I have an Army background (from a long fucking time ago). I was always amused by “Front Towards Enemy,” and we were trained to click three times.

I still think the joke works though.

No, man. My comments are like jazz.

1. Chainmail provides little to no protection against impact damage. As we saw in Fellowship, evil beings who attack heroes in bed use slashing attacks with broadswords or similar weapons. While it might prevent cuts, it’s basically like being beaten with an iron rod that will break bones and rupture organs. It is unsuitable as armor. That’s leaving aside weapons like maces, hammers, and clubs, or a Seal Team Six scenario.
2. It’s aluminum. Or aluminium, if you’re that kind of person. This is basically a blanket designed by Jony Ive. It doesn’t warm. It doesn’t protect. But it’s thin and lightweight. Which is the opposite of what you want in a weighted blanket.
3. You can buy weighted blankets that come in a variety of weights and warmth characteristics for a fraction of the time investment used to make this. The money you save could be used to buy a home security system that includes a minefield or electric fence. If you’re impressed by what a claymore sword can do to an orc, wait until you see what a claymore mine can do.

Yup! I really love the whole story there. It was sort of like the space race but with tall masted ships and pirates and such.

I mean, you also had the slave trade, but if you blithely ignore the discomforting parts of history, reading about it can be fun.

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

There were so many problems with monitoring time. Even today I always dread it a bit. While we’ve tried to at least move the issues from the mechanistic to the philosophical, we still run into things like the Y2K and the 2038 problems. Hell, I remember running into an issue with calculating leap years and such as an undergrad.

I like to think that, if nothing else, it gives me a greater appreciation for Discworld.

So I got scooped on the whole candle thing, which I really wanted to go with. Instead, I’m going to pivot and say that accurate timekeeping - day or night - was actually driven by the needs of navigation. 

You could get a pretty good idea of when it was based on the position of the sun and stars, as long as you knew where you were. The opposite is also true - you could figure out where you were, as long as you knew what time it was (and had the appropriate charts/data). The problem was that, while sailing around the world, ships often didn’t know either one.

For rough purposes, people used things like candles. In some cases, monks would recite specific prayers at a given cadence to keep track of time overnight and so know when to wake the others. These methods, as well as later inventions like the pendulum clock that used a known time component to drive watch mechanisms, were all but useless for navigation due to inaccuracies. They were good enough in the 1200s to let the monks know when to pray, though.

In college, I had a fellow student with a similar condition. Although he’d often use a wheelchair to get around, it was not at all unusual to see him using his arms to walk around campus.

In multiple occasions, I saw him do a takedown tackle of another student and basically wipe the ground with him. He didn’t even look completely muscular - although he did have really good definition on some of them - but he was so damn strong overall just from the way he got around that he’d just thrash them.

Plus, there’s no way to socially come out as winning a fight with a person who has no legs. There’s no way not to lose that fight, it’s just bad versus worse.

You can get married and die first, after charging your spouse an appropriate amount based on the anticipated payout minus future discounting. Or die second, having made that kind of payout.

The important thing is to negotiate hard with medical histories and historic rates of pay being brought as evidence. You’ll probably want to get lawyers involved.

I don’t think that PD (or any of its variants) is a good proxy for cheating, because cheating involves deception or rule breaking, while “defect” is just a legal move.

A better proxy might be something like nuptial gifts in some spider species. So in some species, the male will present a female with whom he wishes to mate a nuptial gift - an insect wrapped in webbing. But the “cheat” move is when either the insect has already been sucked dry or when it’s snatched back too quickly for the female to feed.

We can estimate the degree to which cheaters prosper by looking at how common these and similar behaviors are in their respective populations - let evolution do the calculations. Animal behavior is replete with deceptive and manipulative communication, and because so much of it is genetically determined we can be reasonably confident that we have an objective metric.

I’m not discounting your experience and I haven’t been in a public library more than a couple of times in maybe the last 35 years, but they were some of my favorite places growing up and I still help out by donating to them and such.

All of the ones I’ve been in have had the children’s section physically separated from the adult section by something like the lobby containing the librarian’s desk. Call it about 30-40 feet of space. Furthermore, the kid’s section wasn’t an “anything goes” kind of area - it was treated as an opportunity for kids to learn proper library behavior. The section had its own librarian who wouldn’t not hesitate to shush noisy kids.

So, while I don’t think yours is an unpopular opinion, I am hoping the experience is less common than you’ve seen.

Also, university libraries are often open to anyone (although you won’t be able to borrow books), so that might be an alternate option. They might not have public WiFi though.

Oh, I know. It’s not necessarily a crime, although I wouldn’t recommend it without reading what actions specifically would trigger those laws. It’s the wording of the laws that I’d want to be comfortable with.

But morally speaking it’s not even a grey area. It’s absolutely worse than just not tipping at all. If I were a restaurateur I’d ban this person on the first offense, no questions asked.

I’m not positive about that. Possessing obviously fake money is not a crime, but passing it off as if it were real money in a transaction itself may constitute a crime. Back before sensors became more sophisticated, I had a friend who used photocopied bills (which were obviously fake) in subway token machines, and he got into some trouble for it.

It’s a dead man’s party

Who could ask for more?

The worst was the in-universe explanation for why all of the aliens are shaped like humans. That was just cartoonishly bad. I mean, I get it. There’s very few ways of casting actors that can play a sentient shade of blue.

But just leave it. You don’t have to explain it. We all know. You especially don’t have to explain it in a way that demonstrates no one involved had ever taken Bio 101.

This may be the most poorly written article I’ve ever read. It’s completely unintelligible.

It must have been written by a really poorly trained LLM and just posted without anyone having looked at it. Forget artificial intelligence - this is artificial stupidity.

I don’t know. I’ve seen things far worse than a vaguely Pride-aligned Treebeard.

I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.

I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.

The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.

The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.