palordrolap

I’m self taught at this stuff, and am still very amateur, so I might be entirely off base. I rely on sources like Wiktionary and those YouTubers who do etymology for the love of it and don’t seem to have any kind of agenda.

That one’s from a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor rather than from a specific known language outside of PIE culture.

I mean, it’s plausible that “water” also comes from one specific language to have ended up in PIE, but it’s further back than we can trace, so we can’t be as certain as we can be for “channel”. There’s also that water is a lot more fundamental to a language than channels, or reeds, are, which makes it less likely to be a borrowing.

On the other hand, PIE did have at least two words for each of water (ancestors of “water” and “aqua”) and fire (“fire” and “igni(s)-”), if not other words. This is somewhat reminiscent of how English ended up with a lot of doubled words after the Normans took over a thousand year ago, so maybe something like that happened back then too.

You should seek out the etymology, which has been doing the rounds in the last year or so, of “POG”.

But if you’re not familiar with or interested in online video game streamers and the whole lingo that goes around that world, you might be more interested in something a bit more generic like “channel” which traces all the way back to an ancient Sumerian word for “reed”.

But if you do decide to do this, and I should stress that this does not constitute a suggestion to do so, make sure to go out in clearly identifiable footwear and clothing and with no head or face coverings so that the camera can get a good look at you before it dies, you filthy, filthy vandal.

There was this one story that lives rent free in my head, which is terrifying when you realise. And this comment might pass it on, so read on at your peril.

It might be a Steven Baxter story. I know I read it in an anthology, but it could have been a different author.

The story is about a person who lives in a world where it’s illegal to not use augmented reality devices every moment of every day, to ensure that you’re seeing enough ads and behaving like a law-abiding citizen.

The protagonist is in charge of an investigation into people who deliberately live outside this system and seek to disrupt it. One of these people may or may not be the protagonist’s son.

The story meanders for a bit but the investigation is hampered by the very technology it seeks to enforce, so the protagonist insists that their augmented reality device temporarily disable everything.

It claims to have done so, but it soon becomes clear that augmentation is still going on.

So the protagonist invokes an override to turn it all off.

Something somewhere was definitely doing the conversion for you, but it could have been your editor, the compiler or something in between like a C preprocessor directive getting loaded in by your configuration.

I bet there’s a not insignificant chunk of Win3.11 code still lurking at the heart of Windows even now. Patched and recompiled for 64 bits, but still there.

Though most of it is probably for backwards compatibility by this point. Or so we should hope.

So I have a few.

Staying in bed of a morning until I can’t bear to remain there. Usually my body craves getting up one way or another before my brain does on account of less than stellar mental health. (Which also explains why there aren’t any external reasons to get up. I can serve no masters in this state.)

Sugar on my otherwise relatively sugarless cereal. It’s the cheapest I can get and the laws here have taken most of the fun out of cereal anyway, so there’s not much to enjoy in them at all otherwise.

Even having cereal come to that since I’m rarely up what I consider early enough to have it.

Spending all day on the computer Edit: doing what I want, except for food and bathroom visits.

Going to bed at an hour that makes sense relative to my usual morning. Using the electric blanket.

You might ask if any of these are guilty, but yes, yes they are. There is constant pressure from society to be an early riser who works for someone else from 8 till 8, six days a week, then spends whatever’s left looking after house and home, and if you fail at any of that, you’re judged. And I feel every bit of it from without as well as within.

As a non-synaesthete, I dug around in my brain until the answer “white” came to me.

The reason: I am old and Control+E on a Commodore 64 (and some of its close relatives) would turn the cursor and text colour to white. It was the only Control+<letter> that affected a colour change too.

If you’re talking about applications that can be made to act how their namesake predecessors did 30 years ago, sure. The Unix mindset is all about that.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that anything on a modern Unix-like system hasn’t been modified, patched or rewritten from scratch at some point in the last 30 years. More than once. Even /bin/false has a changelog.

Cook? Never. Unless you count a) putting something ready-made into a microwave or b) pouring hot water on noodles. And both are somewhat rare in my diet due to poor cost to nutrition ratio.

Cold foods don’t seem to have the same repetition problem for me, so for those it’s all the prep I can muster before the despair sets in.

haha forking processes and killing children

wait

In British and Australian slang at the very least, “k*ddie fiddler” is a legitimate euphemism for, well, you know.

Would not be surprised if that’s somewhere at the root of the miscategorisation.

There are instances where a creditor will have a claim on the deceased’s estate. For example, mortgages and car loans generally aren’t written off when the named bill payer dies. (Edit: late correction. Payee is the creditor. Payer is the debtor. I think most people understood what I meant even with the wrong word. D’oh)

Other things will depend on how hard the creditor is willing to try to get the money they’d otherwise lose.

There’s a bit at the end of the article that might be counter to the RDP that it talks about, even if it is deliberately vague.

I dunno. There are some of us who run Mint not because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we do* and we don’t want to have to deal with any more nonsense than we absolutely have to.

From that small cohort, there are those of us who’ll frown when all we have open is a few browser tabs and the system’s using 8GB of RAM, twice the “recommended” spec. On startup with nothing running it’s over 1GB.

It’s hard not to see it as wasteful when you’re old enough to remember perfectly good machines running on single-digit megabytes. **

* Or at least, think we do.

** Yes, things are much more complex these days. But are they really a thousand times more complex?

There’s at least a couple of puns going on here. You may already know some of the following.

First of all, Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late '80s. It was designed as a system administrating, text processing glue language with aspects of shell scripting, awk, sed, the greps and a whole host of other things.

This is the first part of one of the puns. Perl was, and may still be, used as a filter in command line pipelines.

The other pun comes from the fact that perhaps the most important Perl book, Programming Perl was published by O’Reilly who generally put some sort of apparently unrelated animal on the cover of their titles. For Perl this was a camel.

Camel is, or was, a brand of cigarettes. Therefore this is the second pun. The pack of cigarettes has “Perl” where it should read “Camel” but still has the picture of a Camel, like both the book and the cigarettes.

Cigarattes, of course, often have filters on the mouth end of them, which completes the first pun. I do not know if any Camel cigarettes have these, but that’s not strictly important. Some cigarettes do. Perl-branded Camels almost certainly would do.

The third (fourth?) pun, which may or may not be intended, is that some people think that programming in Perl is damaging to one’s health.

Listen, I’m convinced the next kernel will finally fix the bug that in rare circumstances causes my potato to spontaneously mash itself and start whistling dixie.

… or maybe I’m confusing my potato with my brain again.

Bad things can’t happen if we’re not here to witness them. For there to be no end to the horrors, we must therefore be immortal.

Perhaps, in a world such as this, the pessimist ought to expect himself immortal.