Well said. Fear is the primary tool of the far right that's taken hold in America. It's a feedback loop that preys on human nature. Another tool extremists use is appealing to pride. Undeniably evil.

As you say, we do have some knowledge of how this is all going to end. I don't look forward to it, I don't condone the actions that will lead to it, but I can't allow myself to panic or give in to fear or despair either. I do what I can to encourage others to make better choices and see the truth about what is happening. I used to wonder how so many people couldn't see what the Nazi's were doing as they solidified their power. But now I do understand a bit as I talk to fairly sane, otherwise rational people who believe trump is doing God's work. Fascinating psychology if it wasn't so pernicious.

There are definitely scary times ahead and many will yet panic.

Funny how I get modded down around here for telling the truth that Trump sees himself as king, and acts as one, and his supporters love it.

I value my rights and freedoms. Do you? Do you equally value the rights and freedoms of those you disagree with?

This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

You can also look to what happened in North Carolina as a GOP recipe across the US. The governor is a Democrat which reflects the fact that the majority of voters in the state lean a bit that way, but despite this, the GOP gerrymandered all the districts guaranteeing themselves control of the state legislature in perpetuity. They also at the same time took many of the governor's powers away (so much for the Unitary Executive Theory that the GOP claims to espouse), and turned the state supreme court into a fully partisan body that, thanks again to gerrymandering, they will continue to control. At the same time active voter suppression is continuing in areas likely to vote democrat. This pattern is playing out in other states across the US. But it's all good because these poor people really aren't smart enough to vote anyway. It's really for their own good.

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

But it's not blessed by the king. I suppose you also just read the normal Bible too, instead of the official guilded-cover trump bible. And you probably own godless bitcoins too, rather than those blessed trump coins.

The fact that you and many others now see this as normal behavior is definitely worrisome. Presidents used to go to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest and hold their business interests at arms length. Now corruption is totally fine. A little insider trading is just fine now too.

He's referring to other countries like the US where the patent is still valid and will be for some years yet. Obviously in Canada, the patent no longer exists so there's nothing to buy or sell.

No I don't, sorry.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

Ubuntu LTS is only five years, and Linux Mint tracks that. I wouldn't really recommend RHEL or Alma or Rocky to a new user for a desktop distribution, and wouldn't generally use it myself. I can't comment on OpenSUSE.

I use Fedora, but that requires an annual upgrade, which isn't really that difficult to do, but it's not something a new user would find easy to do. Certainly the people I know that I've installed Linux for wouldn't.

As to Red Hat being a traumatized company, well they are now very successful and profitable. It's time for them to get over the trauma. Besides, although they put in a lot of work and polish, their product is based largely on the work of others, so they are hardly in a position to accuse Oracle of playing unfairly by using GPL'd code they worked on.

No, you misread what I wrote. "Any version" refers to the version of the GPL. GPLv2, GPLv3, or whatever. Nothing to do with the version of the software package.

Put another way, whether the code in question is GPLv2 or GPLv3, the right to redistribute the source code is that same.

Poor choice of words on my part. Sorry about that.