The email sounds like a college student participating in a sociology study for class and asking the professor for clarification. This is exactly the kind of thing that I’d expect to ask about gender along with a bunch of other personal information. The goal being to see if any patterns in the responses.

Sociology in general does have the problem that categories are important and helpful to spotting patterns, but people are very difficult to categorize. People just don’t fit cleanly into categories

I don’t understand how anyone thinks any part of this is going to work out.

• The vast majority of machines online are fully automated, how do you validate the age of an automated account? If automated accounts are allowed without verification, how can you possibly tell the difference between them and an actual person?
• How do you handle old and foreign software? Are they going to start prosecuting individual people for running non-compliant software? Can’t afford to update your old phone? Well now you’re a criminal.
• Validating age requires private information to identify who you are. They have completely put the security of this information on each individual OS. Expect this info to be leaked.

This will never keep someone from viewing something if they really want to. All it will do is open up individuals to prosecution if they want to use any device anonymously.

They’re concerned about the precedent set if they allow taxation to be included as part of regulatory powers. If they allowed this, then precedent is set for the next Dem president to come in and just start taxing companies that don’t align with their policy goals. So something like taxing carbon emissions no longer needs Congressional approval.

I was never good at typing until I got a job programming. Never took a course or anything so I’m definitely not using proper form, but if you use a keyboard enough your fingers learn where the keys are.

A course might help, but like all muscle memory, the trick is to just practice it enough times that you don’t need to think about it anymore.

Big creature that primarily eats grass. Bad at digesting grass. Worse at digesting other things with gas and intestinal issues being common causes of death.

No idea how something so bad at eating survives on it’s own

What something tastes like is part of your perception of it though. It’s an interaction that is based as much on the tongue doing the tasting as the substance being tasted.

I don’t think either way you tasted it was more “real” or “accurate”, but could be closer to what the majority of people experience.

But when a charismatic idiot says that it’s obviously a square, you need a way to prove to third party that your interpretation is correct. Though don’t be surprised when some people listen to the charismatic idiot anyway

A lot of towns and cities around the world have similar requirements and will start fining you if you let your property. And the majority of HOAs aren’t overbearing, just a way to share costs for common infrastructure and make sure houses aren’t just abandoned or allowed to fall apart by collecting fines.

But petty power attracts petty tyrants and it’s easier to make it onto an HOA board than a town council. So sometimes your worst neighbor has the ability to hand out fines and wields that power with spite and glee.

But people get mad if I say their tomato pie is just a type of pizza

TV shows often portray coroners as forensic medical examiners, but those are different jobs in practice. A coroner is really just the person in charge of handling dead people for a region. Declaring them dead, arranging for transport to next of kin, and sometimes handing them over to a medical examiner if things are suspicious. Each area will typically have a single elected or appointed coroner who will hire or contract medical examiners and other staff as needed.

Sure, but shuttle also rhymes with muddle in my East coast US accent, at least in normal conversation. I can force myself to slow down and really enunciate the T, but even then the difference is easy to miss.

Subtle is spelled weird, but rhymes with muddle. Do you also pronounce “mad” and “mud” the same way? With my accent they have the same first vowel sounds as saddle and subtle

Right? I’m about 10 minutes slower than the machine, but I’m happy to donate my services for free.

None of those languages have thorn in their modern alphabets.

And every example you pointed out is valid English. You should probably learn it if you are going to nitpick other people’s grammer

Op is one of those people who find it easier to read when words are spelled correctly and don’t shoehorn in a throwback letter that hasn’t been used in English for centuries.

Notably, there is only one language that still uses the thorn. Icelandic has less than 500,000 speakers worldwide. Also notably, Icelandic is not English and whether or not you’re bilingual doesn’t excuse poor spelling skills.

That and sex is the latin prefix for six and shows up in some math terms. But yeah, the name is just a pun

It’s very easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. But if you keep an eye out, you’ll see most clocks with roman numerals do this.

Just imagine it entered common use through a Looney Toons skit where they had to “hold down” their inflatable fort or it would blow away. It’s not true, but it’s plausible enough you could just decide to believe it.

That is a terrible argument. Prior art is not required to be standalone. And if we start requiring it to be standalone, that calls into question almost every game out there. They almost all require some kind of operating system to actually run

The names Norway and Denmark are old and predate 1847 by centuries. “German Ocean” is an old term for the North Sea.

Norway was independent from Denmark at that point in time. So it was off the coast of Norway in the German Ocean (North Sea). And the expedition was sent by the king of Denmark, a nearby seafaring nation.