Worth noting that puberty blockers have other medical uses for children aside from care for trans (or potentially trans) individuals. For example, precocious puberty can have some pretty heavy negative health effects in young children, and the primary treatment is puberty blocking hormones.

Point being, we already treat children with some other medical conditions with puberty blockers. If medical professionals and researchers have found that they're also the treatment with generally the best outcome for people with severe gender dysphoria, it seems ridiculous to me to try to deny them that care by law.

This. Plus, if you beat the DC by 10 or more, you get a Critical Success or if you fail by 10 or more you get a Critical Failure, regardless of the dice roll.

And for opposed skill checks only the player/NPC taking the action rolls a d20, and that's compared against the opposing skill DC (10 + Skill Bonus). This streamlines play and reduces random variability.

So in the example here, only the rogue would have rolled the natural 1 and added 26 for a 27. The paladin's Perception DC would be 16, so the Rogue beat it by 11 and it'd normally be a Critical Success. But since it was a natural 1, the Critical Success is reduced to a Success. They still succeeded at deception, but not quite as well as they could have.

Makes sense. Pathfinder already shifted over to Ancestries in their 2nd Edition. Paizo has a pretty good history of representation and sensitivity to stuff like this though.

It's housed on Wikimedia Commons, though doesn't seem to be used in any English-language pages: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Communists_attacking_a_parade_of_Ukrainians_in_Chicago._17.12.1933.jpg

Worth noting that the recent Infrastructure bill passed under Biden includes $108 billion for public transportation (Link). This is much larger than the $7.5B set aside for electric vehicles.

As much as I despise our car-centric infrastructure, climate change is a large enough threat that we should seriously consider and pursue multiple avenues of decreasing our emissions as fast as possible. Fully transitioning away from auto-dominant transportation in the US is, frankly, not realistic in a timely manner with the public support and resources available. Not only will transportation infrastructure need changing, but even the design of our cities. So while we should pursue broader public transportation, we should also pursue other initiatives with high likelihood of broad acceptance and rapid implementation. Electric vehicles seems to be one such initiative.

In American English, owl sounds are typically called their "hoot", so for example one would say, "I heard the owl hooting all night."

If one were to spell out the sound, it might be a "hoo, hoo."

The only way I see a company like this having "significant economic harm" from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).

Not something I'm interested in either way, so they've lost a potential customer.

In the US, my understanding is that there's a weird catch-22 where it's legal to make digital copies of media you own for personal use thanks to Fair Use laws, but it's illegal to break copy protection under DMCA law. So you end up unable to exercise your right to copy DVDs and Blu-ray discs because they have copy protection, but it's perfectly legal to copy music CDs for personal use because they don't have copy protection.

Personally, I find it extremely unlikely you'll get jailed or fined for ripping your discs for personal use. It's only if you start redistributing it that you increase your likelihood of legal problems.

Eh, I think porn studios just were looking for something new that's "taboo" since some sexual acts that 20+ years ago were super taboo are much less so nowadays.

They have, literally just a few hours slower than this guy charging people: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761

SD cards are far worse than hard drives or SSDs for long term storage. They are useful for temporary mobile data storage and transit, but anything you want to keep long term should be transferred off relatively quickly.

It's not really hard to be the most democratic superpower when you're the only superpower; we're also the least democratic superpower. China, India, Russia, and the EU are only considered "potential superpowers."

And frankly, most of the EU nations are routinely rated better regarding democracy than the US, which in recent years generally is considered a "flawed democracy" rather than a "full democracy".

For example, see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

Or here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking

I think you may have misread OPs post. They haven't built a PC since shirtly after they were 10-11, which was almost 30 years ago. So developments since the turn of the century are in fact relevant here, heh.

12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.

Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.

Better app performance, better upscaling, game streaming (though you'll need to use something like Moonlight for local streaming now), better audio format support for local Plex/Jellyfin servers.

Yeah, this precisely. I don't expect players with Barbarians that have 20 strength to bench 400 lbs, so it's fine if players aren't as suave as their Bard, unless they want to lean into roleplay dialogue. It's usually more than enough for them to say, "I try to charm the blacksmith by complimenting how nice a shop they have" or something like that and let the dice determine how effective they actually are at that.

My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected. So if you secure your phone with one of those, access to it is under 4th amendment protection. Given this, I'm curious how passkey legality would work out since it's a physical key, but access to use it would still require a knowledge element.

This is the way. I've had absolutely zero issues with my Hue bulbs directly connected to a USB Zigbee controller and running zigbee2mqtt. With Zigbee bindings to smart switches, they respond practically instantly as well whenever we decide to control them that way.

Watched an interesting video recently about the computer used in the Apollo lunar missions. Of course even basic processors now are more powerful, but it's still impressive how rock-solid stable the Apollo computers were.

Yup. "Buying" a movie online is a grift, since all you're actually doing is buying a license to stream as long as they decide they want to host it. Companies can, and have, removed movies people have bought because of things like studio distribution agreements expiring.

My dream would be for UHD Blu-ray quality (or better) DRM-free digital movie purchases, much like you already can with high res music. But until that becomes a thing, I'll be buying a physical copy of any movies or shows that I want to own (rather than rent).