duty to society and take your miniscule risk like the rest of us. Because we're losing patience with you to see the light and pull your head out of your slough of backwater ignorance.

I am tired of the vaccine conspiracy theorist disease deniers. It's a form of selfishness. Yes, there is always a risk with any medical procedure, and a vaccine is no exception. With a vaccine there is a tiny risk of an allergic or other reaction. It's very small, but non-zero. Vaccine refusers are basically saying that they refuse that risk and defer it onto everyone else. Drafting off of the idea that everyone else will assume the risk and the diseases won't progress to threaten them.

The unfortunate reality, is even those who get the vaccine still have a small chance of contracting the disease. So as the community of vaccine deniers grows, they are not only a risk to themselves but to everyone around them who may either not be fully immune, or who are too young to have received the vaccine.

When my youngest son was an infant, a woman in my (then) church contracted pertussis and passed it to him. She was an early vaccine denier ("THEY CAUSE AUTISM" was her cry from the rooftops). She was too old for pertussis to be a threat to her, and likely thought she just had a cough. But when my son contracted it, it was life threatening. He developed a sneeze, then a cough, then had trouble breathing, then his lips turned blue and that wheeze "whooping" cough started. We rushed him to hospital, but it was a rural one and they were unequipped for a newborn needing intensive care. They put him on oxygen then shipped him by ambulance to the next larger center. They still couldn't intubate him, but they did suction his lungs and then he was put on an air ambulance to a major center. That finally saved his life, but for four horus it was touch and go, with him getting just enough treatment at each stop to keep him going until the next.

Vaccine deniers make me angry. They need some tough talk, and perhaps strict legistlation. Namely:
- Call a spade a spade. A vaccine refuser is a danger to themself and others and offloads risk to others. In short they are shirking their public responsibility and are being selfish.
- Even if you don't subscribe to the view that they can be forced to receive vaccines, it is the absolute right of the rest of us to say "we just don't want to play with you". Vaccine refusers should be forced to be identifiable. They should then be barred from all public travel, barred from the public workplace, or in fact any public place where more than 10 people gather as being a danger to themself and others.
- De-insure them from all public health plans (I'd do this with smokers too, but that's another discussion). If a private company wants to insure them, that's fine, but they must be forced to identify that they are not vaccinated. And, yes, as part of the previous point, I would absolutely bar them from public hospitals.
- Or, just avoid all the trouble, and simply make them take their medicine like any good parent would do for a recalcitrant and temper-tantruming child.

Pluto is a planet. I didn't make the "IAU" my word definition body. And their definition doesn't actually make any kind of sense. Defining what one object is based on the characteristics of other objects is not something that passes any standard of rigor. And you're doing it again with your pluto/moon comparison nonsense.

It orbits a star, it is massive enough to collapse into a sphere under its own gravity, then it's a planet. If it doesn't go spherical, then we can talk about other names for it.

Pluto is #9. We can talk about what order Eris, Sedna, Orcus and others are in (order of discovery or mean orbital distance or periapsis distance or whatever).

A combination of embarrassment, envy, and elitism is what caused the so-called redefinition, and I have none of it. Neither should you or anyone else with sense. I look forward to when textbook writers finally get over the shock, stop caving in to the pressure, and start having none of it too.

You can't bring home a computer and have just a regular old local account any more. Not without going to extreme heroics. If you've found a way, please show your work.

And your average home user shouldn't have to set up an enterprise authentication scheme.

....is Microsoft Accountless.

unemployment.

So, I have to admit, I don't understand the whole rhetoric. Trump is jumping up and down saying "TRADE IMBALANCE", "TRADE IMBALANCE". Which just means the US is buying more stuff from others than others are buying theirs. But... isn't that just, well, capitalism? He's saying that the whole world is taking advantage of the US because they aren't buying American shit. But as far as I can figure out, that's just everyone else being better at selling than they are.

Maybe instead of pandering to him, or engaging at his level or looking for ways to make sense of him, we all ought to just mock the Americans for being really bad at this, and carry on without them.

Well, it's the (obviously) required joke, but this is likely the way it'll happen. Not necessarily this as in this actual event, but something like this. Sanctions, or some other Western chest-thumping. It's an open secret that it wasn't the presence of backdoors that Huawei was blacklisted for, but for refusing to add back doors in their equipment (same reason that TikTok is black listed for refusing to allow western intel into the accounts). At some point the rest of the world is going to wonder why they are paying Microsoft for the privilege of having Microsoft push them around with lacklustre offerings and high handed "YOU WILL MAKE A MICROSOFT ACCOUNT TO USE YOUR PC" mandates. And some other round of "sanctions" or just general American Trumpeting will happen at just the right time and it'll shift almost overnight. Microsoft will fall, or be reduced to only a game console company, and Intel will be next as everyone realizes that Risc-V will run Linux just as well as x86 does.

Oh, never underestimate the ability of an anti-gmo to chant nonsense at the drop of any hat anywhere. The over-privileged "organic" crowd are happy to use their western buying power to reduce food output anywhere in the name of everything from simple fear, to religious "don't tamper with God's works", to a claimed better tasting soup.

A 27 year old Visual Basic .exe going to Python is a step back. Why is this considered any sort of accomplishment?