Sure but that means a workaround for machines affected, but not needing correct dates could be to set their clocks to midnight Jan 1 1970 and have another 65 years to sort it out

Anyway, the biggest problem will be embedded systems, including many household and business smart devices. Several I have are definitely 32 bit machines and might use 32 bit time precise to the second. Some I don’t know. I have no idea what processor my TV uses

And as long as they get updated, it’ll be fine. Probably cheaper than Y2K. Note that medical and industrial control stuff generally doesn’t care about the date

On 32 bit computers

Do you have any 32 bit computers anymore? Any running important stuff that needs good dates?

Sure, but that’s not VPN action, it’s routing or filtering

Sure, but that’s not generally a thing the commercial VPNs offer, and I thought we were talking about commercial VPNs

But my cohort had Watership Down

Described recently as the best example of cosmic horror/literary irony

Dream a dream

And mouse to top right for me. With windows is usually the users who screw up, the worst of the product itself is that it advertises at you

If Linux had the bulk of users we’d be seeing idiot things users installed on Mint

They hide your browsing from your ISP (and probably your government)

They hide your origin and substitute another for web sites.

I’d say a VPN is only useful to people engaging in crime, or things that look like crime and those buying services that are priced differently around the world

That provide no protection against things you might click on

Win+L? Ok session locked

He didn’t even /anything with his Linux. I think that charge is incorrect

You’ve gotta let FrankTheHealer shout from the rooftops. He has windows to heal

We have never successfully done that. Nestle is still out there doing their stuff

The poor tropics are especially screwed. Also all the cities on the coast

And there’s optimism in climate change, zeroing our carbon burn is straight forward. It wouldn’t take a decade if we could agree on the sane path

But we have pushed so much CO2 into the air, and so much heat into the sea we need to do better than zero. I’m pretty pessimistic

The most likely way I can see the fall of America is through a breakup of the federation. If you’re in a bad state it could be bad

We haven’t had a world war since WW2. We haven’t got two likely sides now. China owns too much of the West, Russia is no longer credible

Nuclear war is no closer now than it was during the cold war. Everything then was on a hair trigger. Now it’ll just take a psychopath in charge, and no one willing to ignore the order in the command structure

We have plans for how one would modify the Sun. The physics is fine. The machines are enormous.

But over all we expect intelligent life to be able to spread to other planets, we expect them (and us) to capture more than their planet’s share of their star’s energy

But we see no evidence of it happening

So really there are two options

• It’s too hard to use enough energy to be seen; or
• There aren’t other intelligent species in the observable universe, at least none that can reach space

Humans also are really bad at returning digested seeds to the environment. Unlike all other life we process our shit