Why did you cross out a word and then write a synonym right afterwards? I’d put an /s here, but well…

When politicians talk about “the country”, whatever country they happen to be in charge of, they almost always mean the parts of the country that they think are important to the total exclusion of everything else. Or what they’ve been bribed to think of as important. Either way, that usually means “the rich, the important, and their agendas”.

Likewise “the economy” is “the rich people’s yacht fund”.

(This latter one I stole from a viral tweet.)

Both sheep and wolves are religious but for different reasons. You seem to be saying that there are only wolves.

However, the wolves are dressed as sheep, and occasionally it is useful to tear off the sheepskins they hide under in order to save other animals that they also eat, if not also the sheep.

I think so. Maybe I’m now a delusional and surprisingly active corpse.

Has it, or were there always pockets of all kinds of schools of thought? It seemed that way to me at least until Spez decided money was more important than anything else and a good chunk of the left-leaners decided they’d be better off elsewhere.

That’s not a pejorative, by the way. I’m a left-leaner. And I, well, left.

If God (or Allah if you prefer that name) is so angry about blasphemy, why does He risk letting fallible humans take care of the problem?

Simply cause the blasphemer to drop dead. Then the faithful can clean up the aftermath if they wish to appear faithful, because it is less important how that is handled.

Is this comment blasphemous? We’ll see if I drop dead.

The brain reaches full maturity around 25. Some parts of the brain stop developing long before then but the pre-frontal cortex is an exceptionally slow developer. It’s responsible for cognitive control: self-regulation both internally and externally.

Basically if you don’t learn behavioural regulation by the age of 25, it’s going to be harder to unlearn those habits afterwards. This is often seen in people who constantly make poor life choices and don’t seem to be able to stop, or people with poor emotional control.

If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there’s no reason Google can’t continue to do the same with a ducking web search.

The former works better with JavaScript, that’s true, but it works OK without and that’s the point.

Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn’t want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.

I’m not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.

For outdated, read “known stable”. Unfortunately newer software very often has dependencies on even less well-tested new things that conflict with other pieces of software and their dependencies, on and on, and the whole thing cascades to either needing to be bleeding edge or very safe. Mint deliberately chooses the latter.

The memory leaks are there, I grant you, but you’ll need an exceptionally long uptime to see any kind of problem from them. And it’s not like restarting the DE is hard. And it takes less than a second.

As for slowness, I don’t remember anything being annoyingly slow even when I was running Mint 17 from an honest-to-goodness HDD on a then 10±year-old computer. 1st gen i7.

“Instagram” is, at least in my opinion, about as awkward as “Friendica” to say, and has millions of users. It wins marginally on spelling, but how often does the average user write or type the full name of a site anyway?

Fun fact: There’s a common misconception that this would load the first program on a disk, but it actually loads the most recently loaded program from the disk. If the disk is detected as being freshly inserted (as determined by the 2-character identifier in the disk’s directory header), that defaulted to the first program in the disk’s directory.

Admittedly, most of the time that makes it a distinction without a difference, but if you’d loaded something else from the same disk first, and you then wanted to load the first in the directory, you would need to use LOAD":*",8,1 instead.

That extra colon is vaguely related to the colon in C:\ on Windows computers. A lone colon was taken as an abbreviation of 0:, because in Commodore DOS(es) the drive “letters” were numbers. Dual slot drives were possible and then the two slots were 0: and 1:.

“So what’s the 8 for in the LOAD command?” you might ask; "Isn’t that the drive “letter” "? No, that’s the device number. Note that drives on the 8-bit Commodores were always external. The 8 was more like the drive’s “IP address” on the serial bus.

“What about the ,1?” That meant to LOAD the program at the memory address specified by the program’s header on the disk. Without that, the computer would ignore the header and try to load into BASIC memory.

The neat part about loading at any address meant that it could overwrite parts of zero-page where the computer kept pointers to important internal functions. Overwrite the right one of those and the computer could be convinced to jump to a routine in the program that had just loaded without the user needing to type RUN.

So, if you wanted to be i) certain of loading the first program in the directory of ii) the disk in the second slot of iii) a dual-slot drive on the serial bus identifying as device/address 9, and then iv) have the program load at its preferred memory location, you’d need to use LOAD"1:*",9,1

The number of people who found the need to type that command in earnest, even back in the heyday of Commodore, probably numbers in the low tens, but there it is.

How’s that for an obscure info dump?

Offtopic word choice nit-pick: “weary” means tired, “wary” means afraid. The first is related to “wear” as in “worn (out)” (or “wear and tear”), and the other is related to “aware” / “beware”.

Since “wear” and “-ware” are generally pronounced the same by most modern speakers, it’s easy to see how the confusion might arise, but in “weary”, it’s pronounced “weer” - “weery”.

I think it’s more like an uncanny valley phenomenon. Or it could be that humans are largely neotenous and other primates haven’t developed that trait, so they remind us of old, or diseased members of our own species at a unconscious level.

Or it could be both. Strange hairy men that live in the woods? Avoidance response activated.

That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.

There can’t be a comma missing from a motto which is itself entirely missing. They threw it in a ditch a few years ago. (I’ll be honest, I thought it had to have been at least 10 years at this point, but Wikipedia says otherwise.)

The example picture at the top of the article is weird.

The window title reads “nano” but the software running in the window is Pico, Nano’s now deprecated (and strangely-licenced) spiritual parent. Or it’s Nano hacked to have a Pico header which, while somewhat fitting with the theme, that would be even more weird.

Illiteracy possibly. Almost certainly more people will be less able to read older texts.

If that’s going to happen anyway, they could do worse than adopt Pinyin or some variant of it. Or they might prefer something like Bopomofo if they don’t want to use Western characters for whatever reason.

Either way, any decision like that is likely to be 20-30 years away at minimum, and that’s assuming literacy rates start going down, which they might not. I doubt Xi gives it any thought at all.

The vowel you’re talking about is “ə”, also known as “schwa”. It’s probably the most common vowel sound in all varieties of English - in defiance of spelling - but it occurs in lots of languages. (German often uses it as the sound for final e, and French still retains it in some words and dialects for the same thing too.)

As to how common it is in English:

“Thə vowəl yo~ə’re talking əbout is “ə” also known as “schwa”. It’s probəbly thə most commən vowəl sound in all variəties of English.”

In some varieties ə moves closer to ʌ, a similar sound that’s a little further back in the mouth. Links go to Wikipedia where there are sound files to listen to.

Spies working for a country do not have to look like the stereotypical person from that country. The spy could even be “on loan” from some other country friendly to SK.

If I was Finland, I would continue as if Russia had changed nothing at that camp, however reassuring the changes there might appear to be.

Even if it’s “only” a training camp now and not a fully operational military installation, I’d still not let my guard down just in case the Russians decide to take a “special training exercise” over the Finnish border. That is the sort of thing they like to do, after all.

I remember this being panel two in a Dilbert strip (from back in the days when Adams did a great job of presenting as sane.)