BillTongg @ BillTongg @lemmy.world

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Joined

5 mo. ago

Unfortunately not (although it's not really surprising).

I have children older than you. It's a matter of perspective - I think anyone under 50 is young, and no doubt in 10 years time I'll think the same of anyone under 60. I don't feel that I really grew up until I was well into my 30s, and my career didn't really get anywhere before I was 40, but now before I know it I'm retired. Relish your youth - it'll pass soon enough!

Neither. He talked about the impact of always being connected, always contactable, and how he needs self discipline to resist the obvious attractions phones have. He didn't say anything specifically about social media, which is the thing I struggle with, thanks to its addictive functionality.

Quite. Certainly not on Desert Island Discs. Perhaps on a programme like Hard Talk.

This deserves many more upvotes than you've had. I guess most people here just don't get the reference.

Good point. The English civil war and the French revolution both went the way they did because the 'rebels' had armies which equalled or exceeded those of the government. Same with the other regicide that comes to mind, Nicholas II of Russia in 1918. So much depends on whether the military remains loyal.

No, not off the top of my head. But English is roughly half French/Latin and half German, with some Norse and other influences thrown in. Wer or were sound Germanic, so then a little Wikipedia help filled in the details.

Yes, this is interesting! 'Wer' (meaning 'man') came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became 'were' in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf ('man wolf') in modern English.

Yes, similar here. Windows 10 had been telling me I needed to upgrade to 11 but that my PC (a Lenovo X1 Carbon with a pretty decent spec for 5 years ago - i7 and 16GB of RAM) couldn't support it and would have to be replaced. I had run Linux Mint for many years on a Samsung from around 2010, which still works, so I thought now is the time to dump Windows. Installed Mint 22 and everything just works.

Absolute monarchies tend to come to a very sticky end, as happened in England in the 17th century and France in the 18th.

There is a history of inclusive radio in the UK which goes back at least to the 1960s. Anyone who was born here and is over the age of about 50 will know about Kenneth Williams, who appeared in radio comedies with Hugh Paddick. The material is dated and may be regarded as clichéd and demeaning now, but they played two gay men called Julian and Sandy on a show called Round the Horne from 1965 to 1968, and the same characters came up in later shows as well. Bear in mind this was on national radio at a time when gay sex was still illegal in the UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy for more details.

Oh yes, 6 Music is a good one. I notice that Iggy Pop has a Sunday afternoon show at the moment (16:00 UK time), and he’s had several series on there in the past, they just keep asking him back because he's interesting and has good taste in music. And also on Sundays (20:00 UK time) is Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, which has been running for years - so long in fact that when it started I remember recording it on cassette tape so I could play it on my commute to work.

As with all BBC radio there are no adverts apart from their own promotional stuff, and everything is available for 28 days after broadcast via the BBC Sounds website and app - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/stations

I spend a lot of time listening to BBC Radio 3, which is their classical station, but they also have a jazz show 5 nights a week, and lots of other music apart from classical - ‘world’ music, experimental and new music, all kinds of interesting stuff in the evenings UK time. Serious music radio, done properly.

I really love WFMU in New Jersey. Of course they broadcast on FM, but they have four live streams (I especially like the 'Give the Drummer Radio' stream https://wfmu.org/drummer). Take a look at the schedules - you'll find lots of music that you won't hear on mainstream radio, across a wide range of different genres, and all of it is archived so you can listen to past shows and see the playlists for each one. It's listener supported, so there are no adverts except for their own WFMU fund raising. My favourite shows:

• Continental Subway with David Dichelle, on the Drummer stream, playing music in many languages - https://wfmu.org/playlists/CW
• This is the Modern World, with 'Trouble', on the main WFMU stream. Incredibly eclectic - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/LM

I came here to say this. And for people who didn't study Latin (which I did as an adult, having chosen German as my second foreign language at school), there is a video on YouTube which explains in detail exactly why that scene is so funny:

https://youtu.be/UfH6gjxTTgE

I know just enough about the light spectrum and the red shift to understand why this is funny (thanks Prof. Brian Cox!), but it underlines how shallow my knowledge is. So much cosmology, so little time...

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn't really very useful.

Yes, I see. It doesn't sound very hopeful then.

I've been wondering how long it will be until his opponents start to be arrested. That has been a successful strategy for Putin, along with rigging who can be on the ballot if there are any future elections (and from comments I heard before the election, when Trump was addressing some kind of white nationalist evangelical gathering, I get the impression that elections are far from certain now) so it would be no surprise to see a similar approach in the US.

You'll have to forgive me because I'm a European with a limited understanding of US law, but what can stand in the way of wholesale dismantling of the democratic process? Am I correct in thinking you don't have a politically independent judiciary and that the Supreme Court was stacked with Trump supporters during his first term, so he can essentially do whatever he wants?

My 5th birthday. I had mumps, but my mother had already organised a birthday party for me, so I lay upstairs, confined to bed, listening to a roomful of other kids having fun downstairs.

This was a very long time ago, before children were routinely given the mumps vaccine.