Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
“will protect the most vulnerable,"
It’s often useful to imagine that they know what people will think they mean when they say things like that, but that they actually mean an entirely different “most vulnerable” group: MPs, their friends and associates.
Depends how Picard ended up in that situation. Are we talking the “natural ageing and eventual death” kind of entropy or are we talking “somehow invulnerable except at the quantum level in an infinite void of nothing, awaiting quantum decay”?
In the former, Q would only save Picard temporarily to make a point or for one last adventure. Q won’t help indefinitely and entropy wins.
In the latter, Q’s probably the reason Picard is in that situation in the first place. There’d be some jape or point (“now you know what it’s like to be bored as a Q” or somesuch whiny nonsense), but Picard would eventually be back in his regular time stream, at which point we’re back to the first scenario.
When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.
This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.
Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.
There are plenty of people whose first language is English and who have confused, or still confuse, the two things anyway. As you say, it’s at least partly cultural. They don’t really teach this stuff at school, or at least they didn’t when I was there.
I was one of the confused people once. Then I learned better (and I’m still learning).
I think what’s important is that we’re willing to learn.
For anyone who has somehow missed this bit of business knowledge, it’s extremely common practice to delay paying something for as long as legally possible, if not longer, to the point it’s expected that your debtors will do this, and that you’ll do the same to everyone else in return. It was set up so that small businesses got time to pay for things, but of course, it was immediately corrupted by large businesses to screw over the little guy as well.
I worked for a company that used the pay late tactic, and did this often enough and long enough to one smaller creditor that the creditor managed to issue a winding-up order, which was - or so I gathered - a nuisance to have to sort out.
The downsides are 1) you have to get creative with the “prove [company] cannot pay” clause that’s required, especially if they’re big and wallowing in cash, 2) it costs roughly £3000 that you’ll only get back if you’re successful and 3) If you involve your own legal representation, that might cost extra that you definitely won’t get back.
For the first one, an incompetence argument might work. Or else that the fact they haven’t paid means that their assets, however large, cannot be made liquid enough to pay. For the second, that money comes back from the debtor if you win, so it costs them more money. For the third and for everything else, good luck with that.
From the ground up has been done at least once, but given there are multiple layers of interface and driver, it might not be at the right level for whatever hardware you have.
I’m thinking specifically of how pipewire recently came along and basically took over the functions previously provided by pulseaudio, to the point of pretending to be Pulse where necessary so that things don’t break.
FWIW, I recently learned that my motherboard has features that weren’t unlocked by default in my distro. Not related to sound, mind you, but nonetheless, I’ve gained access to that now. It required loading an extra kernel module. The same might be required to get the best out of your sound card.
You don’t know how to do something in raw JavaScript. You’re not even sure you should. You find a library / module / package / whatever-the-name-is-this-week on the Internet. You paste it into your code. Your code now works. Your code is now 1MB larger. This web app is heavy, man.
Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer has his arm stuck in a drink vending machine and it becomes clear that he would have been free if only he’d let go of the soda can inside it? And everyone laughs at him?
Here we see “Homer” Putin with his army stuck in a war holding onto a Ukraine. He even has the same haircut. D’oh!
The given reason is that it enables gambling. Presumably they’ll also be banning the other sports and games that are mentioned in the article, including those deeply beloved of whoever it is setting these rules.
If not, we can safely assume that the ban is probably because it’s something that might get the ordinary folk thinking for themselves, and that won’t do. Can’t be having the proles thinking for themselves, let alone practising an approximation of military strategy.
Alternatively, the top brass can’t get their heads around chess and they’re jealous that other people can, so therefore they ban it. (For this one, I cite myself. I’m so bad at chess that I can lose any game from a winning position by playing the moves I genuinely think are best, so I’m kind of jealous of anyone without this amazing anti-power. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’d ban it, but if I was running a country, maybe that’d go to my head and I would.)
The Easter bunny is in all bunny-like things. Is Bugs Bunny the Easter bunny? If necessary.
That rabbit you saw in a field munching on a dandelion and then running to hide? Probably not, but if it was necessary, then yes.
Your toy bun who doesn’t seem to do much and is almost always exactly where you left him? Almost certainly, but only when you’re not looking.
It’s magic.
I would have worded this differently, but you’re right in that it’s probably a good idea not to give anyone an extra excuse.
“Oh but we had to” isn’t a great excuse, but it is one, and if you take away the threat, it takes it away that argument.
Once you get out of a monoculture, you start to better appreciate that ‘best’ is a subjective term.
Some distros are better for some users (and purposes) and others for others.
But it’s got to be Mint ;p
Some of us are old enough to remember when it was 01 811 8055. There wasn’t a catchy jingle for it at the time though.
How about that spelling of “diarrhoea”? The US decided to go with simplified spellings and they chose to go with one that only dropped the “o” from the British spelling. Only that? I can see at least two other letters that could go.
A podcast or a stand-up could probably get a few minutes out of that, easy. Not necessarily a good podcast or stand-up (or internet comment), but definitely a couple of minutes either way.
“Reasonable”, unfortunately, is subjective. Just ask Rupert Murdoch.
Religious conservative nuts feel the same way about people who are in favour of abortion as many people in the US feel about health insurance CEOs.
From certain standpoints, assassinations appear acceptable.
This could all depend on where you’re living. I get the impression you’re in a country that may have been or may currently be an enemy of Russia (or thought of as a threat by those running Russia right now). If that’s the case, could your folks be Russian ops in some form?
They would have stopped having those sorts of conversations around you as you got older and they’d deny that they said anything of the sort for those you did remember.
The phrase “we won’t wait (for) when the war starts” could mean that they’re going to do whatever they need to do even if there’s no actual guns, bombs and fighting going on. You know. Cold war things.
There’s that phrase that Khrushchev allegedly said about the US, for example. Putin has revived all of that. Assuming it ever went away.
My first thought when accidents happen is always “How do I make it so that this didn’t happen?”
I know this is an irrational thought, but you asked. It’s probably from using computers where “undo” is commonplace. (And much missed, often with horror, when it isn’t).
For dry foods, anything that didn’t touch the floor is examined closely and then put back on a fresh plate. Or the same plate after a quick rinse and paper towel dry. The rest would be tossed with heavy heart.
Wetter foods get similar treatment, but there’s more floor cleaning required. That would be done immediately, and any rescued hot food that had cooled in the meantime would get a quick re-warming in the microwave.
Either way, I would be cursing silently the whole time, and I wouldn’t enjoy my meal, but I’d still eat what, if anything, I saved.
… sometimes I will eat escaped dry cereal when pouring from box to bowl just to spite it, even if it ends up on the floor, but it has to look immaculate for me to do that. Anything vaguely oily or sticky doesn’t qualify for this, even if it looks fine.