Without anyone around who would be sad if I ceased to exist, quite a lot of me would leave pretty quickly, if you catch my drift.

But then, there’s also that all but one of me would be in my house, with my things. I’m a nigh-agoraphobic hoarder. Several billion of me would be a long, long way from home and my (our?) stuff, and several thousand would start heading to my house as fast as humanly possible.

There’d be a lot of road accidents. I don’t drive.

Infrastructure would crumble immediately.

Anyone who didn’t “leave” would starve in a few days.

This is not a good plan. Do not use.

Back in the day in the kids’ comics I remember at least one occasion where the spade card suit was used for that purpose. (Britain, 1980s/1990s)

A character’s speech bubble contained “I h♠te homework” or something similar. Might have been spinach instead of homework. Or school. Anything an irreverent protagonist might not like.

The artist was clearly using this as a counterpart to the more often seen “lo♥e”, but as an adult thinking about it now, I have to wonder if the artist had forgotten about the potential racial connotation of using it, or if they hadn’t but didn’t think it was particularly important.

Either way, ♠ could be used as a symbol of hate if the context permits it. Maybe best avoided if you’re looking for a generic one though.

Some kid in a shiny car and a hazmat suit turns up out of nowhere five seconds later and starts shouting and cursing into a bulky radio about having missed it to someone called “Doc”.

All the people saying she looks like Scully and her surname is pretty much the same as the actress who played that character? This idea practically fell into the laps of the people behind these photos.

Frankly, I would not be surprised if she had it as an office nickname before this even occurred to them.

Ironically: toilet paper.

It looks suspicious a.f., I grant you, but even when I had a desk job in an office, I’d have a toilet roll in easy reach on my desk for use on spillages - drink spillages - and for wiping my fingers and face if I was eating and needed to use the computer or to answer the phone. Also for blowing my nose, but I’d try to leave the room with enough in hand to do that so I wasn’t subjecting people to that unmistakeable noise.

I buy the cheapest TP the supermarket sells. It’s generally cheaper than most other paper products and works just as well.

Not terrible for it’s original purpose either, but I prefer something slightly better quality for that.

Any conclusions drawn from a child’s personality can’t necessarily then be applied to a parent. Hannah Montana Linux was ultimately a Debian, but it was so far from stock Debian that the comparison makes no sense. The same, I assume, applies with the Arch-derivative that runs on Steam decks. We’re not in Arch-kansas any more, Toto.

The closest to “Windows with nerdnip” is probably Linux Mint, but even then that’s a fairly unkind comparison.

I use LMDE, btw.

Yeah, I used pods for a few years. Went back to plain old liquid because this would happen once in a while. Or else this stuff would start gumming up the seals or out of sight waiting for the next time I used the machine.

As for the cause(s) take your pick from: water too cold, not enough water, tangled item(s) creating temporary pockets that only open up late in the cycle (which could be caused by:), overloaded machine.

Out-crazy them. Turn up at 12:20 and be ready by 12:25. Shout at them for not being ready when you are. Then when they start turning up at that time, move back to 12:10. Then 12.

And then when they’re turning up and ready at 12, go back to 12:35 and tell them you don’t know what they’re talking about, you’ve always started at that time, it says so in the official documents and you’ve never varied. Tell them they’re crazy.

I mean, hey, if you’re going to quit anyway, might as well have some fun before you do.

.13

Well there’s your problem.

(Not 13 specifically. Just the odd numbered sub-version in general. But 13 if you’re superstitious, I guess.)

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he’s fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he’d find out why we’re really naming it after him and he’d try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

I’m not so sure about that. A mind in a machine lacks the chemical soup in the blood and tissues which drives behaviours far more than we’d perhaps like to admit.

Emulating a personality means emulating the whole human or else what you’ll get will be an approximation, and perhaps not even a very good one.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

Children are potential workers, soldiers and slaves. Some cannot love them, especially not those of others, because to love them is to love a worker, a soldier, a slave, a thing that is necessary, a disposable thing, a means to an end, not a thing to cherish.

For people for whom means to ends are all they can conceive of, that is all other people are. And children are easily moulded into whatever the means require in both form and thinking. Adults less so. Thus they want, they need more children. Children for the machine. Means to all ends.

Now, this is a gross generalisation because there are plenty of people of all walks of life and political leaning who can and do love their own children, and these children receive, appreciate and reciprocate that love.

But the differences start showing up when you start to bring other people’s children into the mix. Especially those of strangers. Those from groups outside of their own.

Those on the right will see this as a fault in people on the left and vice versa. But it seems to me to be people who take on right-wing leanings who have fewer qualms about treating people as commodities.

When people with leftward leanings find themselves doing it, they tend to try to even out the pain across everyone that might be affected rather than concentrating it on one specific group of people. Some of this therefore lands on rightward leaning people who think that they’re being singled out. They’re not, but they are the only ones not used to it.

I kind of wandered off the point there, but yeah. Kids. Kids are malleable, and you can build armies with them. That’s why.

You can put chicken, on pizza.

(That comma has no business being there, but it doesn’t read right without it.)

It’s an even-numbered Star Trek movie. They followed a pattern for a while where they were the good ones and if you were going to skip one, you skipped the odd numbered ones, even the first. Especially the first.

As for recommend, it depends how much you love / know the characters. I grew up on re-runs of the 60s TV show and am pretty sure I saw it for the first time at the cinema. That would have been a couple of years before TNG was even a thing, so my opinion might not mean much even then.

But yeah, sure. Watch it on a grey rainy afternoon with friends or family when you’ve nothing else to do. Trust me when I say that specific weather outside will definitely add to the experience.

Somewhere around here I have a “Learn C++ in 24 hours” book that was published in 1999. I have a feeling that a modern C++ expert would react the same way 22nd century McCoy reacted to 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV.

(For you youngsters, I’ll-get-around-to-its and nope-not-for-mes who haven’t seen it, he mutters things about “dark ages” and “Spanish Inquisition”. The whole movie is goofy, including the otherwise terrifying main plot point.)

Well, back then it was the Soviets, and now quite a lot of what we see in the west is being guided by the hand of Putin, so it basically is the same thing happening all over again.

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

No. They were espousing some unclear but potentially bigoted beliefs that I took to be the sentiment I parodied with the first sentence, but those were not their words. They might have even been going for sarcastic/ironic espousal of the same beliefs, I’m really not sure.

I’ve added an explanation to my original comment to try to avoid any confusion.