Friends stopped writing their blogs. I slowly stopped reading most comics, now only Questionable Content and the occasional xkcd remains

Fortran, probably

I loved netvibes to get daily comics and blog posts. Unfortunately people stopped writing blogs and netvibes is also gone

It’s like a small pitcher with a movable filter, you put in the ground coffee, hit water, stir, wait, push down the filter with the grounds, pour off the coffee with most of the ground staying in the French press.

They moved from python?

I’m shocked I had to scroll this far for the first fluxbox/Enlightenment/windowmaker user

Kerbal Space program wasn’t on the list, and maybe OpenTTD? The latter is also great when you have a random setup (the game is 10Mb, runs in anything and has zero needs) and have only 20 minutes to play.

If you look at any of the ancient statues they don’t look black, whatever the recent propaganda tries to push. It doesn’t make any sense to put everyone in those four racial boxes - an Ethiopian looks as distinct from a South African as a Spaniard and a Swede

Here only those data are available for search that are older than 100 years in case of birth certificates and maybe 50 for deaths. So you would need to know at least your grandparents’ birth data to start…

It depends… Are we speaking about keeping only tall blonde kids? Or aborting a fetus with 95% Down syndrome? Angelman’s? Some other even worse? Stopping a possibility fatal pregnancy? Where do you put the line?

I checked it, it’s not :)

Lots of astronomical objects have names, but somehow it’s asteroids and maybe craters that really got the naming hype, there are hundreds of them named after scientists, poets, the discoverer’s teacher, you name it. It’s a nice custom.

Disclaimer: I might be slightly biased, as I proposed my wife with naming one of them (asteroid, I mean).

I use a Kindle, but never bought a single book from them. I mostly use their transfer method for convenience instead of looking for a cable. As for books, I downloaded a few gigs of ebooks in html/RTF/doc format well before e-ink was invented, and use those with calibre to convert to epub. Pdfs are rather suboptimal for ebooks.

As far as expats go, yes, Chinese are probably the largest group, their numbers are estimated around 18k now (used to maybe 50k in the 90s) but this is a lower estimate, since a lot of them are here without a citizenship. In 2013 a visa program was started when they could basically buy a citizenship if they buy government bonds for 250-300k€ (plus they pay a handling fee of 50k for a politician’s company).

I happen to rarely read recently published books, so I paid for an ebook a single time. In a series of eight books, each of them had an appendix saying “this file was formatted on purpose for torrenting. The estimated cost of producing the book is roughly 5.27$. If you liked it here’s my bank account and my website if you’d like to buy the book on paper”.

Yeah. Way worse that the cup thing or the Japanese eel stuff or the others. That crap still haunts me

But you just told the computer to ignore case…

Wait, in the last thread it was a bank

It’s worse than that. Authors actually pay (up to several thousand dollars) to publish, the editors who find referees are doing this as a side job, so probably they’re not exactly overpaid either. Finally you have the anonymous referee, who not only doesn’t get paid, but they get literally zero recognition. Also, papers aren’t printed in journals any more, they are online only, so there’s no printing fee either, there’s only just server hosting costs, paying some people for language editing and final typesetting (in many fields authors must submit LaTeX manuscripts, basically ready for publishing). And profit of course.

I don’t think you can make up these kind of things