Skip Navigation

Posts
1
Comments
352
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The Olympics have allowed trans women to compete against cis women since the 90s, and yet there's never been a trans medalist. If there was a genuine advantage to being trans in sport, at least one country in the past three decades would have loaded their team with trans women and cleaned house. However, taking enough hormones to make a masculine body into a feminine one after it's already grown means you've got way less testosterone than a cis woman, so that counters out any initial advantage. Claiming otherwise is misinformation. Spreading misinformation to the detriment of trans people is transphobic.

  • Just like a guide dogs collection box

  • As someone else said, installing things outside of Program Files is generally only necessary if they were made for XP or older, and the developers didn't test on Vista or newer or read the bit of the Windows documentation that said not to write to an application's installation directory because it might not work on future versions that was there since the early nineties. Regular Oblivion works fine in Program Files (although it makes it more of a pain to mod) and the Remaster was obviously made post-Vista.

    All that said, none of this is relevant because you've got the Windows App version, which uses a completely different system and works in a partial sandbox so doesn't interact with the rest of the computer like a traditional program would.

  • The scanner's part of security, which is potentially shared between multiple airlines with multiple cabin bag weight limits, so it wouldn't make sense as the place to weigh things. It only works if it's done somewhere airline-specific, like check-in or boarding.

  • That kind of bioplastic tends not to biodegrade naturally, instead requiring a heated industrial composter with specially engineered enzymes added. If it's disposed of properly, it's great, otherwise it's no better than traditional plastic but costs more. Also, not all bioplastics biodegrade at all as all the word means is that the source material is biomass rather than oil.

  • Thunderbird is basically an Outlook-from-fifteen-years-ago clone, and I've always disliked Outlook, even before the recent push to make it even worse. Everything I disliked about old Outlook is exactly the same in Thunderbird, except the licence.

    I don't want much from a mail client, just:

    • basic stuff works
    • I can see an unread email count for each of my accounts at the same time, and also have the list of messages for the account I'm looking at and a reading/writing pane at the same time, too.

    Thunderbird and Outlook will only show the unread count once you've expanded the list of directories in an account, so once you've got more than two accounts with a reasonable number of folders, any further accounts end up pushed off the bottom of the screen. This isn't something that a theme for Thunderbird can change. It'd be a small change to include a total unread count next to the list item for each account when it wasn't expanded and a total unread count next to the combined inbox button, but I'm not maintaining a fork of a mail client myself when it'd still be too Outlook-like to avoid being annoying.

    In the end, I settled on Mailspring, but it doesn't score brilliantly on the basic stuff works bullet point.

  • The basic Mail app in Windows 10 is still the baseline I compare every other email client to, and I've yet to find anything I like as much. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, it only ever ran under Windows, and for stupid reasons, it was deprecated and now if you try to launch it, it exits and launches Outlook (New), which is a horrible email client.

  • You'd need to test every cell in the embryo to be sure none of them had off-target mutations, and DNA sequencing doesn't leave the cell alive, so you can't prove it worked without killing the embryo. He tested some of the cells and discarded embryos where those cells were damaged, but there's no way to know if the untested cells in the embryos were fine, and given what we know about the reliability, it's more likely that there are problems than not.

  • The linked Wikipedia article says only their fathers were HIV-positive, and typically that wouldn't lead to a parent infecting their child unless they decided to share needles etc.

  • He was found guilty of medical malpractice after gene editing babies by treating their embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. He claims that he was trying to make them resistant to HIV, and that medical ethics are preventing cures from being discovered, but his critics say that we know CRISPR is too unreliable to use on a genome the size of a human's, and is more likely to introduce dangerous mutations than apply the intended change, hence why no one else has done this before.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

  • It's already a stretch to assume that men complaining about loneliness are happy with the number of male friends that they've got, but it's a bigger stretch to assume that what they did to get their male friends should also get non-male friends. There are still men who haven't realised that women are people and that to befriend them, you need to talk to them as if they're people, but they're not the ones referring to a male loneliness epidemic, and would instead blame conspiracy theories where crazed feminists want to do evil deeds or whatever nonsense it is that the likes of Andrew Tate peddle. Plenty of men just don't meet anyone new, and on the rare occasions when they do, it's when engaging in a male-dominated hobby or at a male-dominated workplace, and so it's another man. E.g. for reasons I don't understand, all the bars near me where it's quiet enough to have a conversation (the bare minimum to befriending someone) are almost exclusively attended by men. After you've shown up a few times, you might be friends with the regulars, but no matter how effectively you make friends with them, they'll still all be men.

    You're probably right that no one would listen if you made a video, as anyone who needs to hear the thing you're trying to explain is too entrenched exclusively watching manosphere influencers, and anyone without that kind of terminal brainrot already knows what you're trying to tell them.

  • Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It's a massive improvement, but it's not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.

  • The meme doesn't really work. The working-class people who played football the most always called it football. Upper-class people at public schools (don't confuse this with state schools - in the UK, public schools are even posher and more expensive than private schools, and the name comes from letting anyone who could afford the fees in, not from any intention to educate the general public) needed to distinguish it from Rugby Football so they could make a rule against playing it, and invented the name Association Football. There's a tradition at public schools to shorten names in a particular way (Rugby football to rugger, buggery to bugger etc.) and when applying that to association football, it becomes soccer. Soccer has always been a term used to mock poor people who play football instead of rugby, so of course it's badly-received when people say it.

  • It's controlled by whether the stream's opened in text mode or binary mode. On Unix, they're the same, but on Windows, text mode has line ending conversion.

  • It's not guaranteed that it's interpreted as a platitude by the person it's directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it's just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.

  • The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, "good attempt" could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn't good at all, it's bad. If you'd asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it's impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it's completely inappropriate as it'd stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it's incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it's sensitive to moisture.

    The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.

  • I was meaning that the blade count and detachability was the difference in definition between turboprop and propfan/open turbofan, not that it was necessarily the thing making the engine more efficient.

  • I've seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).

  • How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it's promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?