Peeked at Bluesky the other day and was thinking "wow a lot of these posts are in Portuguese". It took an embarrassingly long time for me to connect the dots.

Anyway, my point is, damage has been done to Xitter's user base in Brazil. How much damage remains to be seen.

2K was my jam.

The death of the DOS line of Windows (3.x, 9x, ME) lead to the decision to inject clown DNA into NT in order to appeal to the masses and that's how we ended up with XP.

Vista was an attempt to eradicate the clown, but it was still there, people hated it and because Microsoft thought they had eradicated the clown, they thought people wanted more clown, and that's how we ended up with Windows 8.

What about 7? The clown gene skipped a generation.

In Britain, if not Europe, "purple" is often blackcurrant, not grape.

"Critter" being a variant of "creature", which OP also uses. They seem to want something coarse-grained but not that coarse.

Paid healthcare does exist here. We call it "private healthcare", and there's usually a regular subscription fee if not also insurance. I'm sure for those of us who have that, there are plans where you get vaccines thrown in as a "freebie", but those people are probably paying more than £100 every six months for the privilege.

Why does God need men to do His killing?

Was this man killed in a way pleasing to God or only to the men who performed the killing?

Do the killers presume to know the mind of God?

That sounds awfully blasphemous to me.

The reason people aren't bothering is that we've gone all USA healthcare with regard to the vaccines. If you want one, find a pharmacy that will provide one and be prepared to cough up at least £40. And be sure to shop around and/or be prepared to travel because some places charge £100.

A whole lot of people don't have even the low end of that kind of money, even if "the right thing to do" would be to make sacrifices - like, say, go cold or hungry for a couple of weeks, how hard could that be? - in order to make sure they get it. And then do the same again every six months from now until something else kills them.

And even if someone has £100 to spare, that's a lot of money that could be spent on something other than feeling like crap for three days.

There are exemptions (i.e. free vaccines) for those over 64, the infirm, and health workers, but the rest of us can suck it, apparently.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55045639

If you're not in any hurry, The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth.

Although technically that's several books, not a book.

Nitpicking here, but unless there are multiple sites, that's just a LAN (local area network), and even across multiple sites without certain other bits and pieces, it's still "only" a WAN (wide area network).

Admittedly, the latter can be called an internet (lowercase i important). The LAN would be an intranet.

To replace the Internet (capital-i and all) you'd need, at the very least, a DNS server of some sort, if not reimplementation of any tools that assume IANA and ICANN are at the top of the hierarchy (or successfully lying to them about where those roots are on the network).

To head off the question of where VPNs fit into all of this: Any or all of this could be implemented over a VPN that uses the existing capital-I Internet to transfer data, at the expense of some bandwidth.

Some care would be needed to not let data leak onto the real Internet at any of the end points, but it could be done. This is basically what TOR does for the Dark Web.

Not if Microsoft have deleted it off your computer.

Link to actual file. Needed it for reasons.

Pretty sure I've heard or read that the Quran is supposed to be the literal word of God and any human who was holding the pen was merely a conduit.

Therefore any mistakes are not, in fact, mistakes because God is infallible and that would be impossible. As such, we should amend our own grammar to match the Quran and not the other way around.

Anyone who suggests otherwise should be dealt with accordingly.

I'm not saying I agree with this logic, only that there is a perverse kind of sense to it.

As for "but it's written one way in one paragraph and in another way in another paragraph" well you'll just have to derive what context is responsible for the change in grammar and adjust yourself accordingly. Consult your local mullah. But be careful how you ask your question or you might end up on the run.

(May I suggest claiming you were confused by a different dialect of Arabic.)

Both absurdity and repetition can be funny and the sketch has both in uncomfortable number.

I find it a bit grating, but I think that's the point. And the sketch writers were clearly aware there was something (deliberately?) off about the whole thing which is why they make overt with DSP's catchphrase.

My use of "rent" in quotes was not to imply that no payment was being made, but that "rent" isn't quite the right word in that context.

Sorry for the confusion.

The way I read it (specifically the Reuters link provided elsewhere), it's the total cost of upkeep, not just any "rent" to China. The fact they're on loan makes them an easy target for sending elsewhere to cut costs. Other animals might not have anywhere quite so easy to go back to.

I think I could live with the scale error, and even forgive the lack of asteroid belt, if only Venus wasn't smaller than Mercury.

... Maybe I'm taking this a little too seriously.

.net.uk and .ltd.uk are also regulated to some degree. You have to be an ISP (or very similar) for the former and have to provide proof you're a real limited company (by way of company number) for the latter. There may be others.

In fact, I think a company number might have been required to get a .co.uk at one point.

Caveat: This knowledge is mostly from before they opened up the second level for registrations. Originally there was a fixed list of second level domains all under control of the same entity, and they lasted a surprisingly long amount of time before going for the money grab of opening it all up.

I daresay that there are still restrictions on that. I can't imagine they would have let police.uk go to someone other than, you know, the police.

... without consulting a structural engineer and one of those walls was supporting.

You know how I know this didn't happen?

The ball should be white with a yellow stripe.

A treaty that died the moment Russian tanks crossed the border.

Not saying Ukraine have nukes, nor that they should have them, but if they did, they wouldn't be in violation of that particular treaty.