Plays the Menards “Save Big Money” Jingle

I’ll just go get my flamethrower.

If anyone was hoping for women priests, give up on that. The Roman Catholic church would first have to retract both papal infallibility and ecumenical infallibility.

They have made too many definitive statements that women can’t be priests, and they have made definitive statements that their definitive statements are infallible, and must be agreed to by anyone who calls themself Catholic. It’s not even up for debate (unless all of the infallibility stuff is also up for debate).

For example:

I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html

They really painted themselves into a corner. While the rest of society moves forward with equal rights for historically marginalized groups, the Catholic church will be stuck with the effects of their early bad decisions (and some recent bad decisions) because they banned themselves from admitting when they are wrong.

Have you imported the tails-signing.key yet? Usually you can double-click on that to import it using whatever graphical gpg frontend is set up on your system. It may ask you how well you trust the owner of the key. You can answer that question however you want without affecting this verification process.

Next, it looks like you run the instructions from this page: https://tails.net/install/expert/index.en.html#verify

Some of those command line parameters look a little paranoid. The basic command you want to run is: gpg --verify somefile.sig somefile.img

It’s not really an order. Think of it as more like a threat.

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.

If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.

The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.

It seems in Texas, if you cannot afford to pay a funeral home to claim your loved one’s corpse, then the corpse will be sold for parts, to raise the necessary money to dispose of it. And you won’t get a funeral.

Palestine has a right to exist.

draw .io is closed source.

Rocket scientists be like:

Fuel efficiency: seconds.

This is condescending and completely unhelpful.

Downloading any retail or food company’s app is a bad idea. It will violate your privacy, and give you little to no benefits.

I really hate when companies demand that you sign in to their website to communicate with them, when they could have just used email. Especially if they refer to their proprietary website as “email” when it clearly isn’t, and especially when it’s an app instead of a website.

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).

If you want to get a fair price at Dominos, you have to play their game. At least look through the website for special offers on pizza, because the “menu prices” are 2.5x higher than the average price a person pays. After that, if you still want a lower price, search the Internet for coupons (although that doesn’t work as well nowadays since they use account-locked rewards systems instead of coupons).

Even if you play the game, it will still be more expensive than you remember, due to massive inflation.

I don’t go to Dominos any more due to repeated bad customer service, their website malfunctioning in a lot of ways, and the last time I visited the store it smelled strongly like ammonia.

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.