It can get longer if sailing between Madagascar and the rest of Africa but Pakistan-Russia does not have the same ring to it, I guess.

Not to mention, India’s coastline is very much not straight on a local scale. You’re bound to find a place where it turns perpendicular to the journey close to the theoretical starting point anyway.

around Antarctica in a straight line

No, that’s not Earth’s great circle, you’ll be turning slightly. It only seems straight on most map projections.

The other characters are quite perplexed about the idea of 3D, too, not just the stupid Homer. A scientist gives a brief lecture, similar to how scientists IRL introduce 4D.

Anyway, that answers the good old question “Is the gruesome cartoon Itchy & Scratchy photorealistic from the Simpson’s POV?”

In the Czech Republic, BILLA uses them and they respond to the RFID reader on my phone. It’s a different kind though, most have black-white-red displays.

Can’t wait for somebody to hack them, the displays are certainly neat. Especially if they manage to add it to an existing Home Automation network without extra hardware.

AFAIK, they use RFID now so they must be changed manually but maybe someday, they will devise a price-gouging scheme involving face detection and tracking people with security cameras.

“Here comes this lady that always buys four cans of dog food despite the last price increase! Let’s notch it up it by another 20%!”

…One day, we might see the technique become so common that people will explain astral projections by comparing them to remote logins.

I agree. As long as anonymous voting doesn’t cause obvious trolling/spam issues, it should be preferred.

One of the reasons I’ve always found Facebook off-putting and never used it (even before learning about the shady practices) are the very visible votes. I tend to overanalyse any reaction and would judge people based on their votes on my posts, even if I consciously tried to avoid it. Similarly, I imagine some other people would do the same and I’d feel like I’m under surveillance.

[A patient] found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the stranger was his wife.

Thankfully, the patient was Canadian so the wife survived the encounter.

unironically, your votes have great influence on the fate of posts

Multiplication. It’s why it’s on the numpad.

Also, normal non-technical text also never uses these keyboard characters @^\|_ ` but they are there. If the computer keyboard was designed for proper typography, there would be keys for nbsp, curly quotes or the em dash.

Squish that cat

Auch, wenn es sich um Kategorie abartige Kostüme handelt?

(Ist “abartig” das richtige Wort? Der Übersetzungsdienst, den ich normal verwende, bietet etwas anderes an.)

Project 2025 playbook: “Don’t leave behind a paper trail for watchdogs to discover.”

Some hero from the Centre for Climate Reporting with a hidden camera: “Challenge accepted. Text doesn’t go viral anyway.”

As a person regularly writing regular expressions, the usage of * in a written language rubs me the wrong way. I wouldn’t mind Mitarbeiter/innen, similar to how Czech does it (prodavač/ka, although some are impossible to shorten like skladník/skladnice, as skladník/ce sounds too weird, much like Krankenschwesterinnen would).

Arbitrators are very likely to lose their business if they rule against their more frequent client (which is the company of course).

It’s spelled roofying or roofieing

I hope some politician finally steps in and nullifies all forced arbitration clauses, in past and future contracts. There is no legitimate reason for them to be allowed from the customer’s standpoint (and most voters are primarily customers).

I wrote this after they made the decision, as an “order” joke. Personally, I wouldn’t mind playing pirated copies from an SD multicart or a PC emulator but there are people who care about that.