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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • What a bizarre headline. No it’s not. It’s proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it’s specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that’s the problem.

    Speaking of which,

    Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine’s monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic’s WordPress servers and resources.

    tbh, that’s totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don’t know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a “free tier” of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.

    Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It’s not some moral thing.






  • When you’re talking about a ship’s capacity that’s approaching five digits, that stuff would have to be moved around a lot.

    Foodstuffs from the Conestoga is behind the new sensor package from Starbase 80, but we can’t install the sensor package until we get to a drydock, so we have to move it over there and get the ingredients for Thanksgiving out–but we’re also supposed to deliver half of the potatoes from the shipment to the Boyle when we pass them at Deep Space Two, so we have to crate them into a separate container, and the stasis container we need for them currently has Vulcan plomeek bulbs in it for a diplomatic function on Tendar IV, so we can’t move them over until Wednesday. Meanwhile, in Cargo Bay 2, we literally have a whole entire shuttle that for some reason the commander of the shuttle deck decided just had to be put here, but that means that the restraint units are inaccessible, so we’ve had to jury-rig some force fields to hold everything together. Plus, because of some sort of requisitions mistake, we got sent a double pallet of PADD-xe’s, when what we really needed were PADD-xt’s, so that was taking up every spare parts locker and case in Cargo Bay 3 until we could offload them to some environmental observatory or something, but then Lt. Cmdr. La Forge had this weird idea yesterday to pull 250 of them and try to network them together for…something?..and they’re still strewn all across the floor since he left to deal with a plasma injector leak yesterday afternoon, so I guess we should put them away? I mean, I don’t even know if they’re still functional–and THIS is when the Vendorian terrorist leader decides to pull up and have a tentacle-measuring contest? Does he have any idea how busy we are right now? I don’t have time to deal with artificial gravity fluctuations or inertial dampener overloads today, I’ve got potatoes that are about to rot!







  • Sometimes, with caveats (I researched this a while back). tl;dr: probably yes, if you get puzzles manufactured by the same company around the same time.

    • There are “puzzle companies” that are actually just design studios who farm out the manufacturing process to a puzzle printer. Depending on the printer, they’re very likely to reuse puzzle dies even between design companies; so you might even be able to remix two puzzles by different companies, if they use the same print company.

    • Certain high volume printers rebuild their puzzle dies from scratch every so often (so the design would be entirely different depending on which print run you’re working with). Ravensburger in particular had a thing on their website (it might still be there) about how they can’t get you individual replacement pieces because they’ve almost certainly already rebuilt the die since your copy was printed. And most companies end up just replacing the entire puzzle if they leave out a piece.

    • Some puzzle companies make puzzles where the design and the cut are related somehow (Magic Puzzle Company built a whole line on those). Those are unlikely to be reused between designs, though you do end up paying extra for them.

    • Even if you get a pair of puzzles that were cut using the same die, they might not line up the way this image shows. If the die was removed and flipped around between one puzzle’s cutting and another, the cut would be “upside down” on the other and they would fit together in a very different way.




  • US Government Employee: “Okay, awesome. So that’s a solid contract for the Lunar Lander for NASA. Great doing business with you.”

    Northrop Grumman salesman: “Yeah, sure, happy to help us win the space race against the Soviets!”

    Gov Employee: “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out who we’re going to get to build a stealth bomber for the Air Force.”

    Grumman: “Oh, we can do that too!”

    Gov Employee: “Whoa, really? Thanks, that really makes the rest of the week easier. I appreciate it! Now all I need to do is find someone to make some cute little mail delivery trucks for the USPS.”

    Grumman: “You’re not gonna believe this…”