We’ll have to get rid of the politicians in the back pocket of those corporations first.

There’s a reason the new legislation doesn’t say anything about them.

Yeah. I think I have a preference for a three tier system that’s Y.R.P (e.g. 25.0.2; “Year”, Release within year, Patch number), so yes, I could imagine the third level being incremented the following year in an emergency.

And if two-tier is paramount, tricks like (R+1)*100+P will work provided there aren’t going to be 100 patches per release. (e.g. 25.102)

I wouldn’t want to keep the 11 in there. The entire reason for (hypothetically) making this change is to get away from the old version number and any potential confusion it might cause.

I also prefer smaller version numbers, so “subtract 2000 from year” works better for me (and there’s no better time to take advantage of the fact this produces sensible numbers), but I can see why the full year might be preferable for someone else.

Odd question: What would be the fallout from changing the version numbering to be more like the change recently made by LibreOffice? That is, making it be related to the year number rather than the current system.

The reason I ask is that Linux has been and will be getting refugees from Windows 10 and 11, and the timing of the current version numbers is somewhat unfortunate and potentially confusing in that regard.

I’m aware I may be imagining a problem that won’t actually exist in any meaningful amount.

There’s also the potential problem of Microsoft following suit with whatever follows Windows 11 being “Windows 2029” or something, but it wouldn’t be too hard to deliberately throw in another jump if that were to happen at the loss of some synchronicity.

Wine 49 certainly has a ring to it!

IIRC Thatcher claimed to sleep for four hours, and she only did that because she thought it was necessary to be able to do the job properly. The job of, you know, running a country.

Sleeping for two, and then expecting a regular salaryman / career woman to get on the same level and then do that for a lifetime is an entirely new level of ludicrous.

Don’t complain people have stopped loving you when you’re the one who built a wall around your heart.

Fun fact: The closest English equivalent might be “Roderick”.

But names have a funny habit of doing that. Nothing for decades, then it becomes a fashion and everyone and their pets have the same name, and then back to obscurity again. Rinse and repeat.

Facial expressions say everything.

“This is my powerful friend who I am just like and we both rule large landmasses and he will help me with my special military exercises.”

“There’s a good chance I’ll get my hands on Taiwan if I keep pretending to be friends with this clown.”

Well, it worked with Crimea…

Edit: This response is not showing up where I want it to. I can’t tell whether my stupidity is preventing me from replying in the right place or this interface is suddenly acting screwy. @orioler25@lemmy.world

Perhaps I should reword one of my previous comments:

Me: The Earth is flat.

Them (You): Several paragraphs patiently explaining that it’s round.

Me: …

Sensible things look a lot like lies when you’re stood on your head.

Perhaps I should reword one of my previous comments:

Me: The Earth is flat.

Them: Several paragraphs patiently explaining that it’s round.

Me: …

Sensible things look a lot like lies when you’re stood on your head.

Apparently I’ve misunderstood the word liberal every time it’s been used across my life in the same way that people think that “epitome” is pronounced “ep-i-toam” because they’ve only ever read it.

When I looked up liberal, one of the places I looked was https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberal but I did not click through to liberalism, which might have taught me a thing or two.

But please note the bit at the bottom of the link where the meaning has recently split into meaning “leftist” which is a lot closer to what I thought it meant… so apparently it hasn’t been just me getting it wrong, but a significant portion of the English-speaking world.

Me: The Earth is round.

Them: Several seemingly legitimate paragraphs, patiently explaining that it’s flat.

Me: …

Someone else brought up the term “neoliberal” and I might have gone along with that. A prefix can do a lot of heavy lifting in allowing the rest of a word to mean something else entirely, even opposing the original meaning.

What I’m gathering is that economists have redefined the original word, and what I think of as liberal, they call progressive.

If what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t explain why the greatest increase in capitalism has historically occurred under governments that were not liberal (by the dictionary definition. Or my simplistic one.)

Unless, that is, that what you’re saying is that all the pro-capitalist governments were liberal by your definition (or some redefinition to which you and certain others believe is, or should be, correct). That, I think, is a ridiculous way to go about things, and smacks of trying to steal the word or besmirch people who would otherwise use that word to describe themselves.

In short, I think you’re being disingenuous.

The belief that no-one is above anyone else and that everyone should be treated equally. The doesn’t quite match with the dictionary definition, I grant you (I looked it up afterwards), but nonetheless I think I was nearer the mark than “capitalist = liberal”.

Capitalists tend to think of themselves as more deserving than others which would seem to be at odds with that supposed equivalence.

And there’s that the biggest capitalist booms of recent years have been driven by illiberal politics, by and large. Reagan wasn’t a liberal. Thatcher wasn’t. Today’s billionaires are stumbling over themselves to swear fealty to distinctly non-liberal political parties, in power or not.

Wait, what? Liberals are the capitalists now? Or is it that Liberals aren’t doing anything/enough to reign in the capitalists?

Someone needs to yarn-bomb this thing. Perhaps something like a headband that falls to googly-eye level maybe. Perhaps, you know, with eyes on it.

Either way, I’d be tempted to put up a sign next to it that says “Help! I’ve gone blind!”

The solutions:

For the individual: Don’t start in the first place, which is what the Maldives are hoping to help people achieve.

For governments: Copy whatever local legislation applies to heroin and make it apply to nicotine as well. The article doesn’t say what the Maldives intend to do to underage smokers and those who’d sell to them, but I’d be making it unnecessarily draconian just so people get the message.

For people who are already smokers: Nicotine patches of decreasing strength over time and some sort of media teaching pen-flipping or other legal hand-based hobby. Having something for the hands to do is a big part of it. If these can be prescribed by medical or psychological practitioners, all the better.

General advice follows. I may be preaching to the choir. Apologies in advance.

Did take a backup before running the update? If not, now would be an excellent time to reboot to externally hosted media and get what you can off the storage before proceeding any further.

If you have a backup, be ready to format and install the new OS from scratch then repopulate necessary files from that. You might not need to if you’re lucky and a reboot and retry all goes to plan, but still something to bear in mind if it hangs again. And maybe a third time.

Also be ready to have to reinstall the old OS if this is a case where the new OS and the old hardware refuse to get along.

Old man ramble: Back in the old days, it used to be possible to tell if a computer was doing something because the HDD would make noise, but with SSDs that’s all but impossible to do. HDD/SSD lights on the case sometimes give strong hints that something is happening, but, in my limited experience, they didn’t always match up one-to-one with what a HDD was doing, so I assume the same is true with SSDs. Onion on belt, etc.

… politics is a hugely partisan-tribal affair with a lot of drama

This is a problem everywhere. In fact it may well be the definition of politics.

I know this isn’t particularly helpful in terms of this specific discussion (China, Taiwan, etc.), but that phrase leapt out at me and I had to call attention to it.