LOL! I don't think any amount of sex changing would turn some of these ...folks... into "real men" :D

You were Tom? [goes off, roots around] Well, you do sound different now... more relaxed. -- Long ago I had a TG friend whom I knew before, during, and after, and there was a personality transition.... to be expected, I think, under changing hormonal conditions. Ordinary biology. She had a sort of emotional crisis shortly after and I told her stop worrying, you're just going through puberty again. The light bulb went on and she was like "oh! then that's fine!"

But I'm glad you found yourself, that's what counts.

Not bothering to look at the alleged study, but I wonder if a combination of high estrogen and low cholesterol is the root of the issue; turns out high cholesterol in the elderly is protective against dementia.

Chromebooks don't support dialup to the best of my knowledge. Some models have cellular modems, however, and that might be an option here.

Perfect! Then we can wait 5 years for the first draft, 10 years for the final spec, and end up with requirements that are so complex and redundant that it'll take 3 times the memory available on most "smart" devices to implement. *LOL*

Unfalsifiable in fact does not mean false. It also does not mean true. Unfalsifiable does mean unprovable and nonfactual. You can't have a fact unless it's falsifiable. That's part of the definition of a fact: even if it's true there's the possibility to attempt to show it is false.

Science is concerned with hypotheses (testable statements) and repeatable observations (empirical facts). If you can't test it repeatedly and observe it repeatedly then it's not science.

There's a big difference between "not scientific" and "anti-scientific".

You can disingenuously try to put whatever words you like into my mouth to build whatever strawman you like. I'm just tired of hearing the religious anti-science crowd and the science-minded folks baiting and presenting meaningless arguments back and forth. If someone's worldview is completely inconsistent with someone else's, that's no reason for them to try to make idiotic cross-boundary arguments adding noise to public fora.

I used to be a big Logitech fan. Not any more.

I had one of their trackballs for close to 10 years. I was happy with it and loved it, so I bought a new one when it failed. The new one died in 9 months.

So I bought one of their mice, 'cause I've always had good luck with them. It died in 6 months.

Logitech makes absolute CRAP nowadays. There is no way in hell I'd trust them to keep my house working

The original screws were probably bronze, not brass. Bronze has no appreciable zinc while brass contains a lot of zinc. Immersed in sea water, brass will dezincify and corrode.

Most marine raw water systems use bronze fittings for this reason.

Stainless isn't suitable for below the waterline applications because the chromium can't form a protective oxidization layer due to the lack of oxygen exposure.

Your boat would have sunk with brass or stainless screws.

Unfortunately many people have never learned to deal with cognitive dissonance very well. There have been great scientists who believed one thing as religious truth and who supported the objective evidence within a scientific model at the same time.

Allegory, fable, parable, subjective experience, and unobservable conjecture about spirits and deities is not anti-science or counter to science. The problem is when people try to conflate their by definition subjective, unobservable, untestable beliefs with what by definition must be objective, observable, and testable.

Religion and theology are informed by a wholly different part of philosophy than is science. Science assumes an acceptance of objectivism, which is anathema to most religions (in fact any religion with a supernatural explanation for anything). It's no wonder they are incompatible.

If someone wants to have faith in something, I have no issue with that. If they want everything proven to them, I have no problem with that. If they want to separate one form the other, I even have no problem with that. If, however, they want to bash science because it's not in accords with their scary invisible, inaudible, uncommunicative, unobservable supreme being in another existence then they need to step back and consider that their religion is not at all even germane to the discussion of science.

Undoing some mod points to reply here, but anyway...

Aside from how dogs have been selected to "read man" (see the results of testing police dogs, where it was found most were alerting not on drugs, but on handler expectations), a dog's nose can pick up even the slightest difference in a person's metabolism -- half a dozen molecules are sufficient for some dogs' noses to distinguish. In crude terms, when there's something "wrong" with the human's chemistry, which includes brain chemistry, they smell different from other folks (probably due to the metabolic byproducts being different). If that smells "wrong" to the dog, they're going to react against it, often with fear or aggression.

This is also why some assistance dogs alert to their owner's health status -- I know a guy whose dog goes nuts if he's starting a diabetic episode, and he's learned (the hard way) the dog is right even tho he hasn't any symptoms yet. He starts smelling wrong to her, so she throws a fit, and she notices well before the blood test does. (He's done multiple tests in a row to check against her reaction.)

Incidentally I have a dog who 'alerts' on certain abnormal personalities -- he's naturally trusting and loves everyone else, but acts like he wants to kill a very few individuals: One was a paranoid schizophrenic (among other symptoms, she heard voices and saw things that weren't there), another had bipolar disorder with severe anger issues, and so on. And this dog, who has an exceptional nose, visibly does the "take a sniff, then react" thing. I've learned that when this dog doesn't like someone, I had better pay attention, because he's always right.

[I'm a pro dog trainer with over 40 years experience. I notice these things.]

I would not be surprised to learn that a large percentage of existing Cobol is one of the archaic dialects that cares about which column you put things into; further, that most of the users of said dialects have no interest in the expense and risk of modernizing their code to a less painful version of the spec.

Besides that, there's the sheer verbosity of the language. Writing out DIVIDE 20 BY 4 GIVING RESULT vs. x=20/4, for instance, is simply annoying.

If I absolutely had to I could wear a suit. I draw the line at wearing a goddamn tie, though, especially one that must be tied.

The tanker DC-10 is designated KC-10. The '135s are close to but not quite the Boeing 707; they're closer to being a derivative of the Dash-80 prototype that became the 707.

I don't really understand the political or economic motivations of Scottish independence.

The political side would make more sense if Scotland was greatly different than UK culturally and had a significant short-term history of English subjugation. The Scots really aren't an ethnic or racial grouping, except at some micro level and don't seem to have a serious complaint regarding discrimination on language or religious grounds.

The economics make less sense -- Scotland has been economically integrated with the larger UK for a long time. Had Scotland split off in 1850, it would have been at a time when economies were smaller and much more locally self sufficient and it would have had time to develop into something that The economy seems much more regional now and it will be a hard transition to a more standalone economy.