Radon is a radioactive but largely chemically inert gas that is generated by radioactive decay in rocks in the Earth. Eventually it escapes the rocks, but it’s heavier than air and so tends to gather in basements and caves where it can theoretically suffocate people, but is more likely to give those people cancer instead.

Yes, Elohim is plural. God is multitudinous and thus worthy of the title, but also one single god dont you dare worship any other ~angry noises and fist shaking~

This is just based on vibes, but I don’t think Starmer thinks he can change Trump. He’s being as non-committal as possible and treating Trump with the same sort of respect he’d like in return. Trump’s used to the cold shoulder or barely concealed anger from - ostensibly anyway - politically opposed politicians, so he actually reciprocates.

But, nice as this all is, it’s almost certainly a scorpion and frog situation. I expect Trump will be looking for some way to exploit this, and I don’t think Starmer’s blind to that. Starmer’s hoping we can get to the other side of that particular river, like, say, the best possible outcome in four years, without anything terrible happening to Britain (that hasn’t already).

Any obvious attempt at preparation for the worst will be taken as an act of subterfuge* and almost certainly hasten any unpleasant behaviour on his part.

* I’m not sure whether Donny knows that word, but he damn sure knows the meaning of it.

Your first two lines need a caveat: … at a local meridian as chosen by the will of the people*.

Otherwise you end up in situations where every individual location sets their clock by local noon, which varies by longitude. If you think it’s bad there are a handful of different time zones across your continent, wait until it’s different from one end of town to the other.

The British invented (or popularised) standard time to avoid those sorts of problems. Problems that didn’t exist until high-speed long distance travel became a thing. And time zones were a later addition because Britain didn’t need any, but they’re also somewhat necessary.

* for “will of the people”, read “will of the ruling class” as necessary. See: China.

How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.

Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.

Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.

And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.

There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.

Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.

Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.

You think admins will be affected by this? Doubtful.

You’ll be lucky if it lets you block him in the first place, but it probably won’t have the required effect.

From what I understood on the recent "live"stream, it can be turned off.

But as others have said, there are many performance mods that don’t change the core game experience. Getting those set up can be a bit of a chore, even if you choose a different launcher that manages them for you, but it can be worth it.

Until very recently I had Minecraft Java running smoothly on a PC that was 13 years old. 1st gen i7 with a similarly aged Nvidia card.

…and I still run the same mods on the new PC. Saves energy, and reduces fan noise a bit, so might as well.

The only plan Russia and its allies will accept is one that has Ukraine’s complete, immediate and unconditional surrender. Anything else will be “dismissed” in similar fashion.

My roof and my walls are not the same thing, but if demolish my walls, will my roof hover there magically?

You completely skipped the part about what you’re buying and selling. That’s not suspicious at all.

Yes

Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they’ll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can’t be bought?

“So what, people can run with the last good codebase!”

Sure, until there’s a critical bug that Google don’t publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

And don’t say “that’ll never happen”. Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?

IMO, this needs a different name. It’s too similar to “Saidit”, one of sites that sprang up as a refuge for the edgier (or sicker) content that Reddit wanted rid of about 10 years ago, and unlike Voat, it’s still live.

If you’re one of the right-wing trolls and/or edgelords who used to hop between Reddit and 4chan back in the day, it might be the place for you. Otherwise, probably best to steer clear.

Either way, steering clear of similar names might be a good idea.

Ah, the old Ben Shapiro logic. If you don’t want your house that’s at risk of flooding, don’t worry, simply sell it! Someone’s bound to give you a good price for it!

This whole situation reminds me of this joke: Two guys out hunting in the wilds somewhere. One of them falls ill and collapses. The other can’t rouse him.

He grabs his phone or radio and calls for help. “My friend collapsed. I think he’s dead!”

The responder says “Well, first we need to make sure if he’s actually dead.”

“Just a minute…” BANG!

“OK, now what?”

Many white supremacists believe in the One-drop rule. Basically, to them, if you have even a single black ancestor within the last three or four generations, you’re black even if you don’t think you are, and should be treated as such.

Obama didn’t even have the good grace to look white* so his ancestry doesn’t even matter. To them he was black.

* I am, of course, being sarcastic here.

Somewhere around here I have an old (1970’s Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; “did be” do be pretty weird, after all.

The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

I’d like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don’t seem to be able to find it right now.

My parents’ house never had and still doesn’t have Internet. I was the one with the computer desk and it had a Commodore 64C and a 13" portable colour TV on it originally.

It finally became an Internet desk at some point in the mid '00s when I got my own place.

I’m still using it right now… and kind of afraid that if I mention its age, it will spontaneously fall apart.

Let’s just say that it’s older than Google.

Did you ever have a crazy friend who hated you for weeks because of something you said or did in one of their dreams? How about if they could have ticketed you for that?

Going to assume you mean the meme.

Blake Boston, the guy whose picture was used for Steve, was alive and well as of August last year, at least according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA296fsdaB4, and there’s no obituary showing up online.

The Wikipedia article for the meme would almost certainly have been updated if there’d even been a whiff of that.