I’m non-native (native German, learned English in school). Nearly everything I read or write is English, though, and I’ve probably read more English books than most of the native speakers.

I use Kubuntu for that. Works good, is reliable, and uses Plasma instead of Gnome. The KDE Plasma environment is way easier to “get” for people coming from Windows than Gnome.

I was running a server hosting a Gutenberg mirror at home 30+ years ago. And no, it’s not public.

I assume. I mean, they do make money somehow, and it’s probably not by getting pirated.

All of the anime pirating sites are riddled with ads.

As if the commercial sites were any better…

One of my schoolmate was a serious asshole. Our guesses for his future were either he’d be a lawyer, or he’ll make a career in the FDP (a more money for the rich kind of political party here, with a “liberal” label).

I was not surprised to learn that he is lawyer, working for exactly that party.

Been there, seen that. Happened when I had the family in car, in the middle of the motorway. I barely managed to get through the trucks onto the hard shoulder…

During and due to the reign of Helmut Kohl. A chancellor who put the sake of the party over his oath of office. There were large donations to his party of unknown origin, and he claimed that he had given the donor his word of honor not to tell where the money came from. And that was it. No prosecution, no consequences.

This is for me simply unacceptable. Our Grundgesetz (constitution) says that anybody is equal before the law, and here someone was obviously more equal than others.

Zohran Mamdani

Knows politics, but is a person I’d trust to fix things.

Network Administration.

If the network and servers all work: What are we paying you for?

If the network or one of the servers are down: What are we paying you for?

But even travel alone isn’t enough. You need to have a genuine curiosity about the world. About humanity.

Indeed. I’ve once met a boatful of American tourists visiting Cologne (Germany). I don’t think they actually knew where they were, and even called me a liar when I told them that the cathedral they were looking at was 750 years old (“No bulding can be that old!”).

Peter Argonis “Anthony Carter” universe.

And of course, I’d hire the talent. This material needs proper care.

I actually think there could be a market for this kind of stuff. “Master and Commander” was a wonderful movie, and if it had not been drowned out by the third “Lord of the Rings” movie, it could have been turned into a good-running movie series.

Peter Argonis works in the same genre “Dashing Hero Captain in the Age of Sail”, and IMHO he is better than Patrick O’Brian (of “Master and Commander”).

There are, but you need a lot of parameters to get it right. Mass and size are just two. You need speed and, most importantly, the direction it travells.

Apart from being too light, it will probably be dense enough so that parts of it will land on the ground. The mass and the (probable) speed will make a decent crater, but for that one would need more data, and a simulation tool.

That would imply that the meteor was denser than uranium.

Looks like my estimate is within the parameters.

A corgi has a mass of 10-14kg, so assuming a density of an average mammal of ~1g/cm³ would actually give it a volume of 14000cm³. See paragraph three for results. Not good.

How would a “corgi-sized” meteor have a mass comparable to “four baby elephants”?

OK. Assuming the corgi is 60cm long, and assuming with “size” they think of “a sphere with a diameter of”, we get a volume of 113000cm³. Depending on the weight of a baby elephant (90-120kg) we get 360 to 480 kilograms. Divided by the volume, we get a medium density between 3.1 and 4.2 g/cm³. According to Engineering Toolbox, this is about as dense as garnet or aluminium oxide, common types of stone.

If they took the height of the corgi (30cm) as a base of their spheres’ diameter, the volume is down to ~14000cm³, leading to densities between 25.7 and 34.2 g/cm³. Now that would be interesting, because that would even surpass uranium (which has 19.something g/cm³).

So depending on how to interpret those measures, it’ll be a ball of dirt, or a serious nuclear threat. That’s why scientists use metric…

While we are nearly an “All Linux” shop at home, there is one machine that I won’t change.

It is a HP oscilloscope running a heavily modified version of Win98. Back then, it cost as much as a new car, and it still works mostly fine (and where it doesn’t, I know, and can work around). The Windows is basically an afterthought to the hardware, and I don’t think I could get any kind of drivers for the hardware - not even for a newer Windows version. So that remains.

But even my wife wants to switch to Linux now instead of going Win11.

No, I’m not afraid. I’ve been using me-dashes for decades now, and I won’t stop just because some idiots flood the streets with worthless AI junk that happens to copy long-established practices in text formatting.