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Yeah. Two crewmen, something like twice as much payload weight (originally designed to carry a nuclear bomb or two instead of a top-tier reconnaissance package), and apparently less ceremony in general than the U-2. The U-2 really wants to have a chase car (!) when landing to call out what the pilot cannot see, from the sound of things the WB-57 doesn't do that. (okay, some irony there considering recent events...)

I was thinking about what could replace WB-57. Large private jets (Gulfstream G650) can get up to 51k ft, and maybe could be modified to go higher. Global Hawk drone can go up to 60k ft, and the Air Force is retiring them.

It's a pity the $600k won't be deducted from his retirement income.

You make it sound like the word of an eccentric billionaire is as good as a US treasury bond.

There is no reason you would have forgotten.

It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.

> It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines.

Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out.

[0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.


They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference.

They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling.

Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.


> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.

They disabled it by default. You can enable it if you want.


We all know that that's a precursor to removing a feature entirely because "telemetry shows it isn't being used".

> They're trying to "nudge" everyone.

Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things.

> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option.

Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it" isn't news; that's been going on for decades. This habit of theirs is a big reason why I've been using KDE for a very long time.


Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that.

And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.


> Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream...

IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]:

  There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.
  
  This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.
I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts.

Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE.

[0] <https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...>


That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest. If you can't run full KDE on X11 there will not be many KDE developers caring about X11 support. KWin for example has already gained many bugs on X11 that I expect to never be fixed. And now KWin for X11 is split into a separate project which will hopefully mean fewer further regressions but probably also not much further development which means bitrot as things around it change.

> That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest.

Given this statement from the announcement that I linked to previously

  The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.
  
  We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.
I expect that I will get at least a year's notice before they stop actively working on the rest of the parts of KDE that interact with X11... whenever that ends up being. A year is more than enough time to find replacements for things that might eventually stop working one day.

Were I sixteen, I'd be very excited to preemptively move to something else. Now? The folks who work on it say that they'll keep it working for the forseeable future, and their behavior suggests that I'll get ample notice before they stop working on it.

The software in question works now (AFAICT) and will continue to work for quite a while. I am likely to get a significant amount of warning before they stop working on the software. I see no reason to switch. I have much better things to do with my time.


Learning BASIC isn't essential, but the thing is, you might as well just do it. It's not complicated, and you're not under any obligation to develop a big piece of software with it. Have fun!

Donuts don't just eat themselves.

Cringe:

In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”

They have an online training and everything!


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LEO satellites only going to reflect light from the sun when they're at low angles near sunrise and sunset? For night time stargazing, they're going to be in Earth's shadow, too.

Iridium's LEO satellites were sometimes (impressively) visible after midnight.


We would fund nationwide health care and more robust social programs if it weren't for all the money we are spending on defense is simply not something the US right-wing and centrists ever put out there. When they fought those things it was with the ideological argument that they were intrinsically wrong. OMG Socialism!

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