*full packing physics for the parachute! Frayed lines, tangling, dodgy mechanisms! The risk of plummeting to your account's demise.

It's pretty annoying that Gnome themeing tools, rather than developing and becoming better/more cohesive, were made totally irrelevant

I can't quite understand how "Linux GUI, make it look how you want! Personalized OS!" became "Linux - this one unchangably bland tablet UI on your desktop!"

I know that other WM/DM exist, but Gnome is incredibly popular, often the default, and was so close to being what people saw as the ideal Desktop.

Not just tablets. Every single theme now in /r/unixporn at Rddit looks the same. Either i3, i3-gaps, some catpucchino/nord theme and Gnome/KDE cloning Mac. And, yes, we even tried to clone OSX even from Fluxbox and FVWM, but we had a bunch of several other themes.

...yeah, on the whole I can't imagine thinking that humanity's impact on birds overall has been a good thing

Unless you really, really love pigeons

I mean that has got to be a sarcastic caveat, rather than a point against the probability of it happening

Why not just keep a bunch of rats and pump them with filth and antibiotics until it outpaces our known chemistries?

We already do this with cattle and poultry in modern Western intensive farming.

And a few million bucks isn't hard to come by when you're in control of an entire country

Even if it's as poor as NK, the guy who commands it can have more material riches than most of us can really consider

Which is not small

If you have one nuclear weapon, you can probably get away with setting up an enrichment framework to produce more without sweating too much.

I'd be less worried about Russia using a nuke directly as a state, and more about it doing what everyone feared in the fallout of the USSR collapsing.

They've already demonstrated a willingness for its materials to be used obviously on foreign soil with the barest pretense of deniability. I can't imagine they'd sweat too much if somebody set off a dirty bomb, and the willingness to take direct action in response isn't guaranteed by NATO.

I suppose it's somewhat up to how willing China and Iran are to ignore such an obvious act. The thing that actually keeps me up isn't their real response, but Russia's assumption of what it will be. Russia's predictive powers seem to err towards 'what we want is the right idea' more than 'we can actually get away with this', and they've simply taken advantage of tolerance more than weakness/fear.

This is pretty common at other places - my PhD advisor was exasperated that a polymer chemist would get an A in Physical Chemistry II, when I had a national lab collaboration to work on, a fellowship to write, and a first-author paper to get out the door.

In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.

Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.

Well this certainly could have saved us a news cycle a year or so ago