Who cares, as long as it’s copyleft?

Your Freudian slip is right, LOL.

Anyway, sure, Gentoo is a good choice to build on, but picking an evil thing as the example doesn’t exactly endear one to your POV, emotionally speaking. Besides, SteamOS is based on Arch, so the notion that Gentoo is strictly “better” (not equal) to Arch on the basis of being used to make distros for commercial products isn’t very persuasive.

I’m not saying you’re wrong about Gentoo being good. I’m just saying the supporting argument is a weak one, and doubling down by saying that sort of thing is “only possible” with Gentoo is even weaker.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the first sentence (fan of Gentoo; never used Arch), but the second sentence is not helping its case.

That’s because they do intend to depopulate the US by force.

(Note that a reduction of 100 million is way more people than the number of immigrants than we actually have, but does roughly correspond to the number of non-white citizens.)

I’ve opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.

TeX will be perfect after Knuth dies and the version number is incremented to π.

LOL, I was hoping somebody would pick up on that!

I didn’t say “impossible,” though. I said “statistically impossible.”

Are “statistically impossible” and “extremely unlikely” not synonyms?

Again, who said anything about “civilization?” Even just on Earth, life has existed for 4 billion years. That’s 4 billion of the 14 billion years the universe as a whole has existed, or 28% of the time, which I wouldn’t call “rare” at all!

Life on Earth started damn near immediately (in geologic terms) as soon as the crust cooled enough to not set it on fire cook its proteins (it wouldn’t have caught fire because the atmosphere didn’t have oxygen yet). Does that sound “rare” to you?

He was, like, some kinda crazy person though.

Who said anything about multicellularity, intelligence, or space travel?

Point is, Obama’s answer was vacuously true, and the only answer a non-idiot could reasonably could have given.

…Okay, I admit he could have quoted Contact for extra style points:

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

But aside from that, the answer he gave was the only one he could reasonably have given.

It is statistically impossible for life to exist on exactly one planet in the universe. Earth just isn’t that fucking special!

Edit:

A statistical impossibility is a probability that is so low as to not be worthy of mentioning. Sometimes it is quoted as 10⁻⁵⁰ although the cutoff is inherently arbitrary. Although not truly impossible the probability is low enough so as to not bear mention in a rational, reasonable argument.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2049714/can-something-be-statistically-impossible#2049722

If I’m wrong about the definition, at least I’m not wrong alone.

Where’re ya gonna get sprocket-feed fanfold paper these days, though, let alone in the apocalypse?

<sigh>… And here I am, expecting “shuffle” to be a random ordering without repetition at all, like a silly person apparently.

I’m not so sure. I could believe their entire productivity has been consumed by failing AI slop in code reviews.

In Windows, every program is usually packaged with all of its dependencies (except really basic ones that are part of the OS, or very common extra ones like the Java or .NET libraries). They don’t get installed separately; you just get a fuckton of extra copies, of various assorted versions, because every program you install has its own.

They would also be .deb files. If you wanted to install package A.deb that depended on B.deb and C.deb, with C.deb itself depending on D.deb and E.deb, you would work down the dependency tree to figure that out, obtaining the .deb file for each package as you went (presumably manually downloading from each project website itself, since we’re doing this in hard mode), then run dpkg install E.deb, dpkg install D.deb, dpkg install C.deb, dpkg install B.deb, and finally dpkg install A.deb in that order. You also have to make sure each of those packages is the correct version compatible with the others, BTW.

This is what apt is designed to do for you, automatically. This is why you use it instead of dpkg.

(Side note: I sure would love to find out how to control syntax highlighting in Lemmy inline code markup.)

“I didn’t use the main standard way of installing software, and am complaining because all the weird alternative ways I did try didn’t work.”

I understand that you claim apt has never worked for you, but, frankly, I don’t believe you.

Just FYI, the entire point of using apt instead of working with dpkg (the utility used to install .deb files) directly is that apt handles the dependency resolution. You deliberately used the lower-level tool instead of the higher-level one and then complained that it didn’t do the higher-level things.

I have this weird suspicion that they use a shitload of open source software, and I’m not just talking about their Android OS or Chromebooks, but for their most core businesses.

“Open source for me, but not for thee.”

That’s also why they bait-and-switched us with AOSP.