People forget that strikes are a civil option to the alternative.

I should be quite surprised if it was legally binding, as opposed to tradition.

The Parliament doesn’t immediately stop functioning if the Black Rod breaks, is stolen, or is out for repairs, for example.

… Why not just say that then? It would save much confusion.

It’d be hard to say whether there would be no suffering in off-world colonies, but I should doubt it. Traditionally, colonisation has been a dangerous thing, and human nature is as human nature does. The best you can do is reduce it so that what suffering does occur is either minor, or ineffectual.

Also, why do they dismiss asking ISS staff to participate in studies? Bodily autonomy doesn’t mean you can’t ask someone to conduct … uh… research with you. It just means you have to respect it they say no. Astronauts seem like the types who wouldn’t mind putting in a little extra effort for… science.

Too many other introduced variables? Microgravity has a lot of other systemic effects on the astronauts that might affect sperm motility, even before effects to the sperm themselves. Or just individual variation/genetics on the part of the astronauts themselves.

They wouldn’t be able to get a sperm sample that wasn’t affected by microgravity from the astronauts to begin with.

Headline made me think that “The Mainichi” was the culprit for the thefts.

No, it was a weasel. One of the other kinds of long, furry noodle creatures.

Got a link to the Onion story? Couldn’t seem to find it.

Yes. For a while, South Korean internet nicknamed him the “Gold Goblin” (after Diablo), since he was so disliked that anyone shown hitting him would receive a decent amount of money in donations.

Yes, it’s that thing what 4-chan hackers known as Anonymous use, isn’t it?

It’s particularly bad now that it’s forcibly embedded into every computer, and at the forefront.

You can’t hit Win-C by mistake any more, since Windows will instead open a window to “chat with friends and family” by trying to install Teams. (Which makes it particularly bad on my end is that the install broke, so it will randomly pop up later with “Cannot install teams at the moment. Please try again later.”)

And never try to deal with dates and timezones.

Or anything that looks like dates.

Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and ‘helpfully’ convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).

It’s bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.

It isn’t over nothing, though. Allergen information was missing.

Sure, it seems silly in this case, but not enforcing it also leaves wiggle-room that you really don’t want for food labelling, otherwise companies could just start leaving stuff out of it because it’s “obvious”.

No-one with a nut allergy wants to be unexpectedly landed in the morgue because the company didn’t put “contains cashews” in the label for their satay, since it’s obvious, as nearly every satay sauce on the market contains cashews.

You can turn it off, but the fact that you have to go into the settings and toddle about is ridiculous.

It’s a notepad, why does it even need settings to twiddle?

Enterprise would riot if they did.

They might do it later, but as it stands, this isn’t the old notepad, and gets used by a good bit more than just Enterprise users, so they can stick their AI into it.

This way when the country bursts into flames it won’t bring the rest of the world with it.

The interconnected nature of the world these days means that it would be inevitable that everyone else would be embroiled in whatever it is that happens.

People also forget that YouTube ran at a loss for well over a decade.

And any new start up would have to compete with YouTube and their massive audience, and all the other sites. There’s a reason that Vimeo never made quite the same height, for example.

Or reprise their old assistants from XP.

At least a “computer Wizard” would make them stand out compared to ChatGPT in a funny box.

Also a way to spoof the input.

If the app is so paranoid that it refuses to work after detecting a different keyboard, I should be surprised if it allowed screenshots.

Excel definitely has its flaws though. For example, in science, it will mangle your data in its attempts to be helpful by reformatting the file if you so much as open it.

The genomics committee had to change their naming scheme for some genes because excel kept converting them into dates (for example, you had a MAR-10 gene, it’d be converted into a timestamp or 3/10) and destroying the names, even if the file wasn’t saved.