The things holding back Linux for the unwashed masses have diminished to minor annoyances in the last 15 years, especially when compared to the nonsense wintel still puts its users through. It finally has gotten through to ords that there are solid reasons why experts don't even consider Windows as an option when doing mission critical stuff these days. ChromeOS and Android are signs of the things to come and Windows isn't even on the radar with those usage patterns.

Looks like linux has finally gotten critical mass for regular end users. I certainly wouldn't mind. My last Windows was Win2k and that's been a while. I occasionally bump into poor bastards using whatever the newest Windows is and always experience a bizarre throwback into distant and long gone times messing with ultra proprietary systems and their bullshit. Very strange. Personally I fundamentally do not get why M$ even has a business case with their system. And I even am a well paying customer who is quite happy with his XBoxes.

... Blender just piling on to it's already solid critical mass of professional functions and features after finally gaining wide-spread industry recognition a few years back. I'm an early Blender user and even have an original commercial license from NAN more than 20 years ago, before Blender was liberated into open source. Back then it was a curious underdog that had full OpenGL UI rendering (a first), a fully configurable UI (also a rare feature) and it fit on a 3,5" disk (absolutely unique).

25 years later Blender has finally taken the industry lead with other 3D kits keeping up by lowering their prices and emphasising special features and optimized workflows. Good to see the laughed-at FOSS underdog in this state of things.

Could this be due to stress and cortisol reduction caused by the drugs effects? Not unlikely, right?

Let me get this straight: A little desktop sized cutesy robot that looks like a crippled Wall-E, doesn't have arms and can't even move besided nodding it's head in 4 directions is going to "disrupt the AI robot industry"? Nonsense.

LOL! I know Fisher-Technik robot arms from the freakin' 1980ies that were driven by a C64 homecomputer that are more useful than this thing.

Yes its an anecdote, and you get 1Gb/s now, sure.

This was 8 years ago - and gigabit fibre to the premises was not new in NZ when I moved here.

And in the UK I lived in a large city, while in NZ I live in a rural town.

But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.

Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

Other countries have solved these problems.

In the UK, most people dont have to file taxes - there are no deductions for the vast majority of people, you dont get to deduct your mortgage costs, healthcare costs or anything else. You pay your tax in monthly instalments taken from your wage by your employer, based on well known tax codes and your level of earning, and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper saying how much you paid. If you switched jobs and earned more but underpaid tax, your tax code is adjusted for the next financial year and you pay more tax per month to cover both the previous years shortfall and your new tax requirement.

If you run a business, then the business does file returns, and does have deductions - so that covers your business, Uber driver, travel expenses and everything else. People travelling for business claim expenses through the company, and the company deals with the tax implications.

A businesses accounts and the accounts of the business owner are very very strictly separate - the business owner does not get to dip into the business for their own usage, they get paid a wage or dividend, which is taxed like everyone else as income.

Don’t unsubscribe, mark it as junk. And if it gives you the option to block the sender, do it.

Gmail has such an inconsistent behaviour here it’s unbelievable - how the web ui works is very different to the apps.

Gmail also is terrible at spotting obvious spam, and im regularly marking actual spam as such.

You joke but a lot of suppliers to the US government, including the military, works on a two-contract basis - the initial acquisition of the item, and then the support contract for the item.

A lot of suppliers bid low on the initial acquisition contract, because they know they can make up losses on the support side later on. The supplier is also more willing to take on more risk as part of the supply, again because they can make money back on the support.

If the support contract becomes uncertain because the military can go elsewhere to support the item, then expect the supply contracts to get a lot more expensive, and a lot fewer contractors willing to undertake fixed price deliveries for anything.

The US government did try something similar to this in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they split the procurement of new items into two contracts, the first being the development of the item, and the second being the delivery of the item. Whomever won the development contract had to hand over everything needed to produce the item to whomever won the delivery contract. The problem is, all the risk exists in the development contract, and all the profit exists in the delivery contract.

It did not go well and after a couple of very bad outcomes for development contract winners, they stopped bidding. So the approach was dropped.

The sheer difference in quantity of fuel there is going to raise eyebrows if you try and put AvGas into an aircraft that requires JetA.

Which is why the Jeju 737 didnt record any data once its engines shut down - the 737 didnt have a RAT.

Which means that the most important points of the accident were unrecorded.

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

This is unlikely because its been shown that the time it takes to go through the 787 engine-out checklist, to get to the point where you do anything that could conceivably turn the good engine off, is longer than the time between when the aircraft took off and crashed.

If this was the case, it would have been done by a crew member not going through the checklist.

... are having a hard time justifying their favorable ratings. With one the US has moved from AAA to AA a few years back and even that was seen as being nice and kind. I hope the US doesn't squander trust beyond the Trump era, lest you guys be sitting on a pile of money that the world has finally noticed not being worth the paper it's printed on.

It is my opinion that you could have a true revolution, a bottom-up redo of the US constitution and fixes for the most glaring broken parts of the US system up and running within months without even a single bullet fired. AFAICT from across the pond basically _everyone_ agrees that the current state of things has become untenable. You don't need to be a bunch of Trumpists storming the Capitol to see this.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...