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what’s the point in even using a VPN, if you have to identify yourself just to use it?

Having to identify doesn’t mean they can see inside the tunnel or that your VPN IP can be traced back to you.

I’m Dutch speaking Belgian, so culturally similar I guess…

I generally don’t wear my shoes at home, and I don’t know anybody who does, but it is considered weird to ask guests who are not staying over to take their shoes off, and it would be considered weird to voluntarily take your own shoes off in someone else’s home. It is more a question of intimacy and is considered getting too familiar. So unless you’re really familiar with each other, or you’re staying over long term or something, guests keep their shoes on.

In practice, I take my shoes off when I’m at my parents’ home, or at my girlfriend’s place, everywhere else they stay on, even at friends’ places.

Not when the output is a pipe.

Quoting myself:

It’s a great movie

So: ???

Interstellar is a very plot driven movie, it’s leads you by the hand saying “these things are happening, in this order, and it’s interesting and engaging”, and when the movie is done you get it: the journey is at an end, and the good guys conquered the big problems, emotions were felt along the way, and you’re not really left with any lingering questions afterwards. It’s a great movie, but it’s also a rather easy movie to enjoy if you’re into space stuff.

Whereas 2001, aside from being an absolute visual feast, is more abstract and theme driven, about humanity’s place in the cosmos, and it makes you ask deeper questions, but you must actually pay attention and discover those questions and explore them in your own mind to actually engage with the movie. It’s not a passive experience, and your engagement with the movie can stay with you for days. It’s certainly a much more difficult movie to enjoy.

When I was in my 20s, I hated movies like 2001 and Bladerunner, I found them so tedious, because I wanted scifi like Aliens goddammit. Later, I learned to really enjoy these more cerebral movies that took effort to engage with, because they were so rewarding when that effort paid off.

I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care either, it’s not like it was some wildly expensive cable (though I don’t remember the price) … I just know that I saved myself a whole lot of inconvenience.

Gold doesn’t tarnish so much and is also often used on computer edge connectors.

Yes, Gold is a noble metal, so it doesn’t like to oxidize.

So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?

I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.

Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.

Preventing conception would be a genetic trait that evolution selects against.

A woman with your theoretical anti-conception genetic mutation would not reproduce, so this mutation dies out immediately.

Doing your part in a relationship’s reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn’t be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy.

Except what the meme is saying is not that both partners should work together on birth control. It suggests that it should be on the man instead.

Meme also suggests that no work is being done on a male contraception pill, when in reality this is being worked on and has been worked on for decades, but there are good biological reasons why this is anything but trivial and certainly much harder than a female contraception pill.

Counterpoint: a woman taking birthcontrol is empowered because she is taking charge of her own reproduction. She doesn’t have to rely on or trust the man to take his pill. After all, she would be the one bearing most of the burden in case of an unwanted pregnancy.

Additionally, purely biologically it is much easier to reliably stop conception on the female side than on the male side. A woman only produces one egg cell per month, whereas a man produces millions of sperm cells per day.

It’s even more confusing because in my native language (Dutch), we have those words too ( gnoe and gnoom ), and we do pronounce the g.

Of course, no Dutch speaker would ever miss the opportunity to pronounce a g :)

Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:

I am still thoroughly confused whether I should call it KDE or Plasma or Plasma Desktop. Like, what is the difference?

The plane shot the bullets upwards, then continued on a level path.

Once shot, the bullets take on a ballistic trajectory, i.e.: a parabole. On the downwards part of their trajectory, the bullets’ path intersected with the plane’s level flight path.

Don’t worry Ralph, I got you.

þ

I have to ask… what the hell is that thing?

That is a self-inflicted wound caused by how Wayland was designed, particularly the part where they offloaded so much responsibility onto the different compositors.