Propelloni

You clearly have not followed the thread. This is inane.

Well, people are not trying to take Fox News off the air for their many incidents of amplified disinformation, so maybe people think freedom of speech should be protected, even if people disagree with said speech?

Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.

It is flabbergasting, indeed. I'm no friend of China, because it is an evil dictatorship, but as a business man I prefer dealing with China over the USA nowadays. At least China is predictable, even in its corruption.

Oh, come on. HN complains about excessive data hoarding all the time. Now it's wrong to not hoard data? This is just another damned if you do, damned it you don't situation and, predictably, the outrage option is voted to the top.

No, I'd look at IP addresses before validating zipcodes, true ;) What I'm thinking is, if someone wants to deceive a service provider about her billing address, that's a social problem. Social problems are insanely hard to fix with technology, if at all.

So what is reasonable to request from the service provider here? Checking billing address and IP is reasonable, but beyond that? Maybe bank account? But in Europe a German can have a bank account in France, it is not even a big deal. Maybe taxation should follow bank accounts? I have an account in Luxembourg, so I'm set ;)

Why so complicated? Ask yourself how you find out if someone is living in country foo. By looking at the postal address, of course. If the shipping or billing address is in country foo, e.g. Germany, the shipment is subject to country foo's law. Just block potential customers from addresses in countries you don't want to deal with. It's really easy.

Why do they have to choose? That's not a problem of inflation, but of wealth distribution or, if you will, our system of economy.

People make it sound as if Munich flip-flopped on Linux. The then ruling social-democrats and the greens started the LiMux project in 2003! The social-democrats and the conservative christians ruling in 2020 switched back to MS Windows. The current administration is mandating open source but not specifically Linux.

I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.

So, Excel is just the poor man's shadow IT? I like that picture.

Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).

In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.

Maybe the Germans were right? One in-person test, preferably an interview, at the end of the semester should be enough to motivate the smarter part of the bunch to make sure they understand the issues at hand. The rest is chaff anyway. Don't optimize for chaff.

> other renewables

Nuclear power is not a renewable power source in the technical correct meaning of the word. Fission material is "only" abundant, in that we can win nuclear fission material from many sources, including recycling spent nuclear material, but it is not available and spent without human intervention (otherwise we could argue fossil fuels are renewables, too).

As an aside, nuclear fission power differs from renewable power in many other ways, too. It is not clean, it is not easy to harvest, it is not safe, it is not cheap, it is not a mass job engine, it is not low-maintenance, it has less utility, and it has less flexibility.

I see what you did there :D Good one, thank you!

Not only that, Spanish is the second most spoken language of the world, behind Mandarin and before English.