Don’t treat a gun like Tony Stark treats particle beams from an accelerator.

Urine is already diluted by water, so you’re most of the way there.

Either I’ve seen this type of thing before when he first went public, or it’s been some other famous person needing to do similar. Could be both, honestly. Leads to the same problem. Even money can’t save you in this kind of crooked system.

Shorter: You are used as a product for someone else’s profit. If you’re okay with that, don’t worry about privacy and security.

I guess it’s consent. The master/deity or their aide comes to the servant and tells them of master’s will, the great plan. The servant says, yeah, okay.

Yet another fail in writing. Why not make it so God and Gabriel give her the choice, and she adamantly agrees? Remove all doubt from the story’s plot. Or better yet, add some drama, have Mary unsure, and Gabriel explains the importance (not that it’s already planned, but why her choice is key to the direction of salvation and all that). And she with some thought decides to do it.

Oh, right… that would give a woman some agency. Never mind.

No, just debating which set of rules we’re playing by.

Yes. I can absolutely be spun that way, as I said. As most anything in the Bible can be. Let me ask this then. Could she have said no? And when would that have happened?

There wasn’t consent though. It can be spun that way, but biblically Mary was destined to carry, and screw any free will.

It’s a weak loss.

Animal was always my spirit animal.

That’s the “I might be okay” moment, followed by the body’s too early, “oh, we’re there?” at the last few feet. Sometimes you can distract the mind a bit more by focusing on something else while you make the last steps. A lot like how flying works in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you have to notice something totally off-topic and forget you’re about to hit the ground.

The “they have played us for absolute fools” line always gets me laughing, even when I don’t fully get the setup.

I’ve seen enough bad cop videos of situations escalating out of control for this not to be a surprise. Our military is trained better at de-escalation tactics than our domestic forces.

The engineering is incredible. Imagine if it had been applied to a better purpose.

Oddly, it was much like playing Dark Side of the Moon alongside The Wizard of Oz. Everything was in sync and made sense.

So you’re okay with anyone seeing anything you send over the internet, in the mail, or on the phone? Why would this not be a problem, even if you are totally innocent of any current crime? Would you be fine if someone were spying through the open windows of your home? You’ve got nothing to hide, and they aren’t hurting you, right?

If there is a reason for officials to come looking for information about a crime, they have other ways to do so. Why make it easier for them and violate the privacy of everyone else who is doing nothing wrong?

This borders on “well, they aren’t after the group I’m in, and probably won’t be, so whatever”. If you don’t think that’s a danger, you have not been paying attention.

Let’s turn the question around - why is securing any sort of communication between two parties such a bad thing? What happened to innocent until proven guilty of doing anything? Encryption isn’t a crime, at least until it becomes an inconvenience for those in power who want to mind other people’s business. It’s no different than pulling the window curtains closed.

One of my random Linux boot-up sounds is the WinXP boot theme.

When GIMP’s version 3 came out, it got a lot of great reviews. I can’t tell you what’s different or better, but in using it myself since then, it doesn’t “feel” as daunting. Very subjective, but definitely try it out again; it might work for you this time around.

Markdown in the old WordPerfect 5.1 (reveal codes) was a great thing.

The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.