palordrolap

How about, I don’t know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?

But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can’t be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.

Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can’t afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho… wait, Micro-who?

I just imagined a horrible alternative universe where it’s illegal for brand names to become corrupted regardless of whatever else happens to data. Eventually humanity would start communicating only in brand names to ensure messages get through. *shudder*

“Hurt me, daddy.”

“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”

“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”

HG: “What’s that? You’re going to put me in a nice warm cell and be required to give me three hots and a cot?”

PO: .oO(Next step. Outlaw human rights.)

Why do you think you wanted to run ELIZA on a Timex/Sinclair 2068?

I finally got the right search term for it to turn up again.

I can’t believe you’ve done this.

Within reason.

You could try your luck and see how much you can get away with before someone notices, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Nah, they’ll just make life more difficult for any employees who take bathroom breaks, if not find some “clearly unrelated” excuse to outright fire them.

I’m not sure I’m a fan of systemctl either, but I think your hatred of it has caused you to read way too much into what I said.

Love it or loathe it, systemctl is trying to do the right thing with regard to stability and data preservation.

If you really mean it, the manual offers a few levels of strength beyond the plain one: -i (don’t check for busy processes, which is what’s going on in the meme), -f (force, presumably asks even less nicely), and -f -f (don’t even ask, just do it now, preservation be damned).

WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY

These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.

As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they’ve gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.

If there was ever a time to replace this Drake format with the Geordi LaForge alternative, this was it.

That’s a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It’s not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What’s one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I’d be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it’s illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they’re thinking of adding that at some point.

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

Yes. It is an instrument used in the consumption of drugs.

Or do you mean musical instrument? TL;DR: It can be.

It comes down to how wide you want the definition of “musical instrument” to be. Is a drumstick a musical instrument? Is it what makes a drum designed to be played with sticks an instrument? What is such a drum without at least one stick?

“Well I could hit the drum with something else.” Sure, but does that make the “something else” the instrument?

What is a woodwind (musical) instrument without the player’s breath? A saxophone without a reed?

“I could smack it on something.”

Well, yes, that’s the crux of it.

In the loosest sense, anything that can be used to make a noise is a musical instrument. Take the popular joke of mayonnaise: if you put a straw in it and blow, I’m willing to bet some sort of noise can be had.

This then brings in the other argument: what counts as musical?

I strongly suspect that many of these things have already, uh, been tried.

As for those that clearly made it through at least one round of testing, a self-styled “Weird Explorer” has a YouTube series called “That’s not coffee” where he - and occasionally a friend or two - reviews some of them.

Not sure if there’s anyone on there who has tried roasting and grinding other sorts of beans for science though. The closest I can think of is the various creators making tofu alternatives from beans that aren’t soy, which kind of turns the whole thing on its head: Could you make a tofu from coffee beans? (I’m guessing not, but that’s another for-science idea.)

Reminds me of the “comrade major” tea joke joke. Stolen from the Internet:

Three friends are in a hotel room in Soviet Russia. The first two men open a bottle of vodka, while the third is tired and goes straight to bed. He is unable to sleep however, as his increasingly drunk friends tell political jokes loudly. After a while, the tired man gets frustrated and walks downstairs for a smoke. He stops in the lounge and asks the receptionist to bring tea to their room in five minutes. The man walks back into the room, joins the table, leans towards a power outlet and speaks into it: “Comrade major, we want some tea to room 62 please.” His friends laugh on the joke, until there is a knock on the door. The receptionist brings a teapot. His friends fall silent and pale, horrified of what they just witnessed. The party is dead, and the man goes to sleep. After a good night’s rest, the man wakes up, and notices his friends are gone. Surprised, he walks downstairs and asks the receptionist where they went. The nervous receptionist whispers that KGB came and took them before dawn. The man is horrified. He wonders why he was spared. The receptionist responds: “Well, comrade major did quite like your tea joke.”

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.

There’s no proof the universe will end in a Big Crunch. Apparently there’s some measure of the universe where if it’s less than 1, we’ll get a Big Crunch, and if it’s greater than 1, we’ll get a Big Rip where everything just falls apart. I may have those backwards, but the important thing is when it’s exactly 1, it implies a universe that continues forever, getting colder and colder. And as best as science can determine for our universe, the value is precisely that.

But here’s another, well, dimension to that: There’s a popular but unprovable conjecture that our universe is the inside of a black hole that exists in a higher-level universe. In our universe, black holes boil away due to Hawking radiation, a process that can take trillions of years for very large black holes.

Once the black hole we’re inside of stops consuming matter in the level above, that spells a very slow but alternative end to our universe. One day it will simply cease to exist.

“This the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper.” – T.S.Eliot.

Not completely mysterious, but still largely so. The usual zodiacal constellations are listed, and the names therein have allegedly been decoded as resembling a Turkic language.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a hoax, only that someone with knowledge of a Turkic language helped create those pages in particular.