The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.

Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.

I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.

But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?

Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP’s question.

Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don’t count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.

Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.

Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.

All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.

Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.

This is probably 10 years ago that I read it, but I don’t expect that the numbers have changed much: The median number of lifetime partners for men is 4, while the median for women is 7. The median means that half of the group had that many or more, and half had that many or fewer. If every heterosexual encounter by definition has to include a male and a female, the way that that works out is that there’s a subgroup of men who have a partner count way over four.

In short, yeah, that observation checks out in the research. Among men, there are a few Wilt Chamberlains balanced by thousands with only a partner or two. (NB: extreme example for rhetorical purposes)

Shout-out to Raritan Engineering. I accidentally cracked the porcelain bowl of the head that was original equipment in my 1974 sailboat, and needed a new one. Not only is the company still in business, the parts from a model they still sell are compatible, 50 years later! Their support techs were able to tell me exactly what parts I needed to buy.

Actually, quite a few marine brands are always reliable. The harsh environment at sea tends to out cheap crap in a hurry.

I think you have some stiff competition on the shortest war from the Conch Republic. You’d have to sign the peace treaty in 59 seconds to beat the record. (Be sure that the enemy sets their killbots for a very low preset kill limit.)

Sorry, that I’m not certain of, since that’s an installer-specific thing. I think I’d try that option first, and see if the installer lets you choose the empty drive.

Just spitballing here, but if I read this correctly, you pulled the Windows drive, installed Mint, and then put the Windows drive back in alongside the Mint drive? If so, that might be the issue.

UEFI firmware looks for a special EFI partition on the boot drive, and loads the operating system’s own bootloader from there. The Windows drive has one. When you pulled the Windows drive to install Mint on another drive, Mint had to create an EFI partition on its disk to store its bootloader.

Then, when you put the Windows disk back in, there were two EFI partitions. Perhaps the UEFI firmware was looking for the Windows bootloader in the EFI partition on the Mint disk. It would of course not find it there. In my experience, Windows recovery is utterly useless in fixing EFI boot issues.

It’s possible to rebuild the Windows EFI bootloader files manually, but since you don’t mind blowing away both OS installs, I’d say just install Mint on the second drive while both of them are installed in the system, so the installer puts the Mint bootloader on the same EFI partition as the Windows one. With the advent of EFI, Windows will still sometimes blow away a Linux bootloader, but Linux installers are very good at installing alongside Windows. If it does get stuffed up, there’s a utility called Boot-Repair, that you can put on a USB disk, that works a lot better than Windows recovery.

I’m too old to be an incel™; I was going through it back when the term incel was coined as a neutral descriptor. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole, because critical thinking comes very naturally to me, and the idea that it was women’s fault didn’t ever quite sit right with me. Women aren’t a monolith; they don’t get together and scheme. But if the incel phenomenon had been around, well, who knows? The camaraderie and validation of a group is incredibly beguiling.

Anyway, I was dealing with depression, which brought along a lot of other problems that caused me to be deeply angry and unsatisfied with life. One thing that really woke me up, oddly, was the song Toledo by Dan Bern. Specifically, the lyrics, “Maybe all the things you thought you got coming to you / Ain’t coming to you / Not in this life / And maybe all of the promises you thought were broken / Were never really made” In short, where was I getting the idea that life was fair, or that the universe owed me, well, anything? Not quite out of my posterior, because many cultural messages tell you that. But those messages are wrong.

So I decided to make the best of what life gives me, work on my own issues, and to have fun and do interesting things solo. And wouldn’t you know it, a year later…

…I was still single. What, do you buy into that trash about how you find “the one” when you stop looking? I’m still single years and years later. BUT! That’s okay, because “giving up looking” isn’t some fancy, new way of low-key actually-looking. The benefit has been being more satisfied with life, and doing fun and interesting things.

100% chance that many people would interpret that as saying you can only get benefits for everybody together. The cannier folks would at least ask: “So can I apply for benefits for only my children, or only for all of us together?”

Better phrasing: “You can apply for benefits for any or all of the following people: You, your spouse, and your children.”

Source: Years of customer service experience.

I’ll add: Turning into the far lane of a multilane street. Phase/faze. Sight/site.