Like in a housing shortage you’re hoarding property and profiting off it.

Housing shortages are caused by bad government policy: namely, low-density zoning. Direct your anger towards the entity that deserves it, and make them fix their fuck-up.

(Note: I’m not making some kind of Libertarian “all government is bad” argument here. I’m saying that in this specific case, the laws need to be changed.)

US, mid thirties, and I not only drive a manual transmission, I go out of my way to insist upon it. For example, I own a truck and an SUV made in the '90s because it’s difficult to find newer ones without an automatic.

Not for long if Lennart has anything to say about it, I’m sure.

The European Union is a confederation, just like the United States under the Articles of Confederation was.

While DRM is the bane of everybody there are cases where trust and integrity is important and it’s an intriguing look into how hard it is to manage.

Nah, when the user wants to ensure trust and integrity in his own system, it works just fine. The problem comes when the user who needs to be able to access the data is simultaneously the adversary who needs to be stopped from accessing the data.

In other words, it’s one of those situations where the fact that it’s hard to manage is a gigantic clue that it’s wrongheaded to try to do so in the first place.

According to the Open Source Initiative (the folks who control whether things can be officially certified as “open source”), it basically is the same thing as Free Software. In fact, their definition was copied and pasted from the Debian Free Software guidelines.

People in North America identified with their colony/state first, and the United States second back in the 1700s. Give it time…

I get that they’re different countries, but different states here might as well be.

^ This guy Articles of Confederation.

(Seriously, the European Union basically has the same kind of structure now as the United States did between 1776 and 1789.)

Less than a week until Dragon*Con!

They were both apparently being broadcast by ABC at the time, too.

My argument applies to any cylindrical projection.

Well played.

I’m just as annoyed by the overuse of the Mercator projection as the next guy, but no, I don’t think we can blame it in this particular instance. Consider the similar case of a day/night map, which pretty clearly reads as 50/50 even when it’s Mercator:

(Upon further scrutiny comparing these two maps, I think the missing Antarctica might be a factor too.)

Also, relevant XKCD.

I have a similar issue (also Firefox on [K]ubuntu 22.04) every time I open a link on a logged-in site in a new tab, but in my case merely refreshing the page is enough to get me logged back in.

I assume is most likely the fault of the fairly aggressive mix of extensions I’m running rather than Firefox itself, but I haven’t actually tried to troubleshoot it yet.

The name of that island is “South Georgia,” not just “Georgia.”

Nah, exactly 50% “of the world” is closer to Georgia than Georgia because the dividing line forms two perfect hemispheres. It just doesn’t seem like it because more of the world’s land area is closer to Georgia.

The fact that the map fails to color in the oceans doesn’t help, of course.

Guliani turned into Ghouliani only because of greed and dementia.

This incorrectly implies he wasn’t already a ghoul even back when he had all his faculties.

The folks responsible for the sexy costumes, Roddenberry and Theiss, died in 1991 and 1992, respectively.

See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheissTitillationTheory

The sexiness of an outfit is directly proportional to the perceived possibility that a vital piece of it might fall off.

This basic theory underwrites Stripperiffic clothing, Impossibly Cool Clothes, and pretty much anything else you stick characters into: what makes clothing sexy is the potential for a catastrophic Wardrobe Malfunction. The Trope Namer is William Ware Theiss, costume designer on Star Trek: The Original Series, who first codified the concept.

…

Though Theiss was a costume designer, according to Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herb Solow and Robert Justman, most of the costumes — following this theory — were actually somewhat more modest before being “improved” by Gene Roddenberry.

“what is the difference between these two pieces of material” (one was aluminum, the other stainless)

Did they expect you to identify which metals they were, or just that they were different metals?

The “Christmas Season” is Fall, not Winter*. The only reason the holiday isn’t literally over when the Winter season starts is that the Christians got their calendar screwed up and hold the holiday on a fixed date instead of on the solstice where it belongs.

(*Or “Spring, not Summer” for upside-down people, I suppose.)