Waiting for Canonical to up sell proprietary utils features by subscription. Ubuntu's regular release cycles were brilliant in 2004 when there weren't a lot of alternatives but why does it still exist?
Trump supporters don't know what a province or territory is. They have probably heard of states even if they can't name many. Making Canada one state minimises the true size and strength of Canada to them. It only makes sense when you consider the audience.
Clearly there is lots of corruption and waste in China but I am not sure how much it would be tolerated when national ambitions are at stake and spaceflight is fairly adjacent to national security. I could be wrong. The US clearly wasted a lot of opportunities and several decades.
The first woman in space was Soviet. The first North American of African or latino descent was a Cuban who flew with the Soviets. You get the picture. I'm no tankie. As bad as authoritarian commies are and as much as those were PR stunts to shame the US on the world stage, the US preferred to exclude they own citizens based on misogyny and racism than shield themselves from international criticism.
Human spaceflight is all about the optics as there isn't much practical benefit. The optics the US was sending in the 60s was of clean cut military white men being sent to the moon by Nazi scientists and the majority was just fine with that.
Not sure that China will beat the US to the moon. They are making a lot of steady progress in spaceflight and technology in general and without the politics and waste we have seen for decades hampering US spaceflight. But even with the gap China has to make up I don't think it is unrealistic to expect the first woman on the moon will be Chinese now.
I wasn't aware of FASFA. I just looked at the distribution of funds by state and it looks like this is an overwhelming loss for red states, far worse than I expected.
I know the US is fucking weird politically and culturally but anywhere else I would say if MAGA don't accelerate the transition from populism to authoritarianism they are leaving the door open to an alternative populist movement to give them a real thrashing in their heartland.
This sounds like some horrendous Taliban level shit but living in a federal system myself (Australia), k-12 education is primarily a state responsibility here as I believe it is in the US. I wouldn't want to see this happen in my own country but it wouldn't be the same as closing down the department of education in an unfederated country like New Zealand or most European nations where it would be disastrous.
Inconsistencies between states here (Australia) used to negatively impact students moving between states and entering tertiary education. Federal systems can be grossly inmeficient and full of duplication and barriers between states.
Unfortunately not having national standards is probably going to increase economic disadvantage in already disadvantaged red states which will only increase division in the US.
The tech sector has a massive diversity problem. Lots of young men raised with one hand on their dick watching porn while reading libertarian propaganda. I get why vulture capitalists want naive, manipulable children running their businesses but I wish real adults were in charge.
I have left multiple platforms that don't offer parental controls, family sharing etc. Fortunately better alternatives exist to all these platforms.
As a older man and father I think these people are pathetic little children and I avoid shitty commercial social media in my house and around my family. Unfortunately they are still having a devastating impact on society.
Don't carry digital data across any border, even if encrypted. Many countries have totally different standards over search and seizure at their borders to when you have gained entry and sometimes far worse for non citizens.
I think all "western" countries were considerably more community focused in the past.
I am in rural Australia and as a kid our supermarket and hardware store were owned by farmer's co-ops and the hotel is still community owned and puts profits back into local sporting clubs. I have old pictures of some of the community fund raisers in the past and they looked extravagant for the time for a small population. Everyone pitched in to help building sporting clubs or other community facilities or to fight natural disasters. One old timer said they thought the US influence of entrepreneur clubs (Rotary, Lion's, Apex) was one of the first things to divide the community as the shop owners started to do their own thing separate from everyone else. We still have local community run child care, aged care and hospital. Increasingly people send their kids to the religious private school for social signalling despite the government school being well supported by parents and having excellent facilities and standards. The US funded churches are everywhere competing for customers and preaching hate and division. The disconnect between how people here naturally chose to build a community and what they are told to believe is interesting. I saw a silly old bugger wearing a MAGA hat last year. His parents probably came back from fighting fascists and helped build this community through unimaginable hard work and sacrifice.
That's the problem with countries being run by responsible adults. They tend to think of the interests of the country instead of petty payback and point scoring. It is a shame the US didn't elect such a person. Idiots try and drag you down to their level.
Tariffs raise domestic prices and the price of inputs for local industry. The US economy and it's citizens are being punished enough by Trump's stupidity.
Also the real prize for us is the export markets the US will be losing. When the US pushed their LNP stooge Scott Morrison into pissing off China, US exporters picked up billions of export business at our expense. Time to return the favour before Dutton does a repeat.
They exist. Firefox and chromium are open source. Big companies pay their dev costs but they can be forked. Chromium is a descendent of WebKit which is a descendent of khtml from the KDE project. The engines have been open source for decades It's the proprietary crap they put on top which is the problem.
Not really. I was only using it as a visa alternative for some online payments so it was redundant. PayPal runs scams like Honey and was founded by Nazis so they had to go. Unfortunately visa is also US controlled but it seems the lesser evil until I find something better.
A lot of money goes to the US in IP licensing and services. We could make a big collective difference there.
Most of my software has been free and open source for years though I still pay money to Gaben for games.
If creatives can't use free software for some reason there are some alternatives to Adobe. Davinci Resolve is supposed to be excellent and is from Blackmagic who are Aussie(Melbourne) and have a lot of other cool high end gear. The Affinity Suite was from the UK but got bought by Canva who are Aussie founded(Perth) but not sure I would trust them and they look to have a lot of US VC. Also in the creative area Røde Microphones are Aussie(Sydney) vs companies like Shure from US.
I stopped all payments on Paypal and closed it but I had been meaning to do that for ages for other reasons. Amazon Prime went - they are a shit greedy anti-union, anti-Australian company anyway. No loss. Most streaming went over the last few years due to the great enshitification.
I am sure a lot of supermarket products are US owned but thankfully fuck all is made there.
Good stuff. This should be more widely known and discussed.