I always thought of “Briton” in that last sense, while “Brit” has the meaning of anyone living in the UK (almost). But that’s from an outsider’s perspective.

As my English cousin corrected me, though, “I’m English, ‘British’ could be anything!”. She wasn’t, of course, talking about the difference between English and Welsh, or Scots.

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.

I really like that water molecule analogy. Personally, I have always viewed it as so feature of the topography of our universe in a higher dimension. Think about two two dimensional people living in a spherical plane. The furthest actual distance they could get from each other would be the diameter of the sphere. Yet they wouldn’t even know of the spherical nature of their universe.

I’m not sure that they saw it as a “placeholder” at the time. It wasn’t until Mickelson and Morley demonstrated that the fixed frame of reference demanded by aether wasn’t there, paving the way for Relativity, that it was abandoned.

I don’t see people treating Dark Matter an a placeholder right now either.

But, like I said, I’m not qualified to comment.

I’m totally unqualified to comment on this, but something has always itched in my brain about dark matter. It smacks, to me, to be the aether of the 21st century.

Deal with the ethernet port issue by purchasing a 5 port ethernet switch. Maybe the rest of your issues go away?

As a Canadian driving around the UK I always found these signs strange. When passing one we would raise our fists in the air and shout, “End road work…end road work everywhere!!!”.

It amused us.

Grandma’s on the roof and we can’t get her down…???

There’s two kinds of issues: instance and pattern. The first time or two, it’s instance. You deal with those with specificity. Something like, “I would prefer not to talk about this subject with you, please stop”.

If it persists, then it’s a pattern problem. You deal with the pattern, not the instance. “I’ve asked you not to talk about subjects like this in the pant, but you haven’t stopped. This makes me feel like you don’t respect my boundaries and it’s making it difficult for me to work with you. Why are you doing this to me?”.

You can escalate from there, and this might involve management involvement but at least you’ll have the clarity of having made the situation clear before it gets there.

Honestly though, unless the coworker is actually deranged, they’ll be mortified when they find out they are making you uncomfortable and they’ll stop right away.

I think that a good starting place to explain the concept to people would be to describe a Travesty Generator. I remember playing with one of those back in the 1980’s. If you fed it a snippet of Shakespeare, what it churned out sounded remarkably like Shakespeare, even if it created brand “new” words.

The results were goofy, but fun because it still almost made sense.

The most disappointing source text I ever put in was TS Eliot. The output was just about as much rubbish as the original text.

Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.

An small InstantPot does the trick just as well, and you can use it for other stuff as well.

It helps if you are an old enough Canadian to remember the original “Hinterland’s Who’s Who” shorts.

So write it properly from the get-go. You can get 90% of the way by naming things properly and following the Single Responsibility Principle.

Stone only makes sense for people used to pounds, shillings and pence. For instance, “This costs 3 pound, 4 shilling and 8”, and, “I weight 12 stone, 6 pounds and 3 ounces”.

In this case you could view a swap partition as a safety net. Put 20-30GB in a swap partition in case something goes wrong. You won’t miss the disk space.

I’m not sure a corvette has ever counted as “major” warship.

Try living in Canada. Pretty much all the providers charge $15/day for roaming! No monthly plans available.

“Row headers” seems wrong to me. Maybe “row labels”?

FORTRAN IV was the first language I learned to program in. Punch cards!!!