When your neighbour is a bear, it is wise to be wary of it.

Round coins are less likely to damage coin purses and pockets. No more complicated than that.

Then as technology has moved on, it has proven advantageous for coins to have constant radius so that coin-accepting machines don’t jam on an unfortunate rotation of points.

This is why even when coins aren’t round - thinking specifically of the British 50 pence and 20 pence coins, but there are others - they still have curved sides.

I think the motivations of the 26-year-old are immediately called into question in a way they wouldn’t be for someone of high school age, so in that sense at the very least, yes, it’s strange.

What are, or do you suppose are, the motivations of this 26-year-old? (And note that “because they want to” does not address the actual motivations.)

FreeDOS is a free MS-DOS compatible operating system. EDIT.COM was a commonly used editor on MS-DOS and can be run under FreeDOS. I was making a comparison with Floppinux being a bare bones OS with a basic editor (vi).

Actually, the original incarnation of EDIT.COM was as the alter ego of QBasic, so that was literally a BASIC editor, but that’s more a fun fact than a selling point.

Admittedly, it’s more of a proof of concept. I included it because it’s probably the most extreme example of how small Linux can get.

It does have vi as an editor though and leaves a few kilobytes free on the same floppy, so whatever ancient hardware it runs on could be used as a very basic journaling device.

Personally, I think I might opt for FreeDOS and EDIT.COM instead, but the Linux purist would almost certainly balk at that.

How small do you want? Floppinux fits on a floppy disk.

Tiny Core’s largest image will almost certainly fit on the smallest capacity USB thumb drive you own*.

Puppy Linux has a diverse ecosystem that pulls from other popular distros and their images generally run to around a gigabyte.

* It’s less than 256MB. There are a few reasons you might have a smaller drive than this, but for most people this is true.

I guess that explains why he and Minnie never had kids.

You’ve probably had your chilli by now, but no-one else seems to have mentioned that canned goods are often fine long past their printed expiry date.

Exceptions might include: rusty cans, because rust outside could also be inside; dented cans, because that might have created a weak point that could compromise the contents; and those cans with the ring-pull easy-open lids - ring-pull seals aren’t as good as the full seal of a can that needs a can-opener.

And finally there’s always the look and smell test. Tip them into a separate bowl before putting them in the chilli. If they look and smell fine, then dump em in the chilli, with or without any liquid they might have been stored in.

Other way around. “Moses” apparently came first. It’s basically the last two syllables of “Ramesses” but missing the initial particle saying who (or what) was the cause of the person’s birth. For Ramesses, it’s Ra, obviously. The Semitic peoples took it and applied it to their mostly mythologised forefather.

Since their culture took the meaning of a name seriously - something we’ve started to lose at least in Anglophone countries - you’d expect there’d be a record of that missing particle for Moses, and yet, there doesn’t seem to be one.

This could indicate there there were a lot of -messes all amalgamated into one.

Imagine, if you will, a compilation of stories about the heroic exploits of Celtic men all named Mac-something and eventually a mythos develops around a unified “Mack”, eventually with allegorical and fantastical stories being built up around him. This hasn’t actually happened in Celtic culture as far as I know, but it puts a context on the whole thing.

What’s your opinion of the word “neologologist” and are you proposing that these “most linguists” are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

Couple more facts for you: 1) It’s not just conceivable, it’s incredibly likely that *dyéws-ph₂tḗr is older than both the Greek and Roman pantheons. He’s in the ancient Vedic (Hindi / Indian) religion under a very similar name and even made it into the Norse pantheon as Tiwaz, though it’s harder to tell how and when he ended up amongst Odin et al. He might have been a borrowing because all these other folks kept talking about him and how great he was. (But he is why we have a day called “Tuesday”, so he was still fairly highly regarded, borrowed or not.)

2) Moses probably didn’t exist (his name having the Egyptian ending -ses is apparently a big clue) and stories about him are allegories and/or amalgams of real people whose names had been long forgotten.

I envy these linguists’ ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

*whose

“who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”

NPC.

Oh. I have do the quiz?

It gave me “Multiclass”.

There’s a joke about inheritance in there somewhere. And the fact that no-one will want whatever I leave behind.

Can I choose NPC now?

Man called Cissé cracks down on homosexuals.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was compensating for something.

Depends on the person and what they’re used to.

For a lot of people here in Britain, that’s definitely getting up into shorts territory (at least for the shorts aficionados) but somewhere more equatorial, that’s the sort of low temperature where people might start thinking about putting on long trousers… if not also a coat.

I stand corrected. I’ve had the “save passwords” feature disabled for a long time due to (largely misplaced) paranoia, and that feature needs to be enabled for it to generate one.

Edited my original comment to reflect my feelings on the implementation.

Most external password managers have features that the one built into Firefox (or any browser) lack, not least of which is having a separate (encrypted) backup of passwords (a tiny amount of data) independent of a browser profile (often huge).

The next main one is the ability to generate random secure passwords for accounts rather than simply remember the ones you’ve made up yourself.

Edit: It’s been brought to my attention that Firefox can generate a strong random password (feature added 7 years ago, I’ve been under a rock, I guess), but its features seem to be somewhat limited in scope. I couldn’t get it to re-roll a password I didn’t like, nor could I figure out how to tweak the parameters (length, characters allowed, etc.). Mozilla’s own help says “edit it yourself so that it fits the site’s requirements” which seems like a bit of a cop-out.

Though you didn’t ask, PasswordSafe is my preferred choice. (Runs just about anywhere, or so I’m led to believe. I’ve only ever run it on the one computer.)

I don’t even know most of my passwords now. When I’ve accidentally pasted one into the wrong field somewhere, they’ve been practically illegible.

So what you’re saying is that I’m falling victim to a No True Scotsman fallacy.

I guess I’ll have to go away and think about that.