Bet.

“Its” has been deprecated.

“It’s” follows the rule for contractions with words ending in “s” (is, has) as well as the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. As you have demonstrated, the distinction is obvious in context; there is no significant opportunity for confusion.

Keeping the old form does nothing for society other than to inflate the egos of authoritarian English teachers, provide an opportunity for pedantry, confuse spell checkers, and introduce an unneeded exception to the possessive form. Nothing of value is lost by eliminating the old word.

So, “It’s” is a homonym: two words spelled and pronounced the same, but carrying different meanings.

Hybrid hard drive. Basically, a hard drive with a large solid state cache.

Actual shipping would vary depending on location, but sellers are padding the shipping charge so they can display a lower unit price.

There’s a little to be said for it, sure.

I use nearlyfreespeech.net for personal hosting. They charge me about 10 cents a day.

Not really needed with dynamic DNS able to point back to a web server on your own network.

Need to add shipping charges to the price…

That factoid makes celsius relevant for about 4 out of the 12 months, and humans lack the capacity to distinguish between 60-100 on the Celsius scale. Anything at those temperatures just feels like blisters.

Yep!

Personally, I’m deprecating “its”.

The “its/it’s” distinction requires violation of the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. This exception to that rule is entirely arbitrary. The meaning is never ambiguous in context; the distinction exists solely to enable pedantry and confuse spell checkers.

So, English will be better off by retiring “its”, relegating it to the trash heap along with “chuse”.

“It’s” is now a homonym. Both the contraction rules and the possessive rules for apostrophe-s construction are maintained, and the only people who will cry about it are English teachers and other worthless pedants.

I have spoken.

If “poisonous” are parallelograms and “venomous” are trapezoids, “toxic” would be quadrilaterals in general. (Can’t use square/rectangle analogy, because squares are a type of rectangle, and venom/poison is not a type of poison/venom.)

Aside from that, there aren’t too many rules on “toxic”.

Poison and venom will both cause serious acute injury with the possibility of immediate death. Both can be considered “toxic”.

Just to be confusing, “poison” and “poisoning” can have substantially different connotations. For example, the heavy metal “lead” would not normally* be considered a “poison”. Lead would generally be considered “toxic”.

But, repeated exposure to lead to the point that it causes physical symptoms is referred to as “lead poisoning”.

Same thing with mercury: it would be considered “toxic”; it wouldn’t normally* be considered a poison. But repeated exposure to mercury would be considered “mercury poisoning”.

(* If a third party were to deliberately introduce lead or mercury into the body of an individual, the substance would then be considered a “poison”.)

If you kill a snake and decide to chew on the venom glands, would they be considered poisonous or venomous?

Ok, I don’t think you read what I wrote.

Everytime you read “Starlink”, I want you to think about a flashing anti-collision beacon on a radio tower. Because that is what a Starlink transceivers looks like to every ELINT operator aboard, and on every nearby ship. Imagine a ship with a giant red blinky light on it, because that’s what an ELINT technician would be seeing.

She would have had to have recruited every ELINT technician and supervisor aboard every vessel they sailed with to make this happen.

Ok, so this is a bit different from taping your password to your monitor. Security has a problem with you doing that, but unless they come to your workstation, they have no way of knowing that you do this.

ELINT is kinda like a security camera, but instead of seeing lights, it sees transmitters. You know the frequencies of the communications transmitters on Navy ships, let’s say they are analogous to blue lights. You know the frequencies of their radars, let’s say they are green. During normal operation, you’re expecting to see blue and green “lights” from your ship, and the other ships in your task force.

Starlink does not operate on the same frequencies as comms and radar. The “light” it emits is bright red, kinda like the blinking lights you see on cell towers at night.

So, you’re sitting at the security desk, monitoring your camera feeds… And you just don’t notice a giant red blinky light, strong enough to be seen from space, on the ship next to you in formation?

You’re telling me that this warship never ran any EMCON drills, shutting off all of the “lights” it knows about, and looking to see if any shipboard transmitters remain unsecured?

You’re right, I would expect users to bend and break unmonitored security protocols from time to time. I expect them to write down their password. I expect them to share their password, communicating it over insecure networks that aren’t monitored by the security department. But operating a Starlink transmitter is basically equivalent to having the Goodyear blimp orbit your office building, projecting your password on its side for everyone to see.

The idea that ELINT operators missed seeing it for this long doesn’t seem likely.

The degree of incompetence needed for SIGINT/ELINT operations to fail to discover such a transceiver for 6+ months strains credibility.

I’m guessing this is a ruse to convince adversaries that the Navy can’t detect Starlink transceivers even when they are aboard their own ships. This is much more likely to be disinformation intended to drive adversaries to use Starlink than it is to be a legitimate failure of intelligence gathering.

Every measurement system has had its formal definition changed several times. The kilogram, for example, was once formally defined as the mass of a specific block of metal in France, which was later determined to be losing mass, and thus made a pretty terrible standard. Now, the kilogram is formally defined in terms of the meter and the Planck Constant.

Celsius was once defined by the freezing and boiling points of water, but those aren’t actually constant: Fahrenheit’s brine mixture is actually significantly more consistent. Kelvin’s degree spacing comes from that definition of Celsius, but it it was eventually redefined to be more precise by using the triple point of water: pure water at a specific pressure and temperature where it can simultaneously exist as solid, liquid, and gas. Significantly more accurate, but not enough: Kelvin was redefined in 2019 in terms of joules, which are in turn defined by kg, m, s, which are ultimately defined in terms of the Planck constant.

Celsius is now formally defined in terms of Kelvin. Fahrenheit is also formally defined in terms of Kelvin. Fahrenheit’s brine story is just a piece of trivia.

100 is the imprecise average body temperature of the developer

That’s a myth. It’s no more true than the myth that it was the body temperature of horses, or that the scale was designed to reflect how humans experience the weather. (It happens to reflect how humans experience the weather, but this was an incidental characteristic and not the purpose for which the scale was designed.)

The Fahrenheit scale starts to make sense when you realize he was a geometrist. It turns out that a base-10 system of angular measurement objectively sucks ass, so the developer wasn’t particularly interested geometrically irrelevant numbers like “100”, but in geometrically interesting numbers like “180”. He put 180 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water. (212F - 32F = 180F)

After settling on the “width” of his degree, he measured down to a repeatable origin point, which happened to be 32 of his degrees below the freezing point of water. He wanted a dial thermometer to point straight down in ice water, straight up in boiling water, and to use the same angular degrees as a protractor.

The calibration point he chose wasn’t the “freezing point” of the “random brine mixture”. The brine was water, ice, and ammonium chloride, which together form a frigorific mixture due to the phase change of the water. As the mixture is cooled, it resists getting colder than 0F due to the phase change of the water to ice. As it is warmed, it resists getting warmer than 0F due to the phase change of ice to water. (Obviously, it can’t maintain this relationship indefinitely. But so long as there is ice and liquid brine, the brine will maintain this temperature.) This makes it repeatable, in labs around the world.

And it wasn’t a “random” brine mixture: it was the coldest and most stable frigorific mixture known to the scientific community.

This criticism of Fahrenheit is borne of simple ignorance: people don’t understand how or why it was developed, and assume he was an idiot. He wasn’t. He had very good reasons for his choices.

It’s just so arbitrary

All of them are. The decision to use water at all is completely arbitrary. Even Kelvin and Rankine are completely arbitrary: the “width” of the degrees is not defined by a physical factor, but relative to an entirely arbitrary concept.

I mean, I have clothes. Long underwear? Layers? Coats, gloves, hats, scarves?

They say you can always put on more clothes if you’re cold, but that’s not really true. Insulation adds bulk, and bulk reduces mobility. Around 0F is where I start to have real trouble wearing enough clothing to stay warm while still being able to perform the activity that has me outside in that weather. Somewhere around 0F, clothing doesn’t really cut it, and I need shelter or additional heat.

Geometric construction plays a role in there as well: the 180 degrees between the boiling point and the freezing point of water was not accidental.