GreyEyedGhost

Yes, Esperanto has many advantages of a manufactured language, but I think there are only something like 2 million speakers worldwide. If someone wanted to dip their toes into it, Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series has Esperanto sprinkled throughout it, and has been translated into Esperanto. He was a fan. You certainly won’t learn it reading his (English) books, but the structure is very recognizable.

Some of them are pretty well marbled. I’m not saying they taste like wagyu, but there’s only one way to know for sure…

What he is saying is, while a lot of the phone calls you got were answered with the KB, this doesn’t reflect the people who didn’t call because they used the KB. For that, you would need to track total sales, new customer intake, volume over time, etc. It’s quite possible you could have customers who got a KB reply from your support staff in a timely manner and decided if it was that easy for you to get an answer to them, it would be worth it for them to try it before calling next time.

Of course, the reality is quite likely that the main users of the knowledge base you built was the support team, which still isn’t a loss.

Giving you an upvote for using three metaphors in a sentence that small. Impressive!

Brother has also started down the proprietary toner road. Source.

I liked the office overall, but the first season and a half was almost physically painful at times. They really toned down the schadenfreude at that point and pivoted Michael to being inept but lovable. The last season or so was all over the place.

I was curious, as well, and discovered we weren’t the first.

Turkish origin words (baklava is common).

Here’s a list of lists for various Indian languages (guru is common).

This is like being stuck in a porta-potty for 3 months. Sure, less megayachts, but we need these only slightly more than people climbing Everest.

The current solar panel system of the ISS weights about 8 tonnes, the Falcon Heavy can deliver 63 tonnes to LEO. That’s about 715 launches of the Falcon Heavy, assuming space solar panel W/kg hasn’t improved since then, that Starship never becomes commercially viable, and doesn’t include batteries, cooling, or the working components. This still isn’t in the range of feasible for a data center, but could be an option for microgravity industry. The value of a more successful or precise silicon crystal production method, for instance, may make it worthwhile.

Well, I know the difference between alkaline, NiCd, NiMH, and lithium batteries, and that they don’t grow on trees, so at least I have that.

Well, the downside of this not being a 4x game is that sometimes research doesn’t pan out, and you don’t know which ones until after you’re done.

We’ve had 3 major changes in battery chemistry in the last 45 years. Energy density, lifespan, cost, and dangerous materials have all generally improved. We also have 2 new battery technologies in the process of becoming generally commercially available. Also, batteries went from 500 mAh batteries about the size of your smartphone to 3000 mAh as a minor component of that same smartphone, about an order of magnitude in energy density.

No, that’s why we use the same batteries Voltaire did on his frogs.

1300 was the end for me, at least reading at a reasonable pace. I might have squeezed out another century or two, parsing together context and other clues, but that is only through the benefit of knowing the story being told.

I saw Crime 101. It’s a good enough movie, but I wouldn’t say it has much in the way of political or social commentary, except some basic Robin Hood philosophy.

A lot of these products used to be good. 25 years ago, Outlook was the only option for mail and calendar because they worked well and nothing else was as simple or integrated. Windows XP brought an enterprise-class OS with true multitasking to the consumer. MSN messenger didn’t have all the features of Teams, but it was a serious contender in the IM space. And now, I have Outlook every now and then telling me I have new mail but I cant see it until I restart the app, Windows gets shittier and more intrusive every day, and Teams on Android cant send me a notification about an upcoming meeting until the meeting actually starts, if I get a notification at all. I also wonder how they ended up this way given they were class leaders just decades ago.

Now if we can get alternatives that don’t have all the problems of Microsoft at its heyday, let alone now, that would be amazing. I already have my console alternative, just a few more pieces.

It doesn’t matter that much if it’s based on open source if you can’t modify the the unregulated parts and have absolutely no privacy.

I’m willing to accept the idea of software patents, provided they follow the premise of “novel to an expert in the field”. So if you walk up to a software engineer, ask them how to do something, and they cobble together something that more or less performs the desired task in a similar manner, then the patent is rejected.

I figure 10 or 20 software patents would have made it past this kind of test. Rounded corners on rectangles? No. Gif compression algorithm? No. But maybe there are 10 or 20 truly novel ideas that were patented.

I’m kind of okay with bleeding heart liberal, and also pretty okay with bleeding neck conservative.

I would also say it is S tier for the task it is designed for. My class went camping once and one of my classmates brought one of these with canned pie filling. This led to an arrangement where I would start a fire in the morning while they were all huddled in their sleeping bags, and they would make me pies while keeping warm in front of the fire. I’d say I had the better end of that bargain because I both got to make fires and eat pies, but they also seemed happy with the arrangement.