"Inside stores, shoppers will see iFixit toolkits and parts on shelves..."

This is a chance how? They've had the toolkits for years at the one near(-ish) to me

My former boss used to say that he knew enough programming to be dangerous (and sysadmin, etc)

But he knew it, so he left it to us professionals to do the work most of the time. AI just gives people the tools to be dangerous, without them actually understanding much of anything. And any jobs to clean up their work will slowly be learned by AI to do a good enough job most of the time until that one critical disaster happens.

Luckily, I was working for NASA, and they have rules for critical systems.... but most companies don't. And it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to poison the AI to leave back doors or whatever other vulnerabilities

I'm sure the so-called "DOGE" only helped solve that problem...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ipla.com%2Fnews%2Fdoge...

The cycle is more like:

"The economy sucks because of too much regulation, I can make it better!"
(things seems to improve for a while, but they relax too much regulation and destroy the economy)
(other side gets elected to clean it up, and spend years trying to fix it)
"Remember how bad the economy was under that other side? I can fix it!"
(and then we re-elect the party that keeps crashing the economy) ... this last time the candidate actually said "are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?". Yes, yes I am. I may not be employed now, but it wasn't the middle of a pandemic that you made worse by telling people yo rise up against measures trying to help hospitals get a handle on things and forced states to compete against each other for supplies... then stole them.

Realized that the company was over valued, then used their stock to buy up Time Warner and such, so they actually had a legitimate value to their stock.

Of course, Yahoo tried it, too, but that didn't exactly pan out for them

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

It has nothing to do with Citizen's United. It's a push by some groups (likely people who control corporations) to try to claim that corporations should have rights that we give to people.

If you give freedom of speech to corporations, then truth in advertising laws fall apart.

Corporations can have free speech once someone can figure out how to apply the death penalty to a corporation. Until then, it shouldn't have the rights of people.

Let's consider for a moment:

Imagine if a corporation can outright lie to you about what they're selling, and then claim free speech when they're found to be lying.

"Made in America!"
"Gluten Free!"
"Does not contain rodent droppings or insect parts above the legal limits set by the FDA"
"Will not cause hair loss"
"Does not cause birth defects"
"Will not record your sex life and then put it on unsecured servers" ...etc.

One obnoxious way to get the older version is to install an older LTS of Mint into a virtual machine and then go manually get all the bits that are Thunderbird and copy them to your new system. The hard part is making sure you have all the bits, but I don't remember how I did that.

Unfortunately, the Mint installation essentially copies a complete installation to your system, so there are no .debs of the installed packages. But I've wondered if some other distribution might install all the applications from .deb or .rpm files.

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.

Taking productive farmland out of operation for solar farms is pretty damned stupid, but there's also farmland that's problematic: steeper slopes and odd topography can require crazy terraced plowing to reduce errosion issues; closer to waterways you need to worry more about fertilizer usage.

But there's also an alternative called "agrivoltaics" where you mix the two on the same land. It requires a lower panel density for the solar so sunlight still reaches the ground, then planting crops that prefer shade instead of full sun.

You also need to put the panels up high enough that tractors can get under them... so it's better for smaller scale farms that don't rely on massive tractors.

You can also mix some ranching with solar panels... you leave enough space between them so the grass can still grow, and use it as sheep or goat pastures.

Over the roads?

There's a company that supposedly can make "solar roads" (panels that you would drive on), but as well as I know they have nothing large scale. I would assume it would be better for commercial driveways (the roads leading up to the building), as it doesn't make sense to use a parking lot or similar that's going to be covered for long periods.

(solar panels above parking lots are fantastic... shades the cars and you don't get wet transitioning in/out of your car ... so long as you account for snow loads so they don't fall and crush whatever is below them)

There was also a project to try to put solar panels over rivers ... which would reduce evaporation to make sure more of it got downstream in arid regions. (but I think they're also trying to figure out how it affects vegetation and animals that might be near the river)

There have also been solar-thermal paving projects, where you take the heat from the parking lot and use it for heating water in the summer ... and they usually put in a ground loop for geothermal, so in the winter you can use it to melt snow and ice.

You charge to "upgrade" to Windows 11? How evil are you? :P

For all my pro-life ramblings, we were granted only one child.

Precious. I feel bad you couldn't have more though. G-d has been very generous to us.

Keeping up with two toddlers after age 50 can't be easy.

And yet i wouldn't trade it for anything! Thank G-d, we have a lot of help. Especially, when some neighboring girls come by to take our son for a walk. G-d bless them all.

My understanding is that there's a market for old flip phones in Amish communities (as they typically ban smartphones, but it's okay to have a phone that you can shut off when you're at home), and there are some schools that have talked about banning smartphones so the kids can still get in contact with parents but not be playing games and using social media while at school. ... but models? No clue. The only one that I can think of is from old TV ads for jitterbug phones. (a special network/service for old people)