Because I have to use this shitshow of a software at work because some companies use “license managers” that don’t work under Wine.

I’ll wait and see if they manage to get embedded system debugging to work properly. What I’ve seen in the past has been a pain in the you-know-what in that regard, showing clearly that their main focus was PCs.

When my heart stopped beating in the middle of the night.

Luckily, the human body has mechanisms to force start a heart again. Not funny, though, 0/10, don’t recommend.

Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.

Don’t worry, I consider lasers, too.

It will probably be either a Brother Inkbenefit or an Epson Ecotank model.

A Canon printer. Not just a simple one, but a big (wide) one with real ink tanks, about 20 years ago.

Under Linux, I could only access basic printing services with that, and this only by using a default driver not made by Canon that happened to work. So I contacted Canon to get a proper user manual to create a proper device driver for this (something I could have done without problems), and basically got the answer that they would not support this, as “open source is theft of intellectual property”. They also had some very choice words about Linux in general.

I assumed I just got an asshole on the phone, so when I attended Cebit a short time later (back then the biggest trade fair in Europe for things like that), I went to the Canon booth, explained my issue, and basically got the same reply. So I sold the Canon printer and bought an HP one. At least HP supported Linux and supplied working drivers. Sadly, they have really gone down the drain since that, so the next printer will be a different brand again…

Well, I was not that far off. ‘Spamford’ Wallace founded “Cyber Promotions” on 1997. While there have been unsolicided emails even way before that, they had not been an issue: Whoever did them got a clue-by-four from the network community and that’s it. SPAM started to be a problem with ‘Spamford’ Wallace.

OK, you got me there. For me, EMail-SPAM is still a new thing, because I still remember the time before.

SPAM. Not the food variety, but the other. Inventend by a lawyer.

Reminds me of Slackware, back in the 90s.

Dr. Google MD at its best.

I seem to remember that frequently wiping ones nose is a sign of regular cocaine consumption.

Went to a party at friends. A girl I was hoping to get more than friends with was there, too, and she was in a good and even flirty mood.

Then she left to pick someone up at the train station. Came back with a wet towel kind of guy and introduced them to everybody as her fiancée.

Everyone was shocked, not only me. She was the kind of girl who could have had anyone, and she dragged in that.

It’s worth noting that car centric infrastructure is extremely expensive as well and requires constant upkeep. Bike infrastructure can often be made incrementally by simplying just requiring new/updated road to have bike lanes for instance

Well, try that in a city environment. It might work with some of the main roads, but we are not in Cities:Skylines here where houses move or are automatically replaced when you install a wider road. I may have to add that here is not the US where many roads are so wide that you need a car to get to the other side ;-)

More than 80% (give or take) of the roads in cities here are so narrow that two (small) car lanes plus the pedestrian sidewalks are basically “it”. The road in front of my house is, IIRC, between 5.4 and 5.8m wide - without having a sidewalk. Try adding a bike path here. And if you turn basically each and every side road into one-way roads in order to add bike paths might lead to serious acceptance problems.

The more a place is car centric, the higher these costs for upkeep will be (more traffic causing more damage in more places)

Well, while I won’t contradict your notion that more traffic causes more damage, I’d ask you to keep in mind that one truck does as much damage to a road as 40000 cars (yes, it is that much, the damage factor is x⁴, with x being the relative mass, and the calculation base being a normal European car, not a six ton American pickup). So, as long as you want to have your supermarket stocked and your amazon order delivered, the damage created by private cars is simply irrelevant.

There you are wrong. The official titel of a female mayor is “mayoress”, so it is “Mr. Mayor” and “Madam Mayoress”. Well, at least in the UK.

Source: I had to deal with them last week.

When I go to the city for shopping or attending a meeting, it is maybe once per month. I’m not stupid enough to do everyday shopping in the city when I have five supermarkets within 10 minutes walking distance. No, when I go to the city, it is usually to visit a few selected highly specialized shops that can only survive in an urban center with an appropriate environment. And I go there to see, touch, feel the goods I purchase in contrast to those who buy online and return every other piece because it either does not fit or whatever. Saves me a lot time, and protects the environment, as less returns are needlessly destroyed.

With our next city, well… spending money on road maintenance basically does not happen. They only repair what would otherwise fall apart, and this only adds to the chaos in this city. And as I said, money to properly reconfigure the city to make it bike friendly is simply not there.

If you just need groceries for the week, but your town has nothing to offer in walking distance, it almost sounds like there’s a business begging to be built there, even if it’s a two-room local affair.

While this sounds a good idea at first, literally tens of thousands of shops of this kind have died in my country in the last years, because there is simply no money to be made. There are a few shops that are run by local groups of volunteers because such a shop would not make enough money to survive otherwise.

But that experience of driving is often terrible when every single person (on their own with no heavy cargo) is using a car for every trip.

OK, but what would be the alternative? Especially for those living outside and entering the city either for work of for shopping?

When I was young, I went basically everywhere by bike, as I neither has a car, nor could I afford public transport (which would have cost me about 60% of available money). So I went to work and back on my bike (15km each way), and then to university and back in the evening (another 20km each way). Well, that was when I was young. Nowadays, this is no longer an option.

I don’t expect people to commute 20+km a day by bike. A safe bike garage at a P+R place would be nice and reduce at least part of the way by bike, but it does not exist. And public transport, well, at this P+R, there are good connections into the cities, but they have a low frequency and take quite some time, apart from costing a shitload of money for what they offer.

Chose one and give it a try. I don’t mind seeing you fail.

No. The reason why they don’t do anything is simply: Doing it right costs money. That cities either don’t have, or don’t want to invest. Turning a car-centric city into a bike and public transport friendly one is very expensive.