mcswell

Many linguists (who know more about language than most other people) still don't accept the story of Alex.

> House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals > every year that they don't need or want to eat.

"Recreationally" is carrying a lot of weight here. I suspect that cats kill birds and mice because that's their instinct; it has nothing to do with conscious thought, much less a need for recreation. And that probably is the explanation for most (maybe all) of your other examples as well.

In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.

Somebody posted a similar comment above yours (somewhere...). I don't think your experience is unique!

What documentation?

...or I asked the question (and got an answer) years ago, but forgot because I hadn't worked in that programming language in the interim. (That's my excuse, anyway.)

I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.

Maybe. I wouldn't take bets on it, though.

Not about the stars part or the map, but xenonite struck me as rather odd from a scientific standpoint. Apparently it's some organic chemical bonded--somehow--to xenon. But the mystery depended on the mass spectrometer Grace uses to analyze xenonite not being able to detect nuclei of atoms smaller than some atomic number (something like 20?). So he couldn't tell what it was made of, except for xenon. My initial assumption was that it had to do with one of the few xenon-based compounds we know about, XeF4 (xenon tetrafloride), but there must be more to it than that.

On Vivaldi (a chromium-based browser), it just hangs at the initialization phase. I tried it on Firefox, and of course it comes right up.

Go outside on a dark night and look at the Milky Way: you'll see (at the right time of the year) that it's tilted at a large angle to the celestial equator. (There's also the fact that the Earth's axis is tilted relative to the Ecliptic, of course.)

OP here: I was referring to fossil fuels as things we burn to drive automobiles, airplanes and ships, or to power electric generators. So yes, petroleum will continue to have its uses, just not power. (Although my ten year timeline was hopelessly optimistic, I admit.)

There may actually have been a legitimate reason for that. First, not all these "things" are said to be flying, some are supposed to have gone underwater (although "Aerial" sort of wrecks that idea). Second (and IMO more important), "Object" (in UFO) begs the question of whether these are objects. Many of them are not--they're artifacts in imaging or radar systems, or optical illusions--perhaps intentional illusions. ("Things" that appear to be moving really fast, then take a sudden turn, are easily imitated by lines of drones carrying radar and/or visual transponders.)

Where is Schrödinger when we need him?

Umm...when we lived in Colombia, my son decided to re-name himself Martillo Veneno. For those who don't know Spanish, that's Hammer Poison. You have something against that?

Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"

American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."

Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)

The rest of the world: "Renewables!"

Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.

Libre Office (and a couple others) is pretty close to MsOffice. Not exact, but close.

There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.

Disclaimer: I switched to Linux last year.

I'm assuming this is about resistance to Liquid Glass making people unwilling to update , although of course I could be wrong! If it is that, then it seems like it would have been simpler to just have an on-off switch for LG in iOS 24. But maybe LG is baked in too deep.

Go back to grade school grammar.

No.

You know this how?

Can the prompts be re-used on different files of code?

The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

On the contrary, those are mostly really overweight people, so the amount of them is quite large. The number of them is, however, small. :)

The article suggests that Xubuntu (which uses xfce instead of Gnome) uses much less memory. I don't know how true that is, but it seems reasonable that xfce uses some less memory.

I assume those abundances in asteroids are actually the abundances in iron meteorites, right?

I'm confused. The article is about how various excited states of tin are generated. But tin is atomic number 50, platinum and gold are 78 and 79 respectively. Can someone draw a line between these?

I hope somebody would stop him. Using nukes in a war is just too bonkers to contemplate. Sure they would be small, but the road to big starts with small.

"They are only good for show at port visits..." This perfectly describes Trump's idea of battleships, in fact I think he's said more or less that himself. And he wants to help design them, because he's "aesthetic."