And as I understand it, the existence of an inner planet (Vulcan) was a reasonable explanation consistent with Newtonian gravity. (The only problem was that the planet wasn’t there.)

You should know, it is possible that other people find this comic funny even though you don’t. And no matter how much you ‘explain’ why it isn’t humorous, you can’t undo the fact that other some people have found it funny. So then, what do you think people learn from your explanation?; Probably something about you rather than something about the comic.

At the same time as Pink Floyd singing the same line?

Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.

Partially so, but a lot of adult pain is due to bad posture, and weak muscles from lack of exercise. (Weak muscles don’t directly result in pain, but it does mean that stuff like “looking in the mailbox weird”, or sneezing, or lifting something off the floor can result in stuff going wrong.)

People downvote for a very wide variety of reasons, many of which don’t really have anything to do with the story. For for example, someone might downvote because they don’t like posts that are just screenshots from reddit. Or maybe they don’t like the brands mentioned in the story. Or maybe they’ve seen it before and don’t want to see it again. Or maybe they’re just in a bad mood and are voting harshly. Or maybe it is about the story, and they think its creepy. Or maybe it reminds them of a bad memory.

In any case, it should never be surprising when a post gets some downvotes. The more people who see it, the more likely it is that someone will have some issue with it.

(And of course, complaining about downvotes almost always results in downvotes.)

Privatization seems like a really bad idea to me. Helium is non-renewable resource. Privatization is about being ‘efficient’ at maximising profits. Do you think the people / companies that own the helium reserves are going to be interested in keeping helium available for centuries in the future? I’d say probably not.

For a profit based company, the only motivation to preserve the helium for future use is that maybe it will be worth a lot more money in the future. But there are two big problems with that. Firstly, the timescale is likely to be too long for the profit to be of interest. And secondly, the main reason the price would go up is scarcity; and that scarcity will come sooner if the helium is wasted in the short term. (Unless one company actually has a monopoly on helium, in which case they can create artificial scarcity by just not selling it. But that would obviously be bad for other reasons.)

I wouldn’t say ‘outperform’… Cell death is a deliberate and desirable feature. Without it, we’d be unable to repair damage.

Free food, but confined to a tiny unchanging living space where your entire purpose is to be observed by others; vs no free food, but more person freedom. Which do you think is better?

Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you’d be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don’t care that I’m dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area… I’m just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.

The tides will turn though. I’ve been denouncing google for years, and I’ve find it quite striking how the pushback has disappeared recently. It use to be that any negative comment about google was met by a small army of google fans. That just isn’t the case any more.

Widelands is a great strategy / building game. The gameplay and UI style is a niche - but that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s doing something different to most games.

(The gameplay is similar to Settlers 2; before that franchise changed direction.)

[edit] But the open-source game I’ve spent the most time playing would be OpenXcom-extended, with xpiratez. That game is truly huge.

CrossCode is fantastic. But it is not an open source game.

In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

They removed the soldier’s hand!? That’s serious dedication!

“To many people too cure” Got it.

I agree that it is creepy and subservient… but it is also entirely accurate. The dog is a pet. It is entirely reliant on the owner, and it is only allowed to do what the owner lets it do. It eats when the owner tells it to. It goes outside only when the owner says so. It probably even had its genitals removed at the request of the owner.

So yeah, ‘master’ is an appropriate word here.

I find it a bit uncomfortable too, which is why I don’t have a pet. But from what I can tell, dogs are generally fine with this arrangement. Most dogs seem to like it this way.

The angle is so bad that I was wondering if it was a joke about them falling asleep right at the start of their movie-marathon, before even eating their pizza.

No only that, but people think about the products, and talk about them with others as a result of the ads. So even if an ad doesn’t lead to a direct purchase (or even a click), it still leads to an advantage over competing products and ideas.

Heck, we sometimes even see ads posted and talked about here on lemmy - because people sometimes think they are interesting, or annoying, or controversial, or whatever other reason. In any case, the idea gets spread around - which is the goal of the advertise.

That definitely is not what I was saying. What I’m saying is that mocking and taunting people does not help social cohesion. It can cause reluctance and spite. We just don’t need that.