What am I dual booting if I can’t use win10 because it’s not secure, and I’m not paying for win11?

Oh hi Mark

“If you can dodge taxes, you can dodge a ball”

To be fair to people with legitimate celiac disease - many factories process multiple products and don’t have to disinfect and sterilize their equipment between products. They may run wheat one day and rice the next. If they don’t treat the equipment with a disinfectant certified to eliminate proteins, the rice may pick up gluten from the equipment.

If they state they are gluten free, it (should) mean that they are taking necessary steps to isolate or clean their lines.

Are you glad because I’m not very inventive, or because my description demonstrates I’m disturbed?

And I have so many additional questions.

1. Do they feed this secretion to the live young?
2. If yes, wouldn’t that technically make them mammals?
3. Is the milk harvested before or after live birth?
4. If before, where is egg/larva sack, anatomically?
5. If in abdomen, how separate are these organs - in other words, are we talking like milk sack, reproductive sack - stick the needle filter too far one way and you’ve missed the milk and got larvae - or is it like a liquefied mess in there, and that’s why they need the filter?

I can go on, but man this is weird…

Did you not see the video of the guy wearing his new tim apple ski goggles, in his semi-self driving Tesla cyber truck?

What makes you think people can behave?

What the fuck did I just read.

If I had an ounce of skill as an artist I’d draw the image evoked by your 13 words.

Tiny milking machines hooked up to billions of restrained cockroaches, extracting their milky secretions.

God damnit

Unless they’re evil radical leftist Democrats, those Marxist-Leninist Antifa communist fascist socialists. Then they’ll be hanged.

MAGAts get a wrist slap.

I’m not saying they have any chance - just making the point that “legal” and “illegal” are arbitrary and determined by whoever is the dominant power. Texas seceding is “illegal” only so long as the US remains powerful. If by some unholy miracle, Texas were to win independence from the US, they would probably write their own laws to say rejoining the US is illegal.

Another pair of cases to make my point - the Holocaust was “legal” to the Nazis. After they were defeated, the UN made genocide “illegal.” But how many genocides have occurred around the world since 1949?

Laws are only as good as they are enforceable, which is exactly what you underscore by citing the strength of the US military. Is it “legal” to make drone strikes or drop a nuke on Texas? 🤷

This is a fantastic write-up.

I got downvoted elsewhere for saying this, but let me ask - if they just …went rogue and reeeeeeally started stirring shit up - like setting blockades on highways, rail stations, and ports, stopped exports - like really tried to cause the US economic trouble - attacking federal buildings etc.

What’s any legal precedent matter? Aside from justification for getting totally railed by the US military.

The thing about law though, is that it’s just a framework of written social contracts between rational parties agreeing to abide by the terms and consequences.

Reality is a bit different.

Texas could halt physical transport of goods/services. Refuse to buy US imports. Stop collecting tax revenue. Gun down federal employees that don’t swear Texan allegiance.

It doesn’t really matter what legal papers say, when it comes to actions.

Sure - there may be consequences for such “illegal” state actions, and the documented illegality would be articulated as official justification after administering such consequences.

But that also only matters if Texas is defeated … in the unlikely event they “win,” - they’d write their own narrative with legal justification.

Texas has made an issue over their independence and God-given right to be Texas, in defense of their the right to own chattel slavery since their first secession. From Mexico. In 1836.

Texas reconfirmed their desire to die on the hill of their divine right to own people, by seceding from the US in 1861.

After the civil war, Texas was a haven for the Confederates - and their ideology has been fomenting ever since

They’ve been talking of secession openly since at least the 1990s.

I think this is the first time since the civil war that other states have involved their national guards in support of a hotbed issue that could lead to a secession.

Edit: correction to grammatical error.

Fair enough. Ski resorts in the US mostly only offer burgers and fries, so the seasonal worker attitude is more understandable. Leave it to the French through to try to put a fine dining experience atop a ski slope.

Will check out the Samsungs, thanks for the recommendation. Cheers, good chatting with you :)

Ooh, gobshite has a nice ring to it 🤪

Sounds about right for French cuisine. Yes, I said it - French cuisine ain’t that great, it’s just buttery.

“Reasonable, but not exceptional, and ridiculously overpriced…” Could be an apt descriptor for the iPad too!

It’s a bummer that they kind of dominate the tablet space though… I want a tablet, but have been avoiding pulling the trigger because iPads are designed for the sticky fingered folk.

Why’s it yikes? I’ll admit it was a bit of a ramble, but my comment was (mostly) coherent, factual, and at least a little humorous. No?

Nope. I’m just a bit loquacious.

That sounds like an entirely unpleasant experience.

Reading your post inspired me to write a wryly informative yet droll linguistic comment for your edification and enjoyment (and my own entertainment). However my comment may strike you, in any case, I am certain it is entirely unrelated to the miserable experience you describe in your comment, as well as the content of the original post. Ready? Ok.

At face value, the message is entirely clear from what you’ve written. The restaurant owners required you to use a tablet to browse the menu items they have on offer, and that tablet had a particularly poor user experience.

However, I found your last sentence quite ambiguous, and interestingly so:

…it was an iPad which only pensioners use,…

I see at least three interpretations of this sentence fragment:

1. iPads, as a category in general, are devices used by pensioners and no one else. (Note: my guess is that this is what you actually meant)
2. This particular iPad had specific features that indicated all preceding users were pensioners. You don’t mention any of these features, but perhaps there were fingerprints of denture glue on the screen, or a distinct odor of moth balls.
3. The particular iPad was restricted for use by pensioners only and no others, in which case you’ve broken the law and the Police Nationale are on their way. The laws are strict in France, I don’t make the rules.

Okay, yes yes, readings 2 and 3 are hyperbolic; however, this was intentional, partially for the lolz, but also to convey a sense of saliency for the respective interpretations.

The internet comment section is such an interesting treasure trove of human language. See, in typical language use (by typical, I specifically mean how language evolved, as humans in the bush, making sounds at each other around a fire), there are a multitude of cues that go beyond the simple string of words, collectively referred to as “pragmatics.” These are nonverbal cues like body language and facial expression, but also verbal cues like prosody, intonation, and stress. There are also “discourse” level aspects, like how we can follow the overall point of a speaker. (As an example of discourse, I told you up front that my comment would be somewhat amusing and educational, and hopefully I have delivered that to you - if I haven’t, well it’s still the discourse level pragmatics that underlie your feeling of annoyance or disappointment.)

Another pragmatic element is shared knowledge. Off the bat, we both have some fluency in English, but pragmatically (ha, see what I did there?), that’s a given, but it goes further than that. Friends and family have a history of shared experiences. On the Internet, well we’re both Lemmings, so we likely have an aptitude for technology, as well as other niche hobbies or interests. Shared knowledge is more or less anything that one speaker can assume about another on the basis of experience or overt group membership.

This is what is so interesting about Internet comments though - the pragmatics of language are often missing! This sentence might have been 100% clear if we had more shared knowledge. Perhaps all that was needed was hearing you say it, which would have carried prosody and stress.

Anyway, I hope you learned something interesting.

Was the food good at least?

Tell me you’re compensating for a tiny dick without telling me you’re compensating for a tiny dick.

I’d heard of project 2025, but had not read anything about it yet. Terrifying.

You seem to really know your shit. I’m realistic about my WAN speed needs (symmetrical 350 Mbps is more than sufficient) - but I’m pretty tired of my shitty Netgear setup. I’m not really sure what I need LAN wise, and the price tags of Ubiquiti/UniFi systems have me worried about buying more than I really need. I know pfsense/opnsense can be useful alternatives to start with in minimizing prices, but the steep learning curve has me a bit intimidated.

Do you have a suggestion or recommendation on where to start? Is there something that’s functional at a sub ~$500 initial investment, but would be upgradeable/expandable and ultimately more reliable/dependable in the long run? Do I need to wait for this wifi7 gimmick?

Thanks mate.