I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

According to some right-wing spaces (r/conservative on Reddit), there is apparently evidence to suggest that the shooter was an outlier within their otherwise hard-right family.

Is there any evidence to the contrary?

Students view doing that as basically the same amount of work as writing the paper yourself

Aye that’s exactly the same thing that I said

Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.

This is why invisible watermarking of AI-generated content is likely to be so effective. Even primitive watermarks like file metadata. It’s not hard for anyone with technical knowledge to remove, but the thing with AI-generated content is that anyone who dishonestly uses it when they are not supposed to is probably also too lazy to go through the motions of removing the watermarking.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.

Prior to Discord, there was IRC.

And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

Words become more acceptable over time. In centuries past calling someone a devil or saying that they should go to hell would have been deeply offensive. Today these insults are so mild that even schoolchildren say them to each other. Even twenty years ago the word “fuck” was viewed with nearly as much taboo as racial slurs. Now, it’s a very common word that people will throw around in a casual context.

Even the word n****r (means “black person”) and its non-hard-R variant are starting to lose their offensiveness. In African-American Vernacular it has taken on a variety of inoffensive meanings. It is now only offensive in certain contexts while fifty years ago it was pretty much offensive in all contents.

At the same time, new words emerge and get labelled profane. For example, the word t****y (means “transgender”) would not have meant anything twenty years ago, and now it’s one of the most offensive words in the English dictionary. Similar story with the word f****t (means “homosexual”).

The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.

For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.

I’m American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they’re not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.

Now, one can argue all day about whether it’s appropriate to have a monarchy in the modern day, even if that institution were to be discharged of even theoretical political power like it is in Japan, and whether such an institution is compatible with democratic principles like the rule of law, but that’s something I’m wholly unqualified to opine about.

Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?

The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:

• Democratic Party: 40%
• Republican Party: 28%
• Libertarian Party: 11%
• Green Party: 8%
• Working Families Party: 6%
• Constitution Party: 4%
• Independents: 3%

For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.

The final distribution:

• Democrats: 4
• Republicans: 3
• Libertarians: 1
• Greens: 1
• Working Families: 1

There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.

The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they’d still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.

The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.

You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.

They will ask for your name here when signing up, but nothing prevents you from lying about your name if you’re going to be paying in cash. They ask for an e-mail address as well, but you can say you haven’t got one, and they’ll create one for you using their own e-mail service and assign it to you. You don’t actually have to use it, but it is for receiving their bills and notices.

Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.

Like the others have said, all major distros are fine. Ubuntu is or used to be Valve’s “favourite distro” and the package that you can get from Valve’s website is for Ubuntu. That being said, software on Linux should be installed using the package manager (the Software Centre) and not downloaded from the Web.

You may wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. This is fairly easy (you can use the Software Updater application) but the newer versions have better drivers and newer GNOME versions which may bring better performance.

Arch is the one thing that should be absolutely not recommended to beginners. Even implying that it is a suitable beginner distro in any way like you have done in this comment is only likely to drive away users when they inevitably get confused.

Existing Windows users mostly are not interested in even knowing of the existence of the Arch Wiki. They will just give up and conclude Linux is shit.

It doesn’t go against everyone having equal rights. It goes against everyone having equal power, which is not the same thing.

I’m also going to make a very bold and very unpopular claim that aristocracy is not an inherently bad thing. Every country already has an aristocracy of some sort, because aristocracy is defined as the group of people at the top of the social hierarchy. Even so-called communist countries have had aristocracies in all but name.

The only difference is that by acknowledging that you can’t get rid of the existence of an aristocracy, you can begin to think about how one might control who is deserving of being in that class of people.

It is natural for intelligence to be somewhat tied to the education of one’s parents. I don’t see anything wrong with that. But at least with education, as long as people are given roughly equal educational opportunities, there will be chances for social mobility, and much more so than today. If you take a look at China’s imperial examination system, as flawed as it was (largely based on the arbitrary memorisation of Confucian classics and essay-writing), it still provided unprecedented social mobility for the time, where any literate peasant could obtain a well-paid job in the imperial bureaucracy and prestige for their family. Yes, already-educated people had an advantage but that is not necessarily a strictly bad thing, as unfair as it seems from first glance.

Let me give a scenario to think about (this is not a proposal but just some brain food): What would happen if we administered a university entrance exam to all seekers of legislative office and gave the positions to the top 100 highest scorers? Obviously the average rich person would have an advantage over the average poor person, because they have better educations, but at the same time, poor people would have a much better shot of actually getting the office than they would under a purely democratic electoral system, and we have the important benefit that whoever does get the job is far more likely to possess basic thinking skills.

Again, not a real proposal, just something to think about. The system described above would definitely suck in reality if implemented as written, and it doesn’t stop smart but malicious people from obtaining power.

Of all the arguments against democracy, I think this one is probably among the strongest.

In the past, this was solved by giving the power of the franchise only to the upper class, because those people at least had the time and education needed to consider their choices before voting. Of course, such a system would never work in the modern day. It would just result in a country turning into a cyberpunk hellhole.

But on the other hand, giving educated people stronger voting power than uneducated people seems to be a historically unexplored idea. Something like all citizens having one vote to start, secondary school graduates having a second, baccalaureate holders having a third, and then graduate degree holders having a fourth.