It’s a bit more complicated, really. The islands weren’t usually politically united. China lost actual control of the Ryukyu kingdom well before the first Sino-Japanese war, but maintained a claim on it for quite some time.

The US took over administration during WWII and converted many of the Japanese bases to American ones. The US doesn’t claim any of the islands anymore and has closed some installations, but a lot of bases are still active. The US is responsible for Japan’s defense. Japan would rather have the bases in Okinawa rather than in mainland Japan (although there are a few bases there as well), which a lot of Okinawans feel is unfair. Okinawa is very well placed strategically though and Japanese people don’t like foreigners (sort of… It’s weird), so don’t expect the situation to change any time soon.

BTW, if you ever want to visit Japan, Okinawa’s a great option. It’s beautiful there and it’s not hard to get by on just English.

I’ve never talked to an Arch user about Linux, so I dunno how toxic their community is. But I do read Arch documentation, and it’s fantastic. Arch’s documentation has (for me, anyway) taken the place that used to be held by the old HOWTOs back in the early days.

The kind of cooperation required to accomplish this doesn’t speak of a toxic community to me. I didn’t watch the video since I don’t watch YouTube on my phone, but I’m guessing it’s not the Arch community that has issues but annoying teenage “I’m more 1337 than you” jackwads that are the turd in the Linux punchbowl. Those little cretins are drawn to distros like Arch because they like feeling superior to the “normie” users.

I should know, I used to be like that thirty years ago. Most of us grow out of it after we start getting laid.

Install xterm. Bam, you’ve got sixel support.

So it did. That’s interesting.

It was the fact that they used RPMs that made me think they were a Red Hat derivative. I didn’t care for Red Hat (I ran Slackware back then, switching to Debian around Hamm) so I never gave them a chance. Pity.

It never caught on in the states.

IIRC it was originally based on Red Hat (back when Red Hat Linux was a thing), wasn’t it?

I paid for a car that I could drive halfway across the country in and be comfortable,not spend a fortune on fuel, and not worry too much about it stranding me on the side of the road. The smart screen just happened to come with it. So it seems to have worked out fine for me.

Are you naturally an asshole or are you making a special effort here?

Or just don’t connect your phone to it. That’s what I do. I’ve never touched the “smart” screen in my car except to adjust the air conditioner.

Oh, I’ve got no complaints about the article or even its title. Few people learn Perl or Raku these days so it would be surprising for most people.

I thought it was interesting myself - Perl’s my go-to scripting language but I never used Raku. I might consider it next time I have a non-trivial scripting project.

I’m not sure why that’s surprising. Raku started out as Perl 6. Perl was designed primarily for use in a shell environment. Convenience features like the arguments to MAIN bit are in line with Perl philosophy.

Naw, we just buy ones where the lattice is diagonal.

In other words, we install X Windows.

Have you tried burping and jumping up and down?

It’s can’t in the sense of “I can’t eat another bite.” Yes, until your stomach bursts and you die, you can eat another bite, but everyone understands what you mean.

I can’t watch YouTube with ads. The “without forcing myself” is implied.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

It has one. It’s called evil-mode.

It’s difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you’d have them on a battery backup.

Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They’re pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.

I don’t see it as irrational. You’re thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can’t be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what’s to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.

I don’t think it’s so much “security by obscurity” as it’s an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won’t put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It’s a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it’s ever discovered, you take the money and run.

I see this sort of thing all the time.

There’s a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won’t run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there’s nothing wrong with it.

Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we’ve seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.

Yes, they do. So do I, for that matter. While my part of the company focuses more on government projects like water plants, fuel depots, and utility management, the rest of the company does process automation in the energy sector. That’s a fancy way of saying they build control systems for refineries.

I disagree with your assertion that more thought leads to less conservatism. The particular coworker I’m talking about does quite a bit of thinking, and is quite eloquent. He’s still wrong, of course, but it’s due to his opinions, his priorities, and what he chooses to believe more than a lack of thought.

Yet I continue to constantly hear from my conservative colleagues about how bad Biden is for the oil industry…