As Dave Barry famously observed, the box a Water Pik comes in bears the warning, “Do not use while sleeping.”

Guns already have lengthy safety warnings etched into them. Unfortunately, there definitely isn’t enough space to describe every moronic thing people could do with them.

Recharging isn’t the issue, refilling is. The disposables are designed not to be refilled, so the manufacturer can turn around and sell you another entire one instead.

It did. That may have influenced the naming convention. The LaserDisc was actually originally conceived as the “DiscoVision.” And if that name isn’t a veritable time capsule of its era, I don’t know what is.

When deciding what to do, the order of trumps is legal, then prudent, then right. Do what is legal unless what is prudent is illegal, then do what is prudent. If doing what is right is neither prudent or legal, do it anyway because it’s right.

Never start fights with people. Always be prepared to finish a fight someone else starts with you, quickly, without posturing, hesitation, or mercy. Regardless of their size, shape, color, creed, or uniform, bullies can never be allowed to win.

When solving a problem, always start with the simplest possibility first.

Never lend anyone: Your truck, your pen, your chainsaw, or your wife. No matter what, they’re going to do something with them that you’re not going to like.

You can never have too many pens, flashlights, knives, or bullets.

“-Ette” is a common diminutive used to imply that something is a smaller version of something else. Like many things, we nicked it from the French.

Cigarette, a little cigar. Featurette, a short feature. Novelette, a miniature novel. Etc.

So, diskette, a little disk. Quite separate from the ones spinning in your company’s mainframe at the time. Those ones were two feet in diameter locked in a steel cabinet that weighs two tons. This one can fit in your shirt pocket. You get the idea.

But they’re still referred to as “drives” when arguably they aren’t that anymore, either. It’s really tough to ditch a moniker sometimes.

At its root this was originally a British vs. American English thing. However, the spelling of “disc” with a C has been used specifically as the trade name of various brands including both the throwable and optical media varieties, which have since become genericized trademarks.

For the optical media side of things, the name was coined by Phillips while they were consorting with Sony to develop the standard and named it the “Compact Disc” to compliment their already existing “Compact Cassette” product. They developed an official logo for the format which spelled it “disc.” That’s been with us ever since.

Volumes of computer storage are now colloquially referred to as “disks” because A) a significant majority of the early computer development milieu in general happened in America where we, or at least IBM, spell it with a K, and B) for a very long time, that’s exactly what they were. Tape and magnetic core memory and wire loop memory were all early developments that ultimately gave way to the longstanding popularity of magnetic platter/disk fixed storage… With some exception granted to tape, which hung around for a very long time but definitely was not a random access storage medium suitable for general purpose applications whereas disks were. It’s probably pure happenstance that the dominant non-fixed computer storage media also wound up being disk shaped, namely the various sizes and types of floppy disks. Computers handle linear tape based storage and random access disk based storage very differently, and nowadays random access permanent storage still has the “disk” moniker stuck to it even though it’s now likely to be solid state.

As a generalized descriptor of a flat circular object, either “disk” or “disc” is appropriate but which is preferred seems to be largely depending on which continent you’re from. The root of the word is indeed the Greek “discus,” as in the object yeeted across the playing field by Olympic contestants.

That’s always been my take. I would also much rather be able to easily refill the thing with whatever I want – and have control over what’s going into it (insofar as anyone can, via buying through trusted sources).

Ah. I will see your keystroke and raise you the insertion of a delete character on your terminal. Your move.

I’ve seen Big Clive’s musings on extracting rechargeable cells from these things as well. I’ve always wanted to give it a try, but somehow the apparently conscientious oiks in my neck of the woods don’t seem to litter disposable vapes everywhere so I’ve never been able to get my hands on any significant quantity of them.

It’s astounding that these things are made to just be thrown away. What an absurd amount of waste.

Granted, but if moonlight level is all you want I can already illuminate my surroundings to that benchmark with the flashlight in my pocket. We don’t need to park shit in space to accomplish that. And as a matter of fact, we already tried the “illuminate the entire town like the moon” model in the past as well. It turned out that even on a terrestrial scale it wasn’t actually a great idea because, you know, people in the vicinity who want to maybe turn it off… can’t. (Except in the latter case, maybe with the aid of a rifle.)

I am positive this is just an investor scam of some kind. If anyone is actually stupid enough to launch anything towards this end, it’s a mathematical certainty that they will be murdered in the street by either an amateur astronomer or a chiropterologist. It’ll be a toss-up who gets to him first.

I have nothing constructive to add other than by pure happenstance I managed to get the page sorted so that this post and that one were stacked right on top of each other.

It’s a small internet after all.

This right here. Never mind the dystopian Mr. Burns style subscription based sunlight control bullshit that’s inherent to the very idea. That’s just to sucker in the investors who won’t know any better. Not enough people are talking about this.

I guess they could try to put the thing into some kind of geosynchronous orbit, but essentially the surface area of their mirrors will have to be equivalent to the area on the ground they plan to illuminate in order to achieve “sunlight” levels of illumination. There’s no way around that. So motherfuckers are going to start spouting off about “parabolic dishes” and “lenses” and shit any minute now. This is a red herring. No amount of optics can overcome the fact that the amount of light you can reflect will never be more than the amount of light that hits the mirror. Period. You cannot, now or ever, defy the laws of physics.

The International Space Station is basically the biggest thing we’ve ever managed to permanently put into orbit, yeah? And you can barely see it with the naked eye in the night sky, let alone measure any meaningful amount of light reflected off of it hitting any square inch of ground anywhere, with any instrument you can come up with. And it’s covered in reflective shit already – in fact, most manmade orbital objects are, in order to prevent the direct sunlight baking the fuck out of them in the vacuum of space where they can’t rely on the atmosphere to carry the heat away.

At best, even if they manage to deploy a massive Mylar foldable mirror in orbit that’s hundreds of feet across, they’re only going to be able to light up a small patch of dirt like wussy old moonlight, and even then they’ll only be able to do it in one place. Adding more targets will by necessity divide the light output in a linear fashion even if they somehow make it work like a huge DLP mirror array.

This simply can’t work.

And at 14 years old, he sure as shit did not stroll into his local gun store and fill out that form 4473. That was his dad’s gun, which his dad provided unsupervised access to.

Which was not a smart fucking move.

I guarantee you the bibles in question are provided by some local (private) fundamentalist organization. There’s no way the prison is spending its own money on that. So then you’ve got to look at who is the biggest group of religion-peddlers to find your most likely source.

In America at present, the various Christianity-adjacent sects are basically the only religious groups out proselytizing in any significant numbers. I suspect that compared to the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Aventists, and assorted Evangelical/Baptist types, everyone else is basically just a rounding error.

If experience is any judge, plenty of dudes go into prison and come out Muslim. So Allah must still find them somehow.

Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.

(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)

Renaming it in Explorer does actually rename the file if all you change is the case (in current Windows, at least, see the pedantry below), but whatever mechanism Explorer uses to determine “has this file’s name changed” is apparently case insensitive. So it won’t refresh the file list. I imagine this is yet another one of those damn fool Windows 95 holdovers, or something.

You don’t have to do any multiple-renaming jiggery pokery. Just press F5 to refresh that Explorer window and magically then it’ll show you that the file’s name was indeed changed all along.

As somewhat of a retro '90’s-2000’s electronics collecting nerd, this stuff is the bane of my existence.

It seems like in the early 2000’s there were only three types of finishes applied to electronics products:

• TPE “soft touch” coatings that turn into snot after a few years (many game console controllers, binoculars and other optics, some portable tape/CD players, etc.)
• Crappy metallized silver paint that starts flaking off immediately (basically every digital camera ever made from 1999-2006, and quite a few computer input devices)
• White or Bondi Blue plastic under a clear acrylic layer trying to ape an early iMac or iPod, which gets dirt trapped between the layers and then turns yellow (the Nintendo 3DS Lite, innumerable computer mice, USB hubs, and knockoff MP3 players)

You just can’t win.

But you don’t understand, Mr… Sandbag Tiara, was it? Can I call you Sandbag?

Sandbag, what we’re really looking for in this position is someone who’s really a people person, you know? Somebody who’s a team player, ready to go the extra mile, fit in with our company culture because we’re a “”“”“family”“”“” here. Really shine in our three pointless but mandatory department-wide meetings per day, smile on demand, have a very firm handshake, and really help us close those KPI numbers.

The job in question is a backend software dev position, where the employee will theoretically never have to interact with anyone except their immediate boss, and has no reason whatsoever to emerge from their dungeon. But never mind that.

Go for it.