leftzero @ leftzero @lemmynsfw.com

Posts

0

Comments

913

Joined

2 yr. ago

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

— Pratchett, maybe..?

the thing that was actually influencing Neptune's orbit, whatever that might be

Calculation error due to Einstein not being available (in Lowell's case, at least; Tombaugh should've known better) and margins of error in the measured masses of the planets at the time (the Voyagers took care of that bit), if I'm not mistaken.

Look, those damn things (Pluto / Charon, since they're basically a double bodied system) get closer to the Sun than Neptune, at certain points in their orbit.

There's dozens of similarly sized objects buzzing around in the same region, and probably thousands of not millions in the Oort cloud.

The only reason “Pluto” were ever called a planet is that they coincidentally happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Tombaugh used Lowell's miscalculations to look for an hypothetical transneptunian planet (Lowell, at least, had the excuse of having died before Einstein published his theory of relativity, but Tombaugh should have known that Newton wasn't enough for this kind of thing).

2000, XP, and Vista are NT too.

Because capitalism!

For today's lucky ten thousand, the Ballmer Peak:

Source: XKCD 323.

I'd say it's a tie between The Curse of Monkey Island and Wing Commander (1 and 2).

Personally I'm partial to replacing very x for more x¹ than a very x thing in a pot.

I'm fairly certain I got it from Blackadder, but I can't recall the episode.

1.– Or xer, where appropriate. Eg., this list is sillier than a very silly thing in a pot.

Wouldn't a goat be a cheaper and less polluting solution which would also automatically mow the lawn and produce milk..?

(Of course it wouldn't solve the noise problem, but it'd probably be less offensive than a leaf blower...)

Obviously, yes.

They knew this when they poisoned the well¹ (photocopy of a photocopy and all that), but they're in it for the fast buck and will scamper off with the money once they think the bubble is about to burst.

1.– Well, some of them might have drunk their own coolaid, and will end up having an intimate face to face meeting with some leopards...

Reading the screen.

Seriously, about 90% of computer problems would be solved if people just read the fucking screen.

That's a good question.

Applied science and engineering, I suppose, or the results thereof..?

Or, anything that we intentionally make that isn't naturally found in nature...

It does get a bit fuzzy, though... some kinds are easy: machines, tools, architecture... but are writing and maths technology, or are they something else? What about dogs, or farm animals like pigs? We certainly made them (not cats, though, they took care of that whole domestication business all by themselves)... GMOs are quite evidently technology, but what about most of the vegetables and fruits we eat? We made those too... maize, or most citruses, for instance, wouldn't exist without centuries or millennia of selection and grafting...

And it gets even fuzzier when you get to animals... crows can intentionally modify a stick to make it better to get a seed out of a tube, making it a tool, and therefore technology if it was us doing it... dams are certainly technology when we make them, but what about beaver made dams? Knots are probably technology when we tie them, but what about a cuttlefish tying her eggs to algae stems? And let's not get into termites or especially ants, with their air conditioning, and fungal agriculture, and aphid farming...

That cat's gonna be devastated when she starts going to school.

Oh well. Carpe diem, I suppose.

I don't think I've needed to ask anyone anything when dealing with computers (except when helping someone with a self caused issue, of course, in which case the question is usually “why did you do this?”) since I was a little kid figuring out how to use my 286... I find that usually you just need to read the fucking screen (an extremely rare talent, I've come to realise), and in harder cases a bit of googling or, if push comes to shove, RTFMing seems to do the trick... but OK, we'll see, I've been wanting to try NixOS for a while once I have the time, and my computer is getting old... maybe this summer I'll find some time, better this than updating to Windows 11 in any case. 🤷‍♂️

That's Sony telling the customers they kicked to the curb that it wasn't because of the PSN thing.

It was personal.

Denuvo

... is expensive. And a subscription service.

Which means there's an incentive for studios to remove it as soon as new sales aren't bringing enough money for its cost to be worth it.

That's when you want to pirate (or buy, if you're into that kind of shit) the game. With the added benefit that it's unlikely that the studio will come up with more updates or DLC, and if the game is at all moddable it'll probably have a mature community patch that'll fix everything the studio was unwilling or unable to patch. (Also, I'm not sure how denuvo cracking works, but I doubt it removes all of that shit, so a game with it properly removed will probably run better than a cracked one, even if the cracked one still ran better than the original infected version.)

Call bells are technology.

They come pre-sliced now, who knows what they looked like when we started messing with them. Probably mostly rind, with a ring of seeds inside, each surrounded by a bit of excessively bitter fruit, like the citron.

Then we selected the juiciest, largest, sweetest, and easiest to eat, and grafted them onto each other, over millennia, until we got to something that's actually edible and seems to come pre-sliced.

Just look at teosinte to see what maize started like, for instance, or how many "different" vegetables we made out of brassica.

Whatever fruit Eve is supposed to have eaten way back when must have been some bitter nut, or a poisonous berry, or a tuber barely distinguishable from a root, or Adam's gay brother Bob, or possibly a fig (wasps made that particular abomination, not us); anything else we didn't make until much later.

I am an adult!

Nature didn't do shit.

Sure, maybe the original mandarins, pomelos, citrons, papedas, and possibly kumquats (there's also Buddha's hand, but we don't talk about Buddha's hand) were sort of pre-sliced, to help with seed dispersal, but like with practically every fruit and vegetable we eat we took that small, dry, bitter crap and started selecting for larger, juicier, tastier, and easier to eat.

And then we went, nah, that ain't it yet... and we started grafting (because apparently plants are kind of ok with us playing Frankenstein with them while they're still alive, or at least we can't hear them complain, and probably wouldn't care if we could).

We made oranges, and most of the citruses we eat.

Why do oranges come pre-sliced..? Because we made it so.