Palestine has a right to exist.

That first part is eerily similar to what I was about to post.

In 2011, I was a lonely introvert. I spent my time binging TV shows and reading.

In 2012, on an IRL meetup thread on the 4chan x (paranormal stories) board, I met a new friend. I think deciding to meet them was the critical moment. They introduced me to a local arts and crafts club, a certain sci-fi fandom, and Minecraft.

The arts and crafts club became the basis of a friend group that is still my main friend group today. They brought me to a local convention in 2013 where I discovered I was trans.

In that sci-fi fandom, at a 2016 convention, I met my current partner, and a bunch of new friends.

I played a lot of Minecraft from 2012 to 2016, but then my partner in 2016 introduced me to Factorio.

I’ve seen “Domain Controller” and “Subscriber” for the sake of plausible deniability.

In the case of SPI, they want to keep intact the names MISO (master in, slave out) and MOSI. So they use things like “Main” and “Sub”.

This is condescending and completely unhelpful.

How did you get into TSA Pre without providing fingerprints? I tried once, and they strictly refused to let me apply because I wouldn’t give fingerprints.

Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.

I voted you down because HIPAA absolutely does include privacy provisions, and requires written consent for data use in the way I described above.

My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.

I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).

The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.

The good news is: the error shown there was a PCIe bus error, which means the error is somewhere between the NVME controller and your processor’s PCIe interface. Also good news: the errors you experienced were fully corrected, so you probably lost no data.

So the flash memory in the drive isn’t failing. That’s good because if the flash memory starts failing, it’s probably only going to fail more. In this case, your errors may be correctable: by replacing the motherboard, by replacing the processor, by reseating the NVME drive in its slot, by verifying that your power supply is reliable…

However, if your NVME controller actually does fail, it will be little consolation to tell you that your data is all still there on the flash chips, but with no way to get it. So now might be a good time to make a backup. Any time is a good time to make a backup, but now is an especially good time.

If you keep getting these errors at the same rate, then you probably don’t need to do anything, since the errors are being corrected. If you’re worried, you could use BTRFS and enable checksumming of data.

You know that stuff that appears on the screen before the operating system? That is the computer’s firmware. Sometimes it shows a brief memory check, sometimes it has a silly error message like “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue.” Sometimes it’s just a big image of the motherboard’s manufacturer’s logo. That firmware exists independently of the operating system, and will run even if you don’t have any operating system installed.

Most people refer to the firmware as the “BIOS”, but technically, BIOS refers to an API between the firmware and the operating system. About a decade ago, some people decided that “BIOS” was going to be replaced by “UEFI”, and operating systems would start having a new way to boot. What ended up happening is: the firmware on all recent computers supports both UEFI and BIOS interfaces (and everyone still calls it “BIOS”). Recent Windows versions seem to only boot in UEFI mode, but most Linux distros can boot in either UEFI or BIOS mode. The GRUB bootloader can also start itself up in either UEFI or BIOS mode.

USB live operating systems are limited in size and may have less functionality than other operating systems, so maybe they are only able to boot in one method or another. Try looking around in the firmware (or “BIOS” if you prefer) to see if you can change the boot method to allow both UEFI and BIOS operating systems.

It may help if you can take a picture of some of the firmware’s boot configuration menus.

How would me joining a union help with the Amazon problem? My pay and benefits (and my coworkers’ pay and benefits, to the extent of my knowledge) are very good, so we don’t currently need a union. My job is completely unrelated to Amazon, and my employer isn’t a customer of Amazon or its competitors.

I’m not going to stop complaining about Amazon.

In many cases, they will cherrypick security fixes and other major bugfixes from the bleeding edge version, and put those fixes in the old versions of the software.

This is the same thing the PHP folks would do while the old PHP is supported. Once the old PHP is out of support but Ubuntu LTS is still in support, then the Ubuntu folks have to put in the extra work to do the cherrypicking.

You are correct that the Desktop Environment and Package Manager are the most important part of any distro. Of those, the Desktop Environment is the most important. Switching between Ubuntu with KDE Plasma and Arch with KDE Plasma is less visible of a change than switching from KDE Plasma to Gnome in any distro.

Most distros include all the major Desktop Environments: Mate, Gnome, KDE Plasma, and probably several more.

The biggest missing feature between Mint/Ubuntu/Debian is Container-based package management. This is an additional installation method, for “application”-like programs, usually proprietary. Debian has the infrastructure to run these, but you have to find or make the containers yourself. Mint has more support, in the form of a graphical package manager installed by default.

There’s really not much difference in the feature set of distros. Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint have a lot more in common than they have differences.

Desktop environments usually include a full set of these. I just use whichever comes with it.

Linux usually has the drivers already set up right away on first boot. You shouldn’t need to install any drivers. There’s very little bloat. Any superfluous packages are likely consuming no CPU time, just drive space. Every default installation comes with a media player and file archiver, but you can install VLC or RAR if you like them better.

They probably had a bad experience with one or more qt-based programs, or got a negative response when they filed a bug report to a qt program or library. Or, they were using some weird mix of old and new software, and ended up in a weird dependency loop that blocked a large set of packages on their system.

Probably. The most common distros will have the most community support.

Spend most of your effort choosing a Desktop Environment. Fortunately, this can be changed after installation.

The Catholics are going to be in a difficult place as gayness becomes more normal. It’s quickly becoming self-evident that homosexual relationships are not immoral at all. That’s probably going to accelerate over the next few decades.

So the church should probably do more than just this to accept gay people, but they can’t. Catholic rulings set by ecumenical councils or by the pope (in such a way as to invoke papal infallibility) can’t be changed. It’s like if the US constitution could only be amended if the amendments didn’t contradict or repeal any existing text.

So if the church says “no homo, and that’s final,” then they can’t go back and change it to “just a little homo, as a treat.” It’s hard to find an exact citation, but I’m pretty sure they’ve already said “no homo” enough to make it official, so there’s no going back from that. Unless they also retract infallibility.