finds themselves in a social circle or job environment hostile to Linux.

Ugh. Tell me about it.

I haven’t tried to run the latest Corel graphics suite in Wine recently, but the last time I did it exploded in my face so spectacularly I think my eyebrows still haven’t fully grown back. I really need that to work for… work. Basically everything else I already use is FOSS anyway.

That is patently false.

…Sometimes we also complain about Facebook or Tesla.

You’re conflating the tuner with the antenna. The person you replied to, however, is correct including the comment about the digital tuner boxes (which convert to an analog signal for old TV’s) being available for free during the analog to digital changeover back when.

Any piece of metal will work as an antenna, even for receiving digital broadcasts. It might not work well, but there is no magical difference between a “digital” antenna and an “analog” one, and since digital television is transmitted over pretty much the same original frequencies as analog was, old analog antennae are already quite well tuned in size and shape to pick up modern digital signals.

You just have to plug your 1940’s antenna into a 2009+ or so television. The antenna itself doesn’t “decode” anything. It just catches radio waves and passes the waveform along to the TV or tuner box. I still use the old 60’s era rooftop antenna that cane with my house, but plugged into my modern TV and it receives digital channels just fine.

His glasses are different in every scene. No consistency. It’s subtle in the first few, but in the last shot they’re a totally different style and shape and have a crossbar over the bridge that wasn’t present in any of the previous scenes.

I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

“But we need your generous donations and tithes to continue to operate our house of god!!!”

God, huh? The all-of-creation in 6 days guy? The water to wine guy? All the fish that swim in the sea and beasts that roam on the land and birds that sing in the sky? That guy? Seems to me he’d have no trouble magically causing a church to spring forth out of the ground for you if you’re so damn devout, then. At the very least he could keep all his bisops and deacons and popes in clean vestments without having to put it on the congregation’s dime.

No? How curious.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

a lot of people end up using atheism as a an excuse to have shitty values

Citation needed. This is a total straw man argument.

“Morals” are a completely man made concept. With or without religion, it is immaterial. They did not and do not have to come from somewhere else. They come from us.

And what is and isn’t “moral” changes over time as society evolves. As I am positive you know, quite a few things in Judeo-Christian scripture were considered “moral” in their time but are now viewed as unquestionably heinous. Have you ever stopped to think why that is?

You’ve said absolutely nothing of substance, here. Just platitudes. You haven’t explained why Yahweh is legit but, say, Zeus isn’t.

Because Jesus or any other mythical figure is not required for anyone to have the same or similar values.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Evidence for the existence of Jesus and god – either the Yahweh or any of the other ones – is scant (in the case of Jesus) or nonexistent (in the case of his dad). Sharing similar values to what Jesus allegedly had is not evidence for his existence, nor that of any gods. In this context, the “real” Jesus is as he is depicted in scripture. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was a real person in reality, so don’t get that part twisted. What the poster you’re replying to is interpreting a character as he was written.

It’s exactly the same thing as claiming, “Captain Picard would not do XYZ, because it is inconsistent with how he was written in every single episode.” That may be so, and maybe we all know who Captain Picard is and what he does, but that still doesn’t make Picard a real person. Having a taste for tea, Earl Grey, hot does not require that any person actually believe that Picard physically existed, nor that his published actions were anything more than the fancy of some scriptwriters.

This means that we may face a situation where hobbyists, small businesses, and aerial photographers who make a living with drones can suddenly no longer fly them, but cops will.

That was always the goal.

China (and probably Russia still) have satellites that can read the headlines on your newspaper from orbit. The notion that they’d need or use noisy, unreliable, and easily noticed commercial hobbyist drones for this purpose is laughably absurd. Even if they are planning on secretly snooping on the feeds of privately owned fliers, which is probably not actually feasible at scale anyway. How is the data supposed to be transmitted back to China? Magic? Through the cloud via the user’s cell phone data, with no one noticing? Gigabytes and gigabytes of it per flight? I’m not buying it.

The real reason the US government is so scared of drones is because it will allow the citizenry (i.e., us) to document abuses and authoritarianism in a manner that’s pretty tough to stop with the usual billy clubs/guns/tear gas/water cannons method. Think BLM, Occupy, future climate protests, and all of those sorts of things. Unchecked aerial photography and video that contradicts the Official Narrative from whatever today’s incident happens to be making it out to the internet and going viral would be highly inconvenient, wouldn’t it? Someone can be capturing video of the police shooting protestors or whatever and easily be half a mile away from where the drone itself is located.

It speaks volumes about the pathology and mindset of American legislators and law enforcement that they inherently see drones as a “spy” technology. That’s because this is exactly what they plan to use them for, and are terrified that someone else might do the same thing to them.

Well, tough fucking titty.

And even the KJV edits did not manage to paper over the fact that there are in fact 18 if you count Sky Daddy’s recitation/rant in Exodus after the whole golden calf incident.

FYI, there is no “better” way to use hydrogen that will result in extracting more energy from it than it physically contains and can be released via oxidation. This is not a matter of “development” or “breakthroughs.” It is physically impossible. The standard enthalpy change of combustion of hydrogen is 141.83 MJ/kg. Period. That’s it. That’s all you can ever get out of it, provided you achieve perfect efficiency (which currently we don’t). Ongoing research is surely working on getting is closer to 100% efficiency, but it will never get past it. You can’t defy the laws of physics.

Insofar as I am aware all current hydrogen vehicles already use fuel cells to generate electricity and use that to drive electric motors for motive power. No one is burning hydrogen in a combustion engine in vehicular applications. There are some power plants that are doing it, though, mostly as a mechanism for storing and later reusing excess energy generated from other sources. You can go cross-eyed reading up on it here, if you are so inclined.

There is the notion of the “hydrogen economy” floating around, that is the use of hydrogen as an energy storage and carrying medium – not, notably, as a fuel for actual generation of energy – but it’s pretty certain that outside of some limited applications this will always be a worse deal than just taking the energy in the form of electricity and putting it in a wire.

Hydrogen is a dead end. The only company left trying to chase that particular dragon is Toyota, and I predict eventually they’ll be forced to admit that it’ll never work en masse for private vehicles. Ordinary consumers can already barely be trusted with gasoline, which is neither under high pressure nor requires industrial grade refrigeration to keep it in liquid form, and is a lot harder to ignite… The delivery systems for hydrogen are extremely complex and must maintain an absolute 0% failure rate or else somebody will either get blown up or frozen to a pump. Gasoline is at least a liquid and behaves predictably when spilled, and doesn’t phase change instantly when it leaves containment. And a mechanical failure in the delivery system can be mitigated by simply shutting off the pump. You poke a hole in a hydrogen filling system and you’re going to have a very interesting time. Current systems have redundancies on top of safety devices on top of redundancies for this reason which makes them fantastically expensive.

Hydrogen also has crap for energy density (around 8 kJ/liter in liquid form, compared to 32 kJ/liter for gasoline) and even if you’re producing it via electrolysis or something is a wildly inefficient way to store and transport energy. If you’re going to use electricity to create and compress hydrogen to transport it and create electricity with it later, it is monumentally more efficient to take the electricity and put it in batteries. So you may as well just to that.

The thing with battery swapping is that it will absolutely require strong government regulation to ensure standardization and fair treatment of owners. Replaceable batteries in consumer devices obviously aren’t a new concept, and before proprietary lithium packs took over everything, every single consumer device was powered by AAA, AA, C, or D batteries which were very well understood by everybody and were – and are – completely interchangeable commodity items that are readily available to this day. That’s the only way it’ll work. Manufacturers will have to be forced to standardize on a set of pack sizes because without oversight they’ll inevitably try to turn everything into a subscription-only walled garden pretty much exactly as you have predicted. But if there is a thing as an equivalent of an AAA vehicle battery (for motorcycles and scooters), AA vehicle battery (for city microcars, NEV’s, golf carts, etc.) and C vehicle battery (full size passenger cars) and D vehicle battery (light trucks) etc., and nobody is allowed to try to make up their own bullshit, then no one will have to give a rat’s ass about battery health, the dealership, lock-in, or anything else. If you buy a used vehicle with a knackered pack in it or your battery gets cacked, you could just bop down to your local AutoZone or whatever and buy a new one. Or push your car to the nearest swap station. You’ll turn in your old one for the core charge. Exactly like how 12v vehicle batteries work now.

We’ll have to get people used to the notion that, yes, these things will be kind of a battery lottery and you may get swapped in a pack that’s in slightly worse condition than your last one if you go around pack-swapping all the time. But you know, the next time you swap you’ll get a different one again. And you can play already this game right now if you want to – just go buy some fuel in a third world country.

Apparently they don’t need him because Ronald was fired… Er, “retired,” in 2016.

The final vestige of the clown that I know of was his silhouette being used in the “throw this into a trash can and not on the damn ground” message on the bottom of their paper bags, but even that seems to be gone now.

Provided they’re fine with cutting off 100% of their business coming from customers older than 50, that’d probably work great. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

He probably could, but he can’t buy a gun to put on it so what he’s got is a funny shaped ineffective club.

The nomenclature I always hear is, “Experiencing a higher than expected call volume,” and since no one can prove how low their expectations actually are there is no crack in which to insert the prybar of legal complaint.