It's also a way to get around the prohibition on setting different prices for SNAP recipients. For example you can buy over the net from Costco with SNAP on Instacart but not directly. And the prices are higher there than on their site.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

about environmental causes loose their shit when you tell them to cut back or eliminate eating meat.

Geez I guess they people would want to line all those on the "carnivore diet" against the proverbial wall and shoot them, eh?

By the way....do these documents give one carbon credits if you go on a diet???

If so, what can you buy with these credits?

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

Mentioned two already, Aldi and Lidl.

They've been particularly successful in penetrating countries that have traditionally suffered from a lack of competition, like Australia.

To be fair, once you've a few years of experience in a profession, almost no-one gives a crap about your education. Being able to demonstrate you can do a good job becomes more important. Certs become more important and that's mainly because some licensing agreements give the company discounts if they can maintain X number of certified professionals. Obvious exceptions excluded, like being a pilot for example.

Not that I disagree with your point mind you, and to add to it the over-commercialisation of education has been detrimental to it's quality.

Nope, Microsoft is going to let it wither and die a slow, undignified death as they drain every penny they can out of it.

It's been the strategy with their gaming software for years now. Buy up a successful studio, kill anything that made it successful, release half arsed sequels that are DLC'd, P2W'd and generally geared to maximise profit over enjoyment and when that is no longer working, sack any remaining staff and shelve the studio. Case in point, Bethesda.

They've already said they have no interest in making hardware but they still want branded hardware out there. So what they want is someone else to have the expense of designing, building and supporting the hardware whilst they control the brand.

It would be a mercy if they Old Yeller'd the Xbox right now, but they won't as there's still blood to drain from it and lets face it, the fanboys will keep paying because they're too invested, financially and emotionally to stop now.

The Playstation has the same problem with a few notable exceptions, Sony still does some decent games, they are still willing to piss huge sums up the wall and the Japanese government will never let Sony fail no matter how much they piss up the wall.

Libre office is fine for personal use, it's improved in leaps and bounds in the last 10 odd years. I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of skill or experience to get them off the MSFT merry-go-round.

The problem isn't for the home users, they've always been on the "bend over and take it" track when it comes to MS, it's just that now they've got some real viable options which will end up hurting MS but I digress... the issue is business users. For business users the problem isn't the software for the end user (word, excel, et al) it's not even the issues with supporting FOSS, it's mostly the back end. The costs of running an on-site MS Exchange setup is stupendous and not to mention that it's a huge vector for cyber attacks let alone the costs of running an equivalent platform, not even Google really competes with Exch/Office and that's just the tip of the iceberg (OK, a large enough tip on its own), it's really on the back end where MS has businesses by the short and curlies. Whilst I agree businesses should be better protecting themselves against predatory vendors, it's not such a simple thing to do in practice.

I really think we need another serious probe into Microsoft, in fact the entire licensing industry. Shine a huge light onto it and we'll be horrified at what we find.

No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.

That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" systems we already do on Earth - you just need to get them there in an affordable manner.

The primary consumables are water and fertilizer. Nobody seriously is proposing building a colony that can't produce its own water. As for fertilizer, that would start off as an import, but a much smaller import than the food mass. On Earth, open-loop fert systems are fairly common, but they're slowly losing ground to closed-loop where you just maintain the EC, filter the returning solution, and every now and then due a nutrient-level test on the solution and individually adjust whatever nutrient might be lacking vs. the others.

We can consume lots of growing medium, like disposable rock wool cubes and the like, but we can also not do that. For example, it's perfectly fine to grow plants in clean sand / fine gravel - just clean it and sterilize it between uses. Something like pumice is better, though it slowly breaks down between uses. But you don't have to use anything special.

If you do LED lights, you may get a decade or so out of them. You can reduce shipping mass for replacement by going with designs that let you replace just the light boards from them (Mechatronix has lights like this for example), no need to resend e.g. the heavy heat sink, etc.

There's a million random things you use or that can wear out, from cleaning solutions to solution pumps to climate computers and and on and on. But they're not a meaningful import-mass, at least compared to food. Really, the big thing is fert. But regenerating fertilizer from waste (plant waste, human waste) should not be - industrially - immensely complicated. For the metals, burn to oxides / hydroxides, dissolve in acid, fractionally crystallize. You'll always lose some from the system, but we're not talking large amounts. For nitrates, Haber-Bosch is nothing exotic to adapt, and you have easy feedstocks (mining is complex, sucking in gases isn't).

8 years ago, I may have agreed with you. Now you literally have a secret police force nabbing US citizens or whoever they don't like off the street and deporting them to a foreign prison without trial.

Your highest offices are openly ignoring the law... what makes you think they'll stop at shooting just one US citizen (and posthumously declaring them a traitor with no evidence after the fact). They're already sticking guns into the faces of preachers. Ironic as a German Preacher named Martin Niemoeller warned us of just this kind of thing 90 odd years ago.

That's really more akin to fascism rather than socialism, by which you of course mean Marxism.

A simple cow analogy,
Communism: you have two cows, the government takes both and gives you some milk.
Fascism: you have two cows, the government takes both and sells you some milk.

With the US, this really is a problem of it's own making. Not just with Trump, he's just the ultimate expression of a deep seeded problem in the US. The notion that someone who is poor or doesn't have enough money is in that situation entirely due to their own fault. That the poor deserve their lot. Makes people who benefit from it feel better however it's a negative feedback loop as costs rise (in no small part due to Trump) those who were previously comfortable start to suffer and struggle to reconcile this with the philosophy that it's OK to hate the poor because it's their fault they're poor.

(To elaborate about PELs: Venus's middle cloud layer is ~1-10mg/m3, depending on altitude, latitude, and what study you trust (our existing data isn't great). OSHA PELs are 1mg/m3 for an 8-hour shift. NIOSH's RELs are also 1mg/m3 for a 10-hour shift, with IDLH of 15mg/m3. Now, this has the two aforementioned caveats. On the downside, Venus's aerosols are higher molarity - 75-85% concentrated vs. ~20% on Earth. On the upside, the vast majority of the PEL/REL/IDLH risk is from inhalation, which obviously, you can't be doing in any atmosphere in our solar system other than Earth. Dermatitis thresholds are far higher. So again, so long as there's not rain/snow/dew/frosts, and you're at the right altitude/latitude combination**, you could probably spend some time outside in shirtsleeves and a facemask, and feel an alien breeze against your skin.

** One also has to stress latitude, not just altitude, as it's cooler for a given altitude as you get closer to the poles. While Venus's middle cloud layer climate is "similar" to Earth's, it's a bit on the warmer side for a given pressure than Earth's - and because an aerostat rides "down" in the atmosphere vs. its internal pressure, esp. at night when it's no longer being heated by the sun, it amplifies the impact. So if you're going to be living in the envelope, you need to find the right balance between how far you want to go below 1atm and how hot you want to have it be outside. Shifting more poleward helps find a better balance between the two (at the cost of lower sunlight availability for solar power vs. the super-bright equatorial regions). It also shortens your effective day (faster superrotation period). You probably don't want to go fully to the poles, though, because of the polar vortices (though how turbulent they are is still an open question).