What a terrible insult to goldfish.

Judging from the content of the article, the problem is that Google’s local subsidiary started on construction prematurely before the environmental assessment paperwork was complete (but after they already owned the site). Short of keeping a watch on the site 24/7, I don’t see how the local authorities could have prevented that. It’s possible that they may have been lazy and complacent, but absent actual evidence I doubt they were complicit.

Our society operates to a large extent on an underlying assumption that most people will not try to do anything blatantly illegal in plain view. Finland has just learned the hard way that this is not true of large American corporations.

Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn’t give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what’s supplied by solar and wind combined, and we’re doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).

As with most other things, it depends on who or what you’re trying to attract. If you’re trying to attract cats, giving them a nice warm server to sleep on is always a plus.

Arguable. Google has long since jumped the shark, but Yandex was never that great to begin with.

He expects that his potential dates are as unintelligent and lazy as he is. Actually, if he’s looking for someone who shares his “values”, filtering out anyone smarter and more energetic might not be a bad strategy . . . 🤔

Geez, you could probably download the molecular formulas for all of the many chemical compounds in coffee and the ratios to combine them in to imitate various beans without using that much data.

I would expect Gentoo’s rankings on Distrowatch to be lower than its actual uptake. I mean, it’s an oddball distro, an old and well-known one whose reputation probably spreads more by word of mouth than anything else.

Gentoo doesn’t do user stats, so it’s impossible to tell.

I think the disconnect may be due to the article repeatedly mentioning that “this stuff is used by smartphones/websites!!!” but almost never mentioning that full-sized computers exist, even though most of the software being discussed is Linux-primary (and some of it is also used on Windows/Mac, like SQLite). It looked to me like the author’s target audience was “people who use a smartphone as their primary or only device.”

What’s missing in this article (or at least as much of it as I could read) is that much of the software listed has alternatives. For instance, bash can be replaced by a combination of some other shell (fish, zsh, dash . . .) and some other scripting language (python, perl . . .). There are other compression algorithms than xz, even if they’re less efficient. And so on.

Others are nice-to-haves, but their absence wouldn’t cause much actual technical dysfunction. If Harfbuzz vanished tomorrow, it would result in some ugly text displays. This is not the end of the world.

Some high percentage of them will be that stupid, yes, because the people making the decisions are not terribly computer-literate and just want things to go back to “normal” without having to learn anything new or retrain anyone.

Um, no. There are many other categories of people who have issues with self-checkouts. Like anyone who’s legally or by the store’s rules due a discount or tax waiver (people with Indigenous status aren’t required to pay sales taxes in some jurisdictions, for instance), since the software often fails to account for these. Anyone paying cash. Anyone who knows anything at all about UI design or has wrestled with a self-checkout that just doesn’t function properly.

I’ll wait in line rather than deal with a machine that’s broken by design, thanks. Fortunately, the stores around here mostly have reasonable staffing practices, so the wait isn’t long unless some idiot tries to price-match against a flyer or something else weird and unusual.

Question is, what happens if you don’t have dmidecode installed? Even more interesting, what happens if you’ve replaced it with a fake that spews back values of your choosing? If they’re bundling it, given that it appears to be GPL2, they’re opening themselves to a lawsuit unless they provide source upon request.

(Somehow, I don’t think they’re actually using dmidecode.)

Y’know, it’s funny, but I can’t recall ever having heard even one thing I would consider positive about fraternities in the US, and now I discover them tangled up in this matter too. Why are they allowed to continue to exist, when their whole purpose seems to be manslaughter, rape, defamation, and alcohol abuse?