I’ll take the entrails of a priest.

Joenald Triden

Convince Biden to drop out of the race about a week before the Democratic National Convention, citing health reasons, and name a millennial candidate who grew up on a farm with wind turbines and solar panels, before enlisting for 2+ terms, and moving to a middle-class area of a blue state after separating. Turn the convention into a media frenzy, energizing the Democratic base.

Undercuts Trump among rural Americans and veterans. Reverses all of Trump’s old and senile attacks against Biden, as he suddenly becomes the geriatric candidate. Keeps all of Biden’s supporters, while stepping away from the “genocide” criticism.

Basically, if Biden backs out a week before the convention and names someone in their 40’s, they can run on a platform of “Ok, boomer” and reach 270.

Is there anything you have done for which, if I had done the same actions, I would be irredeemable?

Is there anything that you have done, for which if I had done, you would expect me to jump into the volcano?

Feel free to judge yourself just a tiny bit more harshly than you would judge others. But only slightly. Give yourself as much of a break as you would give me after expressing remorse for my actions.

The hotter it gets, the thicker the oxide layer form

This is accurate enough for tempering of most cutting tools, but technically, the oxide layer will continue to grow if you hold a lower temperature for a longer than normal time, and might not fully develop if you reach a higher temperature for a shorter than normal period of time.

This property useful if you are trying to develop a specific color rather than achieve a specific metallurgy. You can heat to a lower temperature for a longer time to develop a deeper, more consistent color.

In my experience, it’s easier to develop colors with an oven or propane torch rather than a forge or acetylene.

I won’t say that this blade is properly heat treated; it probably isn’t. In welding, the problem is the wide variation of heat affects in a very small zone. You can have material that is very brittle just millimeters away from material that is very soft and ductile.

You’re describing “normalization”, which is a process that makes steel uniformly tough, but “plastic”. When you flex it, it bends, and stays bent. “Annealing” is a similar process, where the temperature is raised a bit higher, and the cooling slowed even more. “Annealing” leaves the steel very soft.

In tool making, you’re first looking for high hardness (acquired with a “quenching” process). This makes it very brittle; it has no elasticity.

Next, you’re dialing back that hardness with a “tempering” process, which is done at a lower temperature than the normalization process, and the cooling can be much faster. When tempered, it’s still very hard, (significantly harder than “normalized”) but now it is slightly elastic. It will flex, but beyond a critical point, it just snaps; it probably won’t take on a permanent bend.

These colors are oxide layers that form at temperatures in the “tempering” range.

If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.

Uh… You might be confusing welding and heat treating concepts…

“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.

Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?

I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.

Well, yeah. I mean, help desk deals with users at their moment of peak incompetence. If 1 in 20 users can’t figure out that “Office” is now “Libre office”, help desk is going to be swamped.

The solution is to merge help desk and HR, so that something productive can be done about PEBCAK issues.

It’s not the IT folks who need to be pushed. It’s the users.

Considering that only 2% is not Hydrogen or Helium

I assume that claim comes from:

The abundance of chemical elements in the universe is dominated by the large amounts of hydrogen and helium which were produced during the Big Bang. Remaining elements, making up only about 2% of the universe

I kind of doubt that hydrogen or helium comprise 98% of the mass of the 48 tons of meteors per day. I kinda suspect that the 48 tons of meteors are comprised almost entirely of “other” elements.

Apple has an overly authoritarian business model. They strictly control every aspect of their ecosystem.

Apple long ago alienated the kind of people who would get upset about spying, LLMs. They either never entered the Apple ecosystem, or they left it decades ago.

Every machine I’ve purchased in the last 16 years has had a Linux liveCD or USB key before first power up. Windows has tried to boot a couple times, when I was too slow to figure out how to select a boot device, but none has actually completed the boot process. I take a sort of perverse pleasure in formatting pre-installed windows without it ever having run.

Wow, I actually forgot about Vista. I never actually had it installed on anything. XP was the last OS I had installed on hardware. Win 7 was the first I knew only from VM installations.

Straw that broke the camel’s back? Every vertebra in that camel’s back has been smashed with a sledge hammer over the past 30 years.

Windows 95 was the last version I was excited about; Windows 98 SE was the last version of Windows I willingly purchased, and XP was the last one I willingly used. When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”. Since then, Windows has only existed on my computers as pirated, virtual machines.

Pilot here. I’m (supposed to) use only current VFR sectional charts, and they are only considered “current” for a 4-month window.

The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.

That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.

The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.

The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.

When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.