Not all states support recalls. California kind of goes all in on the democracy thing with the ease of introducing ballot initiatives and recalls and such. It’s mostly fine, but it can also result in pretty stupid plays like this.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

Not only is this just about the only deadnaming I support, I think we should all use the Spanish rolled “R.”

Also it’s the only time I’d be comfortable saying “No, where are you really from?”

People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

Um, yes?

I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.

In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”

Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?

Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

They weren’t countries. They became countries when the colonizers (and I’m using that term as accurately as possible) lumped together into managed regions and then told them they were countries with their own governments and flags. It was all “We’re going to conquer these people and these people and these people, then put Governor Fitzroy, nephew to the Prince, in charge of all of it with a big army to back him up.” Then they wrote laws and made flags and all the happy crappy stuff they do. Then they lost WWII (because pretty much everyone except for the US lost WWII), and said “you’re on your own.”

They turned former colonies into artificial countries with governments that all but guaranteed factionalism.

There was always war, and there always will be war. But the specific type of war we’re seeing in former colonies is because of the post-colonial situation.

Also that whole India/Pakistan thing. And I seem to remember some stuff happening in Africa.