Reminds me of that slightly meta Eddie Izzard bit where he talks about doing a joke in French to a French-speaking audience where he impersonated Sean Connery. Imagine Connery speaking French in his own acshent and idioshyncratic shtyle; kind of funny even without whatever it was he was saying. Unfortunately, none of the French audience had appreciated it much, and so after the gig he asked someone about it.

It was then he learned that Francophone audiences were more familiar with Connery’s designated French-speaking dub actor, who sounded nothing like Connery.

The audience might have understood what was going on, but it kind of killed the joke.

Depends if you go with the original idea, or the battery idea designed by Hollywood execs who didn’t think the audiences would understand.

… thus proving that Hollywood execs and the people they make their changes for are only good for batteries*, but I digress.

* For legal reasons, this is a joke. I have to say this because some Hollywood execs have more lawyers than braincells**.

** For all the same reasons, this is also a joke.

Oh, I guarantee that pi is 100% normal. Just not necessarily in the base you want it to be normal in.

Owning a domain name is still a reasonably good idea, but it was never a path to fame, even back then. A stepping stone, maybe, but even then, not strictly necessary.

Yahoo mail still exists - you can even set up a new one - but they got rid of the forwarding feature for free accounts a few years ago, so you actually have to make an effort to log in to the site and check. There’s no way to access free mail accounts other than doing that. Of course, if you’re willing to pay something, you can get forwarding back and maybe something like POP or even IMAP.

Of course, if you do pay, you’ll be supporting some of the more questionable decisions made by Yahoo management.

Can’t vouch for any other distro, but aplay is alive and well on Mint. The package that contains it — alsa-utils — seems to be a core dependency for Cinnamon, even.

So basically, your example runs fine on my machine, screechy sounds and everything.

Turkish has (and maybe related languages have) genderless pronouns, but I don’t know whether that context shifts elsewhere in the sentence structure or not, and how necessary it might be in legal contracts.

There’s another, more DNS-related, reason why it was usually preferred to have something before the domain part. It’s possible to alias a subdomain to another subdomain, but not so with the root of a domain, which must point directly at a single IP address.

If your IP addresses are more subject to change than your hostnames, or your site was hosted on a third party service, then it made sense to point www at a particular hostname rather than its address. e.g. you might point www.your-domain-here.biz at a-hostname.the-hosting-provider.tld. That’s not possible with a root domain. IP address or nothing.

Similarly, it’s possible to point a subdomain at multiple IP addresses (or multiple hostnames) at the same time, which was a cheap way to do load balancing. i.e. For a site a user hadn’t visited before, they’d be basically told one of the listed IP addresses at random, and then their local DNS cache would return that one IP address until it expired, generally giving enough time for the visitor to do what they wanted. Slap 8 different IPs in the www subdomain and you’d split your visitors across 8 different servers.

Root domain has no such capability.

Technically it would be possible to do all of that one level higher in DNS where your domain itself is the subdomain, but good luck getting a domain registry to do that for you.

I haven’t done DNS in over a decade at this point, so things may have changed in the intervening years, but this was all definitely a thing once upon a time.

You do realise that even though it’s not one of the official Mint variants, it’s still possible to install Gnome on Mint with minimal fuss?

There are people that still install and run KDE and that hasn’t been a Mint variant for some time now.

Or are you saying that Gnome should be the default variant because it’s “modern”?

The monkey’s paw curled a finger when they took off in that direction. Most old Linux/X applications will run fine under any window manager / desktop environment and, by and large, inherit the look and feel of that environment. Modern Gnome apps say “no” to that and look like Gnome apps wherever they are.

Since the Mint team are forking Gnome apps precisely to avoid that behaviour, I’d say Mint isn’t going to adopt Gnome proper any time soon, but as I said, you can install it if you really want.

“A 'ISO” where that apostrophe represents hard attack on the vowel sound.

As for what that is, consider the phrase “Paula asked a question.”

If enunciated clearly there’ll be a hard attack between “Paula” and “asked”.

(In this example, some — chiefly British — people will put an R sound between them if they don’t enunciate clearly. The R wouldn’t show up in “A ISO”, but this is to demonstrate hard attack, not get into those weeds.)

There was a whole show about Raccoons in the late '80s & early ‘90s. I still remember Bert Raccoon’s name so he must have been at least somewhat famous. I admit I didn’t remember the other raccoons’ names without looking them up, but it has been a while.

Looks like many episodes are up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@runwithusproductions/videos

Also, I’m surprised no-one’s said Tom Nook, even though he’s technically a tanuki, not an actual raccoon.

¯\(x_x)/¯

Pedant mode rising. “A ISO” is only valid in a few English dialects and this doesn’t read like any of those everywhere else. Also, there’s the missing apostrophe in “lets”.

The ambiguity of that abbreviation means you could well be arguing for Mangione and his methods, not against him.

And if you meant Universal rather than United, most of the folks in countries with it don’t want to lose it. Better to worship that than profits, don’t you think?

But worshipping profits made from denying people life-saving care is fine.

The Chinese AI paradox: Either it will be allowed to criticise the CCP and be ultimately shut down by the CCP because such criticism is not allowed, or it will not, hence being untrusted by anyone who is not a fan of the CCP.

The joke is that they’ve not been given in ISO8601 format, and also that they’re both ambiguous. For the second one, we can’t even tell which of the ends is the year.

My point also covers the excluded category of “doesn’t look like the consumer, doesn’t talk AND is sapient”.

We’re horrible hypocrites, but the vibe implies they shouldn’t be, and yet…

(By “we”, I mean non-vegan humans, of which there are many and I’m one. This may or may not include you. By “they”, I mean the characters in the comic.)

My point was partially that out here in the real world, we don’t care or turn a blind eye and do the murder anyway. In this cutesy cartoon where even plants can be sapient, the same ugly scenario is actually worse and it’s staring us in the face.

You might be thinking of lzip rather than lz4. Both compress, but the former is meant for high compression whereas the latter is meant for speed. Neither are particularly good at dealing with highly redundant data though, if my testing is anything to go by.

Either way, none of those are installed as standard in my distro. xz (which is lzma based) is installed as standard but, like lzip, is slow, and zstd is still pretty new to some distros, so the recipient could conceivably not have that installed either.

bzip2 is ancient and almost always available at this point, which is why I figured it would be the best option to stand in for gzip.

As it turns out, the question was one of data streams not files, and as at least one other person pointed out, brotli is often available for streams where bzip2 isn’t. That’s also not installed by default as a command line tool, but it may well be that the recipient, while attempting to emulate a browser, might have actually installed it.

How do they determine which plants are sapient and which plants are food?

FWIW, most Debians (which includes Ubuntu and Mint) have Ctrl+Alt+T set to open the default terminal program without needing to install anything else. This is usually reconfigurable in the system settings too if that’s an awkward stretch.

But I get that people like the drop-down terminals too, for which see also Yakuake and Guake.