Or places which are already heavily inhabited/productively used. Inland river valleys are some of the most desirable real estate, in human habitation terms.

Major river dams are often only feasible in countries which either have lots of sparsely populated wilderness (like North America), or which don’t have a problem with displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying whole communities (like China). Takes it off the menu for a lot of the world.

Would it particularly affect the performance if the sphere ends up covered in barnacles or coral? It’s what’s inside that matters (it’s just a big hollow tank).

You’ve pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.

You can’t force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that’s a different matter.

What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple?

People in the FOSS community constantly talk about the best ways to minimise use of Google, Apple and Microsoft products. That is an absolutely valid motivation for choosing to use one project over another.

If someone is willing to use the behaviour of a company or its owners as a factor when choosing a software stack, presumably it’s valid to apply the same sentiment to development teams of smaller projects too.

I’ve worked in jobs where my colleagues are good friends of mine, and other jobs where my colleagues are just colleagues and nothing more.

I’m lucky to currently work with people I genuinely get on very well with. I don’t go out for after work drinks with them (because I have small children and lots to do and no money), but I’d happily wile away an evening in the pub with them when it comes up.

I don’t know how they do it in the US, but in the UK most big companies outsource application checks to several big clearing houses. They handle the logistics of checking qualifications and obtaining references from previous employers, plus the optional enhanced checking that some companies need (such as DBS/criminal record checks).

In the UK there is a single official centralised system for checking degree qualifications which covers most major universities. It’s also only a 5 minute job to email a university registrar directly. I think most big companies would consider this a bare minimum task when recruiting for any role where a qualification is in any way important.

It was 16 but only with parental consent and only with a marriage partner 21 or younger.

16 with parental consent is quite common. Mississippi I think is 15. Some allow marriage younger than this (some have effectively no minimum age), but with the requirement for consent to also be sought through the courts.

What’s the consequences of being caught lying on your resume? you lose your good job.

I used to work as a trade union officer representing people at disciplinaries. I’ve represented several people over the years who were sacked for lying on their CVs.

Not only did they lose their job, but they’ll get a “sacked for gross misconduct” reference from that employer making it much more difficult to get another job. Those in regulated roles also ended up with gross misconduct records with the regulator, making it essentially impossible to work in that field again.

So no, it’s not a risk free game.

Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.

I’m currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can’t be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.

If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

Not quite the same thing I think.

My understanding of “no contingency” is more to do with inspections, certifications etc. I.e. an offer has been made that isn’t going to be cancelled if the structural survey comes back with a load of issues to fix.

“Chains” in UK real estate lingo are about whether your sale is tied to other sales. For example, if you’re buying a house from an owner-occupier who won’t move out (and give you your new house) until the new house that they’re buying is ready- that’s an onward chain. A chain in the other direction would be someone who says that they’ll buy a house, but will only have the money to make the purchase once they’ve got a sale locked in for their current house. Selling a house with “no onward chain” is telling the buyer that they can have it as soon as they’ve got the money, and that the seller isn’t waiting for anything.

Chains can get very messy and complicated, as you can end up with s dozen house sales all tied up with each other waiting for one house in the chain to be ready to go before any of the others can go.

I’ve just discovered that the vets in my town are owned by Mars Inc.

You know, of “Mars Bars” fame.

Who knew?

The family next door used to have furious, thunderous rows all the time, until the couple got divorced and the dad moved out; now it’s all very harmonious.

In my old house I once heard the woman having sex with someone who definitely wasn’t her partner (as he was very definitely out at work at the time). That relationship ended before I moved house!

I’m deaf as a post, so when I watch TV I have a tendency to watch it too loud; apologies to my neighbours for that. But actually I don’t watch a lot of telly these days, so they mostly dodge that bullet.

I would use both ways depending on context, but ee-ther by default.

I’m in Swindon.

Imagine trying to dust that. Just think of the cobwebs.

maybe turn the three sisters

Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.

Obviously toasted. I mean what the fuck.

I’m pretty free and easy with the toppings. Marmite is good. Jam is good. Golden syrup is good.

My dad used to make his standard “Sunday night supper” of crumpets with cheese, garlic, sliced tomato, done under the grill cheese-on-toast style. Haven’t had that for ages, but it was awesome.

Very co-operative mother!

I’m a politics person, and knocking the doors is a significant part of the deal. 2 hours per door knock 2-3 times per week is not at all unusual. Also council meetings and various party meetings scattered amongst the evenings.