Dunno who that is, don’t care. Again, there’s plenty of other recent articles about it.

I can never discredit myself to the degree you have done yourself, attacking points and stances I never even came close to making or endorsing. Insincere, infantile and facetious from your first reply, and only escalating from there. Bye now.

No fucks given about the body-count. Not putting a stop to it at the point it becomes traumatizing AND leaning-in on the trauma in public quotes? I relive all the times I let myself almost-break for a dollar enough in therapy enough, without risking strangers asking me about it or calling me “brave”(as if THAT’S what would happen…) No mistake, good-on-her for following-through if she genuinely wanted to or deemed it that important, but from the sound of it…

… Oh, and let’s not pretend society(or even 95+% of women who despise OOP, rightly or otherwise…) would be cool with me being cool with that and still wanting to date Bonnie Blue this side of her-changing-career-paths and me magically having enough money to “fix” her, either. I’m not interested in increasing the number of judgy “I got mine”/aspiring prudes in this world, TYVM.

My source was one of many, and only makes the Empire’s failure to endure look even more pathetic if taken at face-value, but you get all butt-hurt about it as you like, I guess.

Dude, read the article, but I used quotes for just that reason, that being the evidence we have is some evenly-spaced holes in some walls with flechettes lodged in some.

Where you got the idea I was just fellating the old empire from all that is beyond me, but at least I don’t have to give a damn which part of “the Ayatolla appreciates your efforts!” offends you exactly in return…

Seriously, versus OOP, I’m here for the
A E S T H E T I C . . .
Can we set the Dick-measuring contests aside for like, a minute?

What an appropriate setting to play Empire versus all other concerns! This is why we can’t go to China to beg them to take away Trump’s Duplos, but you do you, Pooh Bear!

No shit, I came here to point this out. Like, wtf does the WESTERN Roman Empire part really have to do with anything? I want to what kinds of Mechas the Byzantines and even various Caliphates could have eventually churned-out if their reigns hadn’t ended as much as I begin to give a damn what various stages of Rome, specifically, would have done.

Same goes for Egypt, Ghenghis Khan and all of the African empires that time(and disinterest) has ground to presently un-known dust and rumor. Even random Greek city-states’ offerings would at least be unique and not guided by OOP’s/our misunderstandings about Rome’s “super-marbled”/black-and-white-and-gold-and-red aesthetics.

Fuckers had “machine guns” in their day … the miracle is that anyone else got a chance to show us something cool in the times since.

I mean, given that its based on specific teachers, the opt-out or in is going to have to be allowing the child to stay with the teacher the teacher the school assigned the child to, or request a transfer … unless magically trusting the researchers to scrub students faces. The biggest problem I see is the school acting like that last option is something that parents should even seriously consider.

Those made 1000x more sense.

Oh God, they can’t even do prepping right any more.

No, they live off eating paper. Crunchy little rectangles with pictures of royalty on them.

cIvIliAn tArGeTs dOn’T CoUn’T!!!

Seriously, why won’t anybody play nice with us? It’s a mystery…

Depends where you sail, but I’ve made some edits to that comment since anyways.

A single-hull can be made self-righting, in case it flips in bad weather. A 35 foot catamaran? You’re not getting that back up-right with a crew of one - you basically hope and pray a bigger boat comes along at that point.

… or, you know, grant them asylum, and arrest individuals involved in the human trafficking of these people until China stops sending human traffickers?

Without a Plug-In? Hard agree, nor should they.

Its amazing to think the UAE and/or Oman went with opposing Iran rather than trying to get in on this, vs appeasing a genocidal ethno-state neighbor and a super-powered toddler-state on the opposite site of the planet.

What in God’s Green Earth are you talking about, “windows-or-nothing people”? Employers? Schools? Told a lot of them to kick dirt, but with them owning the buildings, that basically amounted to me walking away.

One of my favorite things about my current employer is that the “Windows” part doesn’t matter -it just happens to be the only thing the bespoke software suites we use will run-on, and the entire shift is spent in those applications anyways. I’ve almost got my boss convinced to ditch Acrobat Reader though, or rather, its constant demands to be allowed to present AI Summaries of confidential documents is doing the convincing for me.

The simple fact is, all four of my children can generally get done what they want/need to in Windows, Mac, Chrome, Android or IOS, including customization or “esoteric” stuff, and get on with their lives, without coming to me pretending there aren’t a million tutorials on Youtube for whatever and that they shouldn’t even have to check there first. Only one of them has shown the same aptitude, willingness, patience, what-have-you, for Linux. Another is just too young to tell where she’ll go with all that.

I meet my users and use-cases where they are and presume a heterogenous network/device environment. That becomes and stays true the moment you introduce a game console, a printer, a tablet, phone and/or a router of all things.

I like Linux, love it and can’t wait to get back to using it more in fact, but using only Linux isn’t going to leave me with any way to relate to or convince people who are sceptical and comfortable with another OS they are already comfortable with, and forcing it into the present state of my life is going to demand time I don’t have available for the next year or so, but it was my daily driver for years and will be again.

Meanwhile, I’m counting down a shorter-every-day fuse for when the one boy wants an Amiga or roll-your-own-“retro” device of some sort to go with his RaspberryPi, OrangePi, plus various consoles and old phones he’s torn-down to the compotenent leven and built back up(successfully … err … to a surprising degree anyways), and his brother just laid claim to my (kickstarter-era)Snapmaker A350 CNC/Laser/3D Printer.

Some people still want to feel like Windows is something they own, like back when it was something you installed on-top-of DOS. Taming the hostile mess its become is still rarely worse than de-bloating a new OEM PC ever was, and if you use your PC rarely-enough, there’s hassle aspects that blur into near-parity versus Linux(updates, anyone?)

… share a PC with others, and just keeping Open-Shell(plus PowerToys and/or StartAllBack, or sometimes Rainmeter for a laugh) on one’s profile looks sufficient, versus dual-booting or whatever. Personally, my Laptop can go un-used(by me, anyways) for months and months, and letting my family use it helps keep it up-dated and let’s me know if problems arrise before I run face-first into them in a moment when I just need the thing to work.

I’m looking-forward to each of my kids having their own capable laptops(just ONE more …), but until then, Windows updates are stupid-prone to breaking dual-boot, only one of my kids likes/uses Linux half-so-much as I do, and even he is in more of the tweak-it-until-it-breaks-and-start-over dabbler stage, so I let him keep to his own laptop and a pile of old used ones(and consoles…) that are older than he is. 99% of what I would use it for in the mean-time, I just use my phone.

I knew eBay fucked-up, but $55 billion? That’s couch-change to a lot of businesses with much worse brand-recognition. At least their turn-key operation isn’t over-valued by orders of magnitude…

Like Free-to-Play games and Casinos, they “make their real money” on whales. Go step foot in a Best-Buy; 95% of the time, the employee-to-customer-ratio is about 5-to-1, or worse.

To be clear, I think basing one’s business on that concept is delusional at-best, but its what a “profitable” retail chain has looked-like to share-holders for at least the last 30 years.