cassetti

My partner speaks a native language which is extremely rare - only a few million people worldwide speak the language. So uncommon that it's hard to find software to teach me the language. A real-life babble-fish would make life a million times easier when visiting her family who doesn't speak English (I assume, since I know that AI including Chat is capable of translating to and from the language fairly well with good grammar, but I doubt that it would be able to easily synthesize speech patterns for a rare language compared to converting their language to English. But I could be wrong lol.

That's awesome - I'm glad to hear you found something that works for you :-)

Well cool, I hope it does. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but the Nintendo Switch interested me for the occasional mario kart session. But all the Joycon drama scared me off from buying one. I'll hold out for a few more years before splurging - I'm in no rush, I rarely game or watch television anyway lol

Well.... Let's just say those full body scans they take during the medical entrance exams isn't just so they can confirm you're healthy...... They're taking full scans of your body. (Decades ago the intention was to assist in manufacturing replacement body parts when needed for soldiers so they could return to battle faster, but I think we're moving far past that goal now.....)

TL/DR - they're using mini solar tower collectors to concentrate and collect sunlight to charge PV panels. This produces a lot of excess heat (enough to melt steel) - the heat is pumped away via water into an underground vault where the heat is stored until the evening where the heat is converted back into electricity using conventional off-the-shelf materials and hardware.

I haven't done much with Excel and Word these days, but I have not had a single issue opening standard documents. The PDF import capabilities for LibreDraw work reasonably well. Many MANY years ago I fiddled with OpenOffice and then LibreOffice before moving to Office365 for a while.

Now I'm back to LibreOffice for the past 5+ years and haven't had any complaints

Dammmn, that's a sick burn. I love it

Yeah, weather patterns are shifting everywhere. The thing to remember is that "climate" is a measurement of weather over time.

Humans can adapt easier than plants to climate change - we can move to different locations while plants are basically stuck unless we humans relocate them. The growing zones where people can grow different fruits/vegetables/herbs is changing. Sometimes too rapidly and even humans can't keep track of what they can/should grow (and when to plant it). It's now getting too hot in some regions for even tropical trees/plants to grow using photosynthesis (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/leaves-tropical-forests-photosynthesis-heat-limit) .

So while the local weather may be feeling different and you could possibly start growing different plants in your region, there's no guarantee that the weather patterns will be the same in five years.

In my own region people are pushing growing zones, growing exotic tropical plants outdoors most of the year then protecting them from harsher weather. Heck I found a guy who is successfully growing a slightly cold-tolerant variety of edible bananas (called blue java) in North Carolina!! No way that would have been possible 100 years ago. Or another example - Cocoa Florida was too cold to grow cocoa beans back when the town was originally founded, but the climate has now warmed up enough that people are starting to grow real cocoa trees in Cocoa! hahaha. (yes, I geek out about weird sh!t like zone-pushing edible plants lol).

As I keep reminding people "At the start of every disaster movie, there's a scientist being ignored"

Yep, exactly. As cool as DU rounds sound on the battlefield as a competitive advantage for piercing armor. They are a health risk to both the soldiers handling them and absolutely poisons the soil which will have an affect on future generations living on that land.

But I guess that's the point - to scare the russians as well as salt the earth so it's useless irradiated soil for either side to use for decades to come...... Or I'm sure if Russia keeps the land, they'll simply mine it anyways and who gives a hoot about the health of government workers mining resources for the motherland, right?? /s

Lol, oh sweet child. You have much to learn about what a corporation says, and what they're forced to do by government regulations. Without them, corporations can (and will) do anything they want for the sake of more profits.

Unfortunately, with a country run by a bunch of geriatrics who hardly understand the concept of the "internet" and hardware/software, let alone the nuances of different social media platforms or how different communities within the internet interact.