Viewing profile — SiVal

Yes, Dick has been a nickname for Richard for about 800 years but only got its modern slang meaning in probably late-19th or early 20th century. It seems to have come out of the Br…

The English form of daughter was also -dottir, but it was not common.

Would a bit of Post-It Note (for minimal adhesion) damage the screen coating if left on most of the time? Would even that much thickness stress the screen when opened and closed th…

It's a little sad, but you're right of course that many books no longer make business sense now that everything they offer is online and free. Well, when the AIs put us all out of …

Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up bu…

Is this for the paid version? I'm using the free version, and it hasn't asked me for a phone number, but if the paid version requires a phone number, my reaction would be the same …

I would love to see kids given the materials and taught how to build makeshift emergency radios in science class every couple of years. Then they could take them home, stick them i…

Does Apple charge 15% for each dollar up to a million plus 30% for each dollar above a million, or when you cross a million (in a year), do they suddenly jump to 30% of everything …

I understand that some businesses might want to take the hit from a cost surge because they get an even higher revenue surge. But a large fraction of sites aren't like that and wou…

I'd like the same but with one more deployment option: create a (simple) static site that doesn't require any web server. I started an old relative on Dreamweaver about 25 years ag…

I completely agree. The wonderful speed of the compiler allows for quick small-change, test, small-change, test development. In theory. They then sabotage it by making "unused" war…

If they were so advanced that they left the ordinary material world behind, then anything is possible. Otherwise, they would probably be like us in the sense that their in-use tech…

No, it's a demonstration of the mind virus that caused these changes in SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, etc. If you shift left and things get worse, you should go further left. The pro…

It's not. Combine a loud emergency whistle with Morse Code, and you have the ability to signal without any electric power over much longer distances than voice.

The article says lightning rods don't attract lightning. They just give it a safe path to ground. That makes no sense. Lightning pushes (& pulls) against resistance. Most current w…

Can you install it [edit: the .Net 7/8 platform that sounds interesting, not the IDE] for free on a Linux server and get the same benefits? (This isn't advocacy, it's a literal que…

There is some evidence that posting at certain times can help you grab that virility factor ...Or have virality as Plan A and grabbing your virility could be Plan B.

recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go... What are you referring to? This is a literal question, not advocacy. I haven't been…

I don't ever reach for my Mac screen because I'm not used to interacting with a large touchscreen. But I'll bet I would enjoy being able to use a stylus on my laptop screen when do…

Vice emerged from the hostile takeover of the National Enquirer by Google's Office of Ideological Purification.

But diamond foil is brittle, and if it cracked, all of your vacuum would leak out.

Oh, please don't let anyone at Apple hear you complain about "thicker". I'm still not back to trusting them after years of downgrades pretending to be upgrades: "We've made the thi…

With Dark Sky's API going dark, I'd like to find a good API for detailed weather data to (approximately) replace it. Low volume (personal) usage. Apple wants to present minimal dat…

What I don't understand is how lawns remain legal in California. Drive through a Silicon Valley neighborhood at midnight when the sprinklers are spraying and maybe one in fifty of …

Two great arguments for digital readers for people like your mother and me: vision and size & weight. You love to read, but it gets physically more difficult as your eyes age. With…