What kind of headaches are you having? I’ve been running two completely different machines in a cluster with a pi as a Qdevice to keep quorum and it’s been incredibly stable for years.

I only buy my USB dongles from PUKEBONUR!

I wonder if Monster and Monster know about Monster

I switched to ebooks a long time ago, but had quite a collection prior to that, and was also the recipient of goodies from my mom’s massive science fiction book collection, including a first edition Dune (Chilton, 1965). My favorites are my signed Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams books, though.

None of them are going anywhere.

Several things keep Americans from moving to Europe.

First, immigration laws of the country one is moving to. If one is not able to get a passport from an EU or EEA county based on ancestry, you basically need to be sponsored for a work visa by a company in the country you want to move to, which can be quite difficult. And even then, you have to be employed in that country for long enough to qualify for permanent residency, then citizenship, which can take up to 7 or 8 years in some countries.

If one is lucky enough to have parents or grandparents who emigrated to the US from a European country and can claim citizenship based on that, it’s a lot of work to get all of the paperwork together and verified and accepted by that government’s consulate (at least it is for Germany, but German bureaucracy is … special).

Second, the US is one of the only countries in the world that double taxes its citizens. If someone was born in the United States, they will have to file taxes reporting income to the US government every single year until they die, and PAY taxes to the US government on any income over a certain amount every year until they die, regardless of the source of that income, and regardless of the fact that taxes on the same income need to be paid to the host country.

While I have zero respect for the snivelling shitgibbon name Boris Johnson, he was born in New York and had to renounce his US citizenship to escape the IRS. You also have to PAY the US government $2350 (in cash) for the privilege of giving up your citizenship, which is also…unique.

Sometimes there are tax treaties that can take most of the sting out of the double taxation issue (Norway’s is decent for US citizens), but it depends on the country.

Finally, it just never occurs to many Americans that leaving is even a possibility.

hisses protectively from atop a musty hoard of green USB to ps/2 adapters

That dude is going to merge with his barcalounger one of these days and we will all end up watching a weirdly swole chair yelling about Apple, and I am totally here for that.

Snip snap!

Ooh, I know this one! Here’s what I did to get it working and set so it survives a reboot:

1. In a terminal, run sudo arandr
2. Set all of the monitors to 1080p
3. Close arandr
4. Go to Settings > Display
5. Rearrange monitors in correct order if necessary
6. Set the each monitor to the correct resolution and frequency, applying the settings after each update
7. All monitors should now work, BUT they will not survive a reboot in Pop-OS 22, because the GDM3 login screen will NOT have this information, and will reset everything. So we must copy the pop-os monitors.xml file to the gdm3 config directory:

sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/

Note: You may need to do this as sudo -i

8. Reboot, and all 3 monitors should be loaded in the correct positions, at the correct resolution at the login screen

Fundamented and silverpilled

Just please don’t use the crystals as deodorant (unless you have sideburns in the shape of stars)

Never go in against the Red Cross when blood is on the line?

For a long time, the US actually had something called the “Fairness Doctrine” which required broadcasters to present matters of public interest in a way that was fair. So if you had a guy on a show that said the president was a lizard person, that show also had to have someone on to refute that opinion, or the media company could lose their broadcasting license.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Reagan Administration in 1987, which immediately resulted in the rise of conservative talk radio, who could say whatever they wanted without having to present the opposing viewpoint, and they didn’t have to worry about losing their license.

The rise of conservative talk radio led to Fox News, which led to the election of Trump.

Interestingly, less than a year after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a conservative political nonprofit corporation was formed called Citizens United, led by a man named David Bossie. The goal of this organization was (and remains) the creation of media that supports their goals of restoring “traditional American values”, which consists entirely of right-wing documentaries and attack ads.

In 2008, Citizens United made a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie”, which was basically a movie-length attack on Hillary Clinton, who had announced in 2007 that she was going to run for president in 2008.

At the time, there was a law called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which essentially banned any attack ads that name a federal candidate from running within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days from a federal election, if the ad was funded with money from a corporation (including a nonprofit) or union.

The Citizens United nonprofit corporation knew this, and sued the Federal Election Commission, arguing that not being able to show their attack ad was a violation of their constitutional right to free speech, which, very importantly, had only ever been interpreted to apply to human individuals, not corporations.

The Supreme Court was dominated by conservatives in 2010 (and still is), and they ruled that corporations did in fact have free speech protection, that not allowing attack ads funded by corporations that were not required to disclose the source of their funding before elections was a violation of the constitutional rights of corporations, and subsequently nullified the part of the law that prevented Citizens United from showing their attack ad, while also removing almost all limits on the “speech” that corporations could engage in without repercussions and also happened to confer legal “personhood” to corporate entities.

Incidentally, David Bossie (President of Citizens United) resigned from Citizens United in 2016 to take a job as deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

I don’t think that comes from Latin, it probably refers to a fish rising to take bait on the water.

Imma upvote you for the quote, but YSK it’s “risible” which is an additional layer of humour if you’re familiar with Latin (which was what the Romans spoke), because “risible” is an archaic English word from around the 1600s meaning “to provoke laughter”, which is itself based on the Latin word “ris”, which means “laugh”. “Ridere” means “to laugh” and “ridiculus” means “laughable”.

That is crazy. According to a comment on that article, most BIOS uses UTC (as does Linux, obviously), but Windows uses localtime for some reason, so it converts UTC to localtime after boot, then back to UTC when it needs to do little things like networking or TLS.

You cannot register to vote online in 8 US states, all of which have Republican governors and Republican control of the state legislature:

• Texas
• Mississippi
• Arkansas
• Montana
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Wyoming
• New Hampshire

Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:

• LinuxMint 21.1
• MxLinux 21.3
• Elementary OS 7
• Ubuntu 22.10
• RHEL 8.6
• RHEL 8.7
• RHEL 9.1
• Fedora 37

I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.

And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale.

… Linux being manageable at scale is kind of the reason why Linux is the standard for servers. Many enterprises run Linux workstation distros, and they can be managed at scale just fine, it’s just different tooling. You can deploy a Linux desktop OS with Ansible as easily as a Linux server.

You can replace pretty much the entire Office suite with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice, both of which can be easily hosted on-prem, for a fraction of the cost of paying MS for roughly the same thing on their awful infrastructure.

If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.

They have. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s pretty easy (and inexpensive) these days to run Linux desktop OSes like RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu on a VM running on Proxmox or OpenShift, complete with multiple monitor support and GPU. Hell, you can even run a Windows VM if you want. All you need is a system (like a thin client) with enough grunt to run a browser, and enough ports to handle multiple monitors and USB accessories.

And businesses aren’t interested in “free”, they’re interested in support, which they are willing to pay for. This is how companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE make their money. The OS is free, but you can pay for professional support.

I have a 1oz silver coin from the Royal Canadian Mint with Bigfoot on it. It’s called a privy coin, and a lot of mints put weird shit on otherwise normal coins.