I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.

The actual smart money isn't selling knowledge to anyone else. They are using it to make money.

I had an idea once for connecting an old 8-bit computer to the modern web by connecting to a text-based web browser running on another device using the terminal. Maybe one day when I find more time.

You can get some of the way there with an Amiga.

I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.

I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to. Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?

Not a popular opinion, but RedHat (now IBM) funds an enormous amount of critical open source. They pay people to contribute to hundreds of upstream projects. And RHEL is 100% focused on stability. Sounds like a good match for your priorities / goals.

There is no meaningful support subscription for end users, only enterprise. If you want to donate pick specific small projects you like.

I don’t understand how someone breaks a system but look into immutable options like Fedora Silverblue.

It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration. These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.

Immutable saves you from packaging issues but configuration always has to happen to some degree. To help there maybe use file system snapshots (btrfs) to rollback changes.

From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.

The dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake. Through some google searches, I came across this recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo

It would not surprise me at all if the sequencing step was done via FPGA processing many network inputs at line rate with a shared monotonic clock. This would give it some amount of parallelism.

good point, sequencing is very minimal, therefore some parallelism is feasible that way, but the pipeline is not that deep, at least ideally. Of course if people are chasing nano-seconds, it may make sense.

Which policies contributed to income inequality?

In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)

God I forgot about shock therapy! The Russian oligarchs owe their fortunes to Mr. Summers.

All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.

For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?

AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.

Anything not in the core protocol might as well not exist. It is literally, by design, impossible to write a fully featured desktop using the core protocols by themselves.

Here is a dumb question. In an OS with user-space drivers, can't many existing drivers be wrapped and repurposed? Does this shorten the path to mainstreaming more new OSes?