Idk about you, but I hesitate to get myself killed.

Isn’t that basically Roman weekend entertainment?

I don’t think I could do anything to a bear that would do more than make it angry. Maybe poke it in the eye or something, if it holds perfectly still while I do that. Even then, I would just be mauled to death by a one-eyed bear that suddenly remembers it has those giant claws right there.

I think part of the problem with cats is that you don’t want to injure the cat, but the cat has no problem with injuring you. The stories I hear from people who dealt with panicking/aggressive cats are mostly about catching the cat without hurting it, while avoiding getting hurt yourself.

Hah. I made it work enough to do my work, and handed it in as soon as I was done

I remember some linux laptops my employer handed out to devs that absolutely needed them. Horrendously outdated and misconfigured, half-assed ports of the company software, you had to have a second laptop to read the knowledge base if it broke again. Not fun. Imagine all the shitshow of corporate windows, but with 1/100th the budget.

May I also recommend dusting off the old pirate hat?

Oh, and group policies. I could not work on a system without turning all sorts of shit off in gpedit.

I wanted to check if everything worked correctly out of the box (and not have trouble with any warranty if it didn’t), and doing the initial round of bios updates was easier on windows. So, I booted to windows, played around a bit, and then installed Linux.

Let me open a random online computer shop here in Central Europe, and I am greeted with this:

Ranging from shit-tier 300€ office and youtube machine to 1k€ entry-level macbook. Sure, it’s no thinkpad carbon pro ultra leet, but face it, most people don’t buy that (or buy that used)

Maybe stop shouting, some of us try to sleep here!

I guess they have to compete with the financial sector and the likes? Over here, it varies wildly by field and by what you do.

No, I mean the quack bullshit about creating energy from nothing. And not just some theoretical framework, as in technically, this could yield a net positive somehow, no. My guy was convinced he could build it himself from tinfoil and strings, if “the establishment” didn’t oppress him (meaning his coworkers and bosses told him it’s stupid).

Fucking wild. Imagine it being that easy, and everybody in the world is either too dumb to come to the same conclusion or in the pocket of Big Oil. Not even, like, a North Korean mad scientist trying to one-up the capitalist pigs? Yeah, sure.

Out of curiosity, have some sources for “most of the academic field”? It sounds like some sociology/psychology thing.

Besides, my guy had a PhD in physics. Either it was an elaborate prank, or a complete nutcase. And I’ve met more than one of that kind, sadly. Degrees are not a guarantee for intelligence or sanity, just a proof that at some point they wrote a thesis.

I had a physics professor tell me about free energy. Having a degree is not 100% effective in curing stupid.

Have you seen lemurs and stuff? They’re tiny.

Sure, and money grows on trees

Yeah, I don’t understand this either. If someone offered me to make me rich by paying him 10 bucks on the street, I’d tell him to fuck off and evaluate my chances in a fight and/or escape route. But as soon as a computer is involved, some people’s brain shuts off or something.

People != their government

Except that they’re still mostly a democracy, and they vote for the shit.

Lobbying from a small nation with no money, resources or military power, that doesn’t even buy our stuff and snuggles up to Russia for protection? I don’t really see how that would work. It doesn’t check out with the behaviour of US/EU other conflicts, like Israel or Armenia-Azerbaijan, where we immediately sided with the party that had oil/gas and bought our weapons.

I’m willing to have my mind changed, but the gut feeling doesn’t really point that way here

And? Seems like your definition and this community’s definition of “science memes” differ. Who cares. What are we even arguing about?