I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the full texts.

That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.

(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that’s arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of 418 I am a teapot).

It’s off center, but still balanced because it hasn’t fallen.

Until a vibration hits, or someone blows gently on the blocks at the top right.

Perl. CPAN has been around for a long time and has some packages in it that are older than other languages’ entire repositories, I swear.

If necessary, you go full circle by 3D-printing the parts that will be exposed to the liquid out of PLA (or ABS or PETG), which can handle limonene.

Amazon will sell it to you in 55-gallon drums (that’s >200 litres) if you’re willing to pay. That’ll fill plenty of super soakers. So it depends on how serious you are about your anti-robot-uprising prep.

Those things just keep on going. I also have one that was in working condition as of a couple of years ago, which was the last time I needed a spare. It probably still works. That PS/2 rubberdome survived a bath in hot chocolate and then being completely disassembled so that I could clean out the goop that had leaked in between the membranes, and went on to handle several more years of daily wear and tear before I splurged on a New Model M.

I wonder if you could use HIPS instead of PVA. Still dissolves, but in limonene rather than water, so inadvertant exposure on a rainy day wouldn’t ruin your circuit board. At the same time, the metal should still be recoverable unless there’s some chemical reaction between gallium and citrus oil that I don’t know about.

Well, Ms. Conservative MP, the government should only consider apologizing for that after you’re done apologizing, on behalf of your party, to every queer person or other minority who has been or might have been harmed by policies said party has advocated or put into place. Individually. By name.

We’ll wait.

For the same reason that “send me your advertising” ticky-boxes on website sign-ups should not be ticked by default: because the “feature” is detrimental to many (if not most) users and you have to spot the control before you can disable it. Worse, in this case many ignorant users won’t make the connection between this misfeature and the fact that their laptop is suddenly burning through its battery in double-time—they’ll just assume Firefox is now broken.

Yeah, but the level of security complexity rises once the Internet gets involved, and risk goes up by an order of magnitude once you have a server storing personal information (even temporarily). Once the random-person-in-Nebraska whose project it was pulls out, what happens to the cloud data store the sync was using? Can you guarantee it was wiped and won’t come back to haunt you years later?

The more popular software tends to have a bus factor larger than 1, so there’s some continuity for maintaining infrastructure, including data stores.

The problem is that it’s opt-out and not opt-in, and it should be opt-in.

Religion seems to be a necessary mental and emotional crutch for some people to function. Do I like that? No, but at the same time I would no more try to get rid of all religion that I would throw someone’s physical crutches into a fire without being able to immediately replace them with something better. And we don’t appear to have a “something better” for these people yet.

The United Church of Canada is distinctly progressive, and if someone needs to follow a religion, I’d much rather they pick it rather than one of the pseudo-Christian Bible-thumping cults that thinks that anyone who isn’t a straight cismale is a lesser being. There still aren’t many religious groups who would make such an apology, alas.

Anyone who thinks it’s business as usual in the US at this point is probably not sensible (but I do agree that, alas, being sensible is not a prerequisite for being a parent).

Dependencies only become an issue if you don’t distribute your source (allowing distros or individuals to compile against the shared libraries they actually have installed, and patch out minor compatibility issues). Since closed-source is frowned upon in the Linux world, it’s unsurprising that there are various sorts of pressure to Not Do That.

Would any sensible parent even give permission for their child to be on such a trip these days?

Yay? For a city with a budget of $167M for 2025, I’m not sure that this amount is much more than a rounding error.

It’s a considerably larger amount than Mayor Chirico misspent on his corporate credit card, and that has been front and center in the local news for a while now.

If it’s your only computer, you may not have a choice, and we’re talking about kids here, who are stuck with what their parents do or don’t buy them. I can easily see a teen in a lower-income household being stuck between a rock and a hard place here.

Per the “ancient” “Chinese” curse, “May you live in interesting times,” I suspect.

(The phrase is actually the brainchild of a British diplomat who was posted to China for a while sometime around 1900, if I recall correctly.)

It could be worse. I do not want to have to clean a hairball out of a keyboard ever again. (At least it was a desktop keyboard, so applying water was an option. I don’t want to even think what would have been needed to clean a similarly soiled laptop.)