I think at some point in the future, after the main storyline ends, maybe a thousand years hence, humanity gets flung back into the dark ages, meaning we have to re-learn how to be a technological race without assistance from the elder races. It has been a long, long time since I watched it and I might have misunderstood/misremembered what was going on though.

This could be what they’re talking about anyway.

That’s just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

That doesn’t mean they’re making good choices, but it does explain why they’re making them.

Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.

The former is British, the latter is American. Noah Webster eliminated letter doubles in words where he thought the extra one didn’t add anything useful. Another word that did the same thing is “level(l)ing”.

I was going to suggest putting something in the water that would discourage swimming, but I guess it needs to be worse than whatever’s already in there… and not kill the wildlife. That’s a fine line if it exists at all.

When that happens often enough, the supermarket installs something that locks the wheels when the trolleys go out of range.

You can still get the trolley away by other means, sure, but I imagine it’s a pain to have to do that when there are wheels right there.

Wait. Tiny Batman head?! How often do they deviate from the standard format like this?! Part of the gag is that it’s exactly the same six panels with different text each time. Now there’s Batman?!

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' might be your friend in Bash. It won’t help in scripts and GUIs though, so you’d still have to deal with that.

There are ways to write functions that pick the right option intelligently, but that’s asking for trouble. One day something will create a better match for your guess and then things will go wrong, e.g. your script intelligently turns downloads into Downloads but then something actually goes and creates downloads. Your script chooses the impostor because it’s a better match. Oops.

And then there’s always ln -s Downloads downloads. That might be enough to confuse that helpful thing that would otherwise create downloads. It’s already there, ready for use. And it works in custom scripts and things too. Until you move your script to a different user or machine, anyway.

Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

(The people who monitor and ensure the good behaviour of (i.e. “police” as a verb) law enforcement (the police) are called the “police police”. The people who do the same for the police police must therefore be the police police police. The original phrasing structure is “2 verb 1. 3 verb 2.”)

I’d bet a few of those actually do want to exclude people from the other UK nations. Not as many as are flying the flags, I grant you, but nonetheless. Colonialist mindset still runs deep in some of the English.

If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.

Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.

Making repeated efforts to ruin a person’s day is harassment.

Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I’m not either of those but it seems like there’s a strong case here.

I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.

Adopting IPA would be wrong because it would require that everyone talk exactly the same way.

I admit that of the things rm could be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It’s still bad practice in my book.

This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.

Sure, go ahead and alias ls to have extra options like --color, but don’t alias rm to do nothing, or even rm -i (-i is interactive and prompts for each file).

Why? Because one day you’ll be logged into a different system that doesn’t have your cushioning alias and whoops, bye-bye files.

Now that you think about it, you thought that ls output looked weird, but that didn’t actually break anything.

As you suggest, yes, look into your OS’s trash option, but leave rm alone.

GNOME-derived systems can use gio trash fileglob (or gvfs-trash on older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.

KDE’s syntax sucks, but it’s kioclientX move fileglob trash:/ where X may or may not be present and is a version number of some kind.

You could set up a shell function or script that fixes that syntax and give it any name you like - as long as it doesn’t collide with a standard one. On that rare foreign system it won’t exist and everything will be fine.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

It’s been on a low boil for a while now. Think of it a bit like a Rick Roll or that one joke a stand-up comic repeatedly comes back to during their set. If it happens a lot it can stop being funny to the point of annoyance, but then there’s a spike in it being funny again if the frequency keeps up, or there’s an especially clever or unexpected iteration of it.

Something something running a joke into the ground something something hahaha, etc.

Banksy is as much a person as Nicolas Bourbaki was. Although unlike Bourbaki, there is allegedly one guy who is kind of the main guy, but if that one guy goes to prison, I’m fairly certain Bansky artworks will continue to appear.

In fact I’d put money on the fact that one would appear in a prominent place soon after.

And if the establishment somehow manage to round up every single person associated with Banksy and manage to get something to stick to every single one of them, which I strongly doubt is possible, the rise in wannabe Banksy groups doing the same thing won’t be far off.

The artwork is almost always made with stencils and spray paints. Stencils can be prepared well in advance. A trained group could have one of these up in under a couple of minutes.

If I was Banksy - or one of them - I would almost certainly have distributed my art to trusted individuals for the event of my incarceration and beyond.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

Actual populists rarely call themselves populists, you got that right at least. Mainly because a good chunk of people they pander to aren’t bright enough to understand the term “populist”.

But the ones I can think of are all firmly right wing. Trump. Orbán. Farage. And not one of them is, or would call themselves “leftist”.

There was one guy back in the late 1930s who tried that and it didn’t go well for him, and I suspect that makes them nervous.

But then, you probably think that guy actually was a socialist.