As a "my first computer was a C64" kind of geek, the last thing I want is more useless plastic e-waste to clutter my house that will eventually end up in a landfill.

Gift ideas for a geek of my generation? A donation to the EFF in my name, or maybe a used copy of a book like Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. An old copy of a BYTE, Compute!, or Creative Computing might trigger some nice nostalgia. Maybe even a coffee cup with vi or emacs commands, but even that's pushing it because who doesn't already have more than plenty of coffee cups?

If only you could get wood by punching trees

I'm on Devuan. Most Debian packages work but not all. When one doesn't I use the appimage or flatpak, preferably the former. It gets me the software and I move on. Right now I am using OrcaSlicer from a flatpak.

In my mind you'd be buying a car without a battery and simultaneously subscribing to a battery service, but if you ever wanted to own a battery you could buy one. You'd get the battery delivered to the dealer (and/or they would work with one or more services directly and keep some on site) before you picked up the vehicle so it would be all the same to you as if it had come with it, and it would also come charged.

Moving them around without a battery at scrapping time is not a detriment, as vehicles to be scrapped are usually moved around with a fork lift anyway.

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Because the USA doesn't have the concept of absolute power, Donnie Dipshit's pet Catholic Court notwithstanding, and those files were sealed by a judge at the time. There are a lot of fundamental ways in which the two parties are up to the same bullshit, but Democrats tend to obey court orders.

Corrupt, yes.

Requirements, maybe. Meeting them, absolutely not. They aren't just reporting an amount spent on classified projects and therefore we can't have a breakdown, they're saying they can't figure out where an awful lot of money went at all.

Obama was more like the Republicans than they think. For example, he was fully behind the MIC, blowing people up without due process and so on. Obviously there is a big contrast, for example we know he did a lot of drone strikes because of his EO which gave us information on how many strikes were used and where, and Trump was doing about four times as many strikes per month when he rescinded that order so that we wouldn't know how many he's done since.

Even the ACA was a Republican health care plan, spruced up a little bit but still writing profit for insurance companies into the law. So no, the pendulum just wasn't pushed that far at all.

Revolution. The chances of us rewriting the constitution for that (which is what it would take) are roughly nil otherwise.

They were specifically chosen for their respective lacks of merit. They aren't DEI hires, they're anti-DEI hires, like matter vs. antimatter. And the purpose is to cause destruction when they come together.

To you, the centrist (pro-corporation, pro-authoritarianism, pro-incarceration, pro-MIC — based on voting records) policies of the Democrats are "too far to the left" when actual leftism includes far more liberal ideas. This is because you are too far to the right to even see the left from where you're standing.

It's a Thomas Jefferson quote, and he was talking about The People rebelling against a tyrant, not invading other countries.

I hope something even worse doesn't set in. It's not like capitalism and greed don't rule anywhere, only the degree differs. I guess we will find out.

Except of course for Peter Thiel

IOW more countries are going to have to build fabs, first and foremost, because you can't trust anything if you cannot trust the silicon.

It would be great if we got some kind of technology for cheaply making high-end ICs at home like we can with plastic parts now, but it's just not reasonable. At some point you have to trust someone. It's unfortunate, I know.