Somehow I don’t think video game consoles are going to be the main concern if the tariffs go through.

It’s definitely a big relief. Here I was expecting the US to throw out a century of medical advancements and halt all vaccine research, which is not only very bad for the US, but leaves a lot of other countries in the lurch (fortunately at least for Australia, our first mRNA vaccine manufacturing plant should be online next year).

It’s really disappointing that so many “Christians” are blind to the fact that Trump fits many of the descriptors for the Antichrist. He may not be the definitive article (he doesn’t quite match everything), but is definitely one of those false prophets the Bible specifically warns Christians to look out for. They are ignorant of what the Bible says and the values it actually stands for.

What an idiot. Or is he suggesting that Harris will trigger a global thermonuclear war and so China, India or the other space powers will never be capable of interplanetary flight?

Isn’t this old news? I recall Trump not only throwing out the handbook, but disbanding the pandemic response team, too…

About the only thing Google is right to be concerned about here is the timeline to enforce these changes - requiring them to be implemented within a couple of weeks does indeed pose a risk that something will go wrong or be missed (causing vulnerabilities). Other than that, I look forward to Google being forced to allow competition.

Okay, this might be a non-issue: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/issues/2697#issuecomment-2403792309

To those that arrive here from any Youtube or Twitter posts, please know that disabling Recall via DISM works fine, and preserves the modern File Explorer (though some might consider this an anti-feature). CBS correctly disables it, and the disablement is preserved through reboots, just like with any other feature.

Edit: of course, the big problem here is that it’s still present (even disabled) and hence malware could turn it back on without you realising. Ugh.

It’s about time the government did something about indoor air quality. It’s a huge factor in the spread of COVID and respiratory illnesses and has a number of relatively straightforward fixes.

Just wanted to make sure it was abundantly clear that that wasn’t my opinion!

Sadly, you’re right. They don’t want demographics to vote that would threaten their ability to hold onto power.

Heaven forbid women vote! /s

“These findings are now final…,” Penn said in a statement, noting the five-member hearing board’s determination that Wax “violated the university’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”

Wax’s conduct, according to Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

So years of breaking the rules and already having received a caution from the dean and effectively all she gets a slap on the wrist - a year off at half pay. She should have been fired.

This is definitely not satire.

The best case is when I am (1) well-rested, (2) not hungry or thirsty and (3) not already agitated/close to being overwhelmed going into it. Socialising definitely drains me, though, and I have gotten better at recognising when I need a break before it becomes critical. That way I can politely excuse myself (if it’s a social function, usually I have a plan in advance to go outside or away from people for a bit to recover).

Unfortunately it’s just reality that some people are energised by that type of conversation or social interaction, whilst for others it is exhausting. Energy management is the key thing for those of us who find it draining. Interoception is sometimes impeded for individuals on the spectrum, so if it’s hard to identify or keep track of how are you going (and hence whether it is time to politely exit the conversation), there are exercises one can find online to help improve interoception.

It takes practice, but a good approach is not to go beyond a few sentences on a topic at a time. Give them a chance to change the direction of the conversation (which will happen if they are not interested) or ask follow-up questions (typically indicates that they are interested, although sometimes it may just be that they are being polite, in which case you’ll usually only get one or two before the other person moves on to something else). As one of the other comments says, it’s a dialogue, not a monologue - most of the time the other person isn’t engaging to get information from you but to connect with you (and yeah, that can be a really nebulous concept at times!). It’s really easy to infodump but most people don’t have the context or depth of knowledge to follow a deep dive on a subject.

Autism is not a deal-breaker. My spouse has ADHD and I have ASD. Granted, each of our neurotypes causes the other some frustration, but both are also factors in why we were attracted to each other in the first place.

Neurodivergent individuals often select for each other in partners and there are a lot of similar patterns in my extended family (to use your phrasing, they’re all a bit “off”!). None of the relationship failures have been as a result of neurotype and most are still married, with the failures due to the same problems that NT couples deal with - poor communication, emotional immaturity, refusal to learn and grow, etc.

The key thing is to be yourself. If she likes you, you want her to like you for you, not the facade that so many of us have to wear to survive in the NT world.

And if she ghosts you, that’s not a failure on your part. It says more about her than you - you took the risk and put yourself out there. If she doesn’t show, perhaps she is insecure and afraid of telling you she’s changed her mind, or perhaps something happened to prevent her from being there (since you mention films, this is a common trope too). Just be kind to yourself.

This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.

Hell no. Do not give machines the ability to lie. We already have enough trouble with people using technology to deceive without it choosing to be deceptive on its own.

Faction Paradox was an interesting concept. Be aware that some of the Eighth Doctor BBC books are a real slog to get through (Interference comes to mind - there just isn’t enough plot for it to be two books). The main thing I didn’t like about the wilderness years books (Virgin & BBC) was that they were distinctly more adult than the show, which I found jarring.

I do wonder what we would have gotten had Moffat left with Smith as he originally wanted. From what I heard, it sounded like he was stuck in the same situation JNT was in the mid 80s - if he wanted the show to continue, he had to run it. Unfortunately in both cases this corresponded to a decline in the show’s quality (Colin Baker really shines in his Big Finish audios, but a lot of his TV episodes are terrible due to the writing; Sylvester McCoy fared slightly better, but still had stories like “The Happiness Patrol”).

I haven’t actually seen any of the Whittaker episodes apart from part of “The Power of the Doctor” (which my wife watched in its entirety and thought it came across as bad fanfic), but after I heard about the whole Timeless Child arc (which apparently Chibnall came up with as a kid watching the Seventh Doctor), I was not impressed. It felt like there was no respect for the show or its continuity. The Whittaker era might have been okay by itself, but as the part of the larger universe, it really grates on me.

Eight is one of my favourite Doctors, so I was really pleased with the references in “The Night of the Doctor”. You are probably right that given the common contributors to both the Big Finish and BBC productions (e.g. Nick Briggs), Moffat couldn’t ignore it. The fact that Sam and the others from the books aren’t name-checked, though, was an interesting point and suggested that the BBC had rejected that continuity (especially since the new series destroyed Gallifrey all over again, not to mention much of the Cartmel Masterplan – which I personally am glad never made it to TV – that manifested through the Virgin Publishing series and which was implicitly accepted by the BBC Books, since many authors worked for both publishers).

Fair point about Jenny, although the Doctor certainly treats her as his daughter in the episode. In either case, though, I think the stronger argument is that Fifteen’s comment simply indicates that he (in that incarnation) has not had children.

As for abandoning the show in the Capaldi era… The writing of the show was on a steady decline since 2010, with each season weaker than the previous. “The Time of the Doctor” was one of the worst regeneration stories and proved once and for all that Moffat is simply incapable of resolving plot arcs satisfactorily – the whole Silence arc from 2010-2011 is explained away in basically a few sentences, plus “The Time of the Doctor” makes the resolution of “The Day of the Doctor” feel like a plot device just to provide an easy out for Moffat to resolve the issue of Eleven being the last incarnation of the 13-long cycle.

I think Capaldi would have made a fine Doctor (and the clips I saw of him later on supported that), but he was given rubbish to work with a lot of the time. Moffat only knows how to write one female character and too easily falls back on tropes (his favourite being “all the enemies at the same time”, which worked really well in “The Pandorica Opens” because it was such a rare thing). I could go on, but from what I have seen and heard, the show has basically been unwatchable since 2014.

The closest we get to an “in-universe” explanation for the Shalka Doctor is actually in The Gallifrey Chronicles, the final BBC Eighth Doctor book, where one of the surviving Time Lords (from the pre Time War BBC Books arc where Gallifrey is destroyed) notes that Eight’s timeline is an utter mess and he has at least three separate “Ninth” incarnations. At the time, this was intended to cover both the Shalka Doctor and Eccleston’s (although post “The Name of the Doctor”, that would have been retconned to the War Doctor; in either case, one of them was meant to be the Time War incarnation). My personal view is that “Scream of the Shalka” is the timeline prior to the changes caused by the Time War.

Of course, “The Night of the Doctor” then seems to establish that Big Finish’s Eighth Doctor continuity is the accepted one, rather than the BBC books, as Eight name-checks companions from the BF series rather than the BBC book series. Regardless of which continuity you accept, Eight’s timeline is very convoluted in both cases (and probably the most complex of all Doctors).

I stopped watching after Capaldi’s first season (as far as I’m concerned, the show ended with “The Day of the Doctor”), but the most obvious explanation for Fifteen’s comment in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is that that incarnation hasn’t had children. The implication was always that Susan was the First Doctor’s biological grandchild, plus Ten not only mentioned having a family at one point but there was also Jenny (from “The Doctor’s Daughter”), who one could argue was Ten’s biological offspring.