Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

This may be, but the probability is unarguably higher than with Trump. Voting exclusively for candidates you morally agree on only works if enough people have the same morale (in this case i.e. are educated on Israel and so on) and are also not willing to make compromises.

Even if unfortunate, this is currently not the case; and you voting independent has smaller chances of changing that than voting democratic. So you will probably have to accept this situation for the moment and choose the “best actually feasible” strategy— and feasible means having the highest probability to win in real life, not merely trying.

Personally, I’d even argue that it’s unethical to not vote for a candidate like Harris, just because the chances of getting stuff like ranked choice voting or educating voters done (which will then lead to you being able to realistically vote for others) is significantly higher when voting Democrats than… letting Trump win?

Notice that I don’t say you have to agree with anything else she stands for, you’re trying to achieve certain goals/get out of the very unfortunate current situation, and even a low chance of reaching that is infinitely better than none.

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

Crazy to think that one of twenty people I meet outside use Linux

“it’s called free software, but copyleft licenses restrict what you can do with it, therefore it’s unfree!!1!” or so they say

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

I understand the downvotes as the comment seems kind of inappropriate, but - as others pointed out - pederasty was really wide spread in Ancient Greece and people thought of boys not in puberty as “good-looking” in a romantic/sexual way, as fucking creepy and weird as we think that is today, so the comment is not entirely wrong: this is the same beauty standard that thought of boys as sexually attractive.

Don’t know how serious this was meant, but I just wanted to inform you that especially the Ancient Greek had another beauty standard thinking men with small penises were superior to larger ones as they thought of people with big ones as barbaric, dull and impulsive.

Billy should really not support them, Ad Block Plus let’s advertisers pay for having their ads checked as “acceptable advertisements”, i.e. is selling out the core functionality of their product. Billy should use uBlock origin, which afaik does not accept donations, he could however support something like PiHole .

I’m with you with (distribution) choice (that’s definitely stressful, especially when you aren’t used to actually having to choose what kind of computing experience you want) but driver/program distribution on Linux is less painful/easier than on Windows on average. If your hardware happens to be supported, everything should work out of the box without the need to install drivers; the biggest problem for more or less average users would be having to install Nvidia drivers if they have a Nvidia GPU. Installing software is generally as easy as opening your distribution’s software store, searching what you need and hitting the install button.

1940, as there are crazy things that will be going on in the world of computer science (and science in general) over the course of the next few decades and that would be really cool to experience. Kind of sad though to not be alive once we achieve human-level artificial intelligence, would be interested in seeing how that will turn out. I would probably chose America, as I wouldn’t want to spend WW2 in Germany where I live in the present.

Alternatively I think I would very much enjoy visiting Ancient Greek, although I’m not too sure when would be the best time for that; maybe at the peak of Athen.

I think the latter makes clear that this is a joke account, doesn’t it?

Was an easy fight, wasn’t it