Operation paper clip

Operation paperclip was when the US government smuggled Wernher Von Braun and about sixteen hundred other nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians into America for to build rockets and kickstart the cold war.

You’re thinking of operation snow white.

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld the wizards of the Unseen University built a possibly sentient supercomputer out of an ant farm (much faster and more powerful than previous druid-built computers based on standing stones, which were mostly limited to calendar calculations and required regular human sacrifices).

The Agathean Empire at the edge of the disc has little boxes with little imps inside which can paint a picture of what you point the box at in mere seconds.

Later, some Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs trained imps to paint even faster on highly flammable nitrocellulose reels and, moving them very fast and lighting them from behind with excited salamanders, invented moving pictures (and promptly accidentally almost let the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions enter the disc).

Even later, some other Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs created a continent-spanning network of semaphore telegraphs, even managing to send pictures through it.

All while some Dwarves in Ankh-Morpork invented movable type, while getting in trouble with the wizards, who’re well aware that you can’t use that to print magic books, for the type will remember…

And, all along, deep under their mountains, the Überwaldian dwarves have been digging up and using ancient Devices to power whole cities…

You don’t want guns in a spaceship. Don’t want to poke a hole in a wall and open it to space.

Swords make a lot more sense when fighting inside a spaceship. (Granted, short swords, probably, due to the limited space, but still.)

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

— Pratchett, maybe…?

Because capitalism!

For today’s lucky ten thousand, the Ballmer Peak:

Source: XKCD 323.

Personally I’m partial to replacing very x for more x¹ than a very x thing in a pot.

I’m fairly certain I got it from Blackadder, but I can’t recall the episode.

1.– Or xer, where appropriate. Eg., this list is sillier than a very silly thing in a pot.

That’s a good question.

Applied science and engineering, I suppose, or the results thereof…?

Or, anything that we intentionally make that isn’t naturally found in nature…

It does get a bit fuzzy, though… some kinds are easy: machines, tools, architecture… but are writing and maths technology, or are they something else? What about dogs, or farm animals like pigs? We certainly made them (not cats, though, they took care of that whole domestication business all by themselves)… GMOs are quite evidently technology, but what about most of the vegetables and fruits we eat? We made those too… maize, or most citruses, for instance, wouldn’t exist without centuries or millennia of selection and grafting…

And it gets even fuzzier when you get to animals… crows can intentionally modify a stick to make it better to get a seed out of a tube, making it a tool, and therefore technology if it was us doing it… dams are certainly technology when we make them, but what about beaver made dams? Knots are probably technology when we tie them, but what about a cuttlefish tying her eggs to algae stems? And let’s not get into termites or especially ants, with their air conditioning, and fungal agriculture, and aphid farming…

Call bells are technology.

No, the point is to prevent real democracy by being “democratic enough”.

All the constitutional monarchies started as just monarchies.

Nope.

Spain, for instance, started as a dictatorship.

Then the bastard died of being an old piece of shit, hopefully extremely painfully, and the corrupt fratricidal parasite he’d named as a successor, a descendant of some dude who had been king long before the dictatorship (which started as a coup against a democratic republican government) he’d been grooming for years, was named king.

There was a sham “democratic transition” that defecated a “democratic construction” with the military threatening the elected politicians to make sure the new constitution wasn’t too democratic, and a referendum where the people voted for that thing because at least it wasn’t as bad as going back to the dictatorship.

Then a few years later the parasite (secretly) staged a coup, and then publicly diplomatically dismantled it, enshrining himself as a saviour of democracy and making sure the citizenship wouldn’t push for radical change, lest the next coup succeed.

As the bastard Franco said before he died, he left everything “tied up and well tied up”.

OK, technically, he was found “liable for battery and defamation”; effectively, though, it was rape.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.

He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

The former requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape. He cited definitions offered by the American Psychological Association and the Justice Department, which in 2012 expanded its definition of rape to include penetration “with any body part or object.”

Worth remembering that Putin practically grew up in the KGB.

Revenge. 🤷‍♂️

That’s what Captain Disillusion’s face looks like. 🤷‍♂️

The guy playing Captain Disillusion, however, appears without face paint (well, maybe flesh coloured face paint, I’ve never been good at recognising makeup and he seems like the kind of guy that’d make sure not to have weird shines and whatnot in video, though to be fair he’s perfectly capable of fixing that in post, so who knows really) in this very video (for a short but maybe slightly too long sketch), as well as, if I recall correctly (Captain Disillusion’s videos are sadly rather infrequent, so it’s been a while), in at least one other of his videos…

Having a child is morally equivalent to aggravated murder (you’re intentionally directly causing that person’s death, as well as decades of pain and suffering), so no, breeders shouldn’t be treated differently than any other murderer (though they probably aren’t more likely to murder an already conceived person than the average citizen, which isn’t saying much).

Of course some people might adopt, and therefore are merely enabling murderers, but they’re statistically insignificant, so I’d say it’s safe to assume that anyone who has children is either a murderer or a child trafficker.

In any case, no, fuck them, they might deserve to be treated differently, but definitely not in a positive way.

how something can be both compressed and lossless at the same time

I assume most people who’ve used a computer are familiar with lossless compression formats like ZIP files.

Of course, though, it doesn’t matter how familiar an audiophile is with digital formats. They’ll still believe that more expensive cables sound better, and they’ll keep on believing that even if you show to them that they can’t tell an expensive cable from a bargain bin one in a blind test.

WizTree scans my entire drive

It doesn’t, really. It’s already indexed. It’s a feature of the NTFS file system. It’s the same way Everything Search can find files almost instantly, and what Windows Search used back when it worked properly in the Windows XP days.

Why Microsoft stopped using that and switched to whatever the current useless search function uses escapes comprehension, though it probably has something to do with them wanting to shove Bing results and other spam in there.