This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).

We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.

They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.

Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.

One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.

We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.

They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.

The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…

“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.

The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.

Imagine you’re Pinocchio. You’re a wooden puppet boy turned human by magic whose properties you are grateful for but can never fully understand.

You grow into a man, meet a woman, marry and try to start a family. The fairy tale continues.

Then remember the era this is taking place in. Many women die in childbirth for apparently no reason.

As the expectant father, you have many responsibilities, but you don’t have much to do towards the end of the pregnancy. You’re outside the delivery room, nervous, worried with any number of increasingly insane thoughts running through your head. It’s taking a long time. Why is it taking so long? Is something wrong?

And you used to be part of a tree. A literal fricking tree.

You’re human now, but you have no idea what that means for your progeny, or what weird hybrids and magic might do to the inside of a woman. You’d never even given it much thought until now. This is taking a really long time.

And that’s where the comic picks up.

TBH, the Good Fairy could have put in an appearance and set his mind at ease, but maybe she was busy…

Understandable. That’s the sort of cowed mentality you have to take when you don’t want to invoke the ire of an authoritarian government.

Heaven forfend you might have an independent thought.

Careful now. Whoever won the civil war would be China, so “China” would have won no matter what.

The question here is how well people who aren’t ethnically Han Chinese, people who don’t speak Mandarin as a first language, and people who have ideologies that compete with the government’s own would be treated if the other side won it, because the China that won the civil war isn’t particularly nice to a lot of those people.

A tar-and-feathering of offending parties would be cathartic for sure, so I’m not against your sentiment, but the word you’re looking for is probably “vicious”.

(“Viscous” means thick and goopy. Possibly also sticky. Thus, tar.)

The first speaker had a couple of vowels that gave away he isn’t a native speaker, but he’s walking the line between uncanny and mastery, so it was hard to pick out enough to guess what his native language might be.

The second I’m not allowed to watch without a Vimeo account, probably because I’m in Britain. I won’t be setting one up today.

For the third there was a lot more unusual vowel articulation, especially ‘a’, that made me think Slavic, but I couldn’t be any more specific than that.

Many of these services won’t accept a static image, which is all that site provides.

People who are racist against Chinese are very unlikely not to also be racist against Taiwanese. Therefore, ironically, something both the CCP and racists agree on is that there’s no difference between the two peoples.

However, they’re both wrong. One group cares too much and the other too little, but still both wrong.

Taiwan has a right to self-determination and no infiltration, subterfuge, threats, coercion or - if you prefer - pleading from Beijing or anywhere else ought to change that.

Although if I were given a time machine, I’d prevent the whole split in the first place and protect the native Formosans… but you probably wouldn’t like the China that would exist if I were allowed to meddle like that either.

I think this might be CustardFist’s dad. Or grandad.

The question is: If Putin is somehow moved out of the way, will someone with the same ideals and desire to continue current policy simply replace him?

That is, is he the puppet master, or merely a puppet of something greater?

Which is not to say that efforts to remove him aren’t worth a try. You don’t know for sure you’re dealing with a hydra until you chop off one of its heads.

Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.

Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.

You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you’d be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.

Eigengrau. It’s what the brain fills in anyway when there’s no visual input, so it wouldn’t be a distraction if that’s all I could see.

I’d have plenty of extra problems, but that, at least, ought not be one of them.

The kana aren’t alphabets either. They’re syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U… aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they’re allowed to be used.

French makes me wonder how well those movies could have worked with Jean Reno or JCVD in the role.

What accent did you imagine him having?

Look man, I don’t fully understand it either, but whether it be for the meme, for irony, for long-standing fandom, whether someone has a mad crush on, or wants to be Miley Cyrus as she was, as Hannah, or as she is now, or some other reason inconceivable to those of us outside its sphere of attraction, it exists.

And at least it isn’t Omarchy.

I made the same mistaken assumption not too long ago. HML did die for a while, but it’s been resurrected. It’s a little odd as choices go, but as an Ubuntu derivative it’s probably not deserving of its “review” in the video.

The Nobel committee should invent “The Special Nobel Prize for Very Special People” and award it to him.

Then when he’s out of office, award the same thing to Obama.

I was about to trot out the old “English needs diacritics argument” but then realised that “reade”, “readd”, “leade” and “leadd” would solve the problem the ways we usually do it.