I live in southeastern Colorado. Here, Halloween is observed in the late afternoon, after school if it's on a school day and only in the business district. All of the businesses give out candy, and nobody has to worry about kids being out after dark.

Thank you, that was very interesting, and looking up Duty Solicitor in Wikipedia filled out the explanation, including some limitations and exceptions that weren't explained but seemed fairly reasonable. I can see why this doesn't appear in the various mystery programs: it would get in the way of the protagonist's solving the case and that Just Wouldn't Do.

And here in the USA, you have the right to an attorney, and if you can't afford one, one will be provided at government expense. Judging only by what I've seen on various TV programs produced in England, you don't have that right in Blighty. Do you have it in Germany? I'm not trying to put you down, I'm just looking for information here.

Simply stating: We Do Not Accept DOCx or XLSx formats, forces compliance. Since MS can produce ODF (allegedly), that's how you get compliance.

There's always going to be a few people who won't do it, mostly because they're afraid to upset some important customer. How you get around that isn't obvious. However, you can start by making it a requirement that anything that comes in that's in an MS format is sent back with some boilerplate added telling the sender why it's rejected and a list of acceptable formats. Making that automatic, so that the chicken droids can't ignore the policy may be all you need.

The last time I interacted with turnitin, I could easily see its shortcomings. That software is made to look for cheating and plagiarism. That works well for essays, but for math you're looking at a square peg - round hole problem. There are a lot of different ways to write a paragraph on an historical figure. There are only so many ways to solve a given practice math problem. It's easy to show that a history student copy / pasted from wikipedia, it's very difficult to show if a math student came up with the correct math answer on their own or googled it.

The proper way to asses learning in a math class is a live in-person test. Homework should be for the students to practice their learning, and if they choose to not learn while doing it that will be seen on the exam.

Back when I was in Boot Camp (USN) we were given gas masks one afternoon and herded into a sealed chamber to see for ourselves that they work. Once we'd had time to try them out, we were ordered to remove them, and find out for ourselves what a low-concentration of teal gas was like, followed by having us exit the chamber at double-time to help clear it out of our eyes. Some things you can try out for yourself, others are too hard hitting for that.

Yes I was in the Navy. If the helmsman and the duty office stick the ship on a sandbar the Captain still gets the blame.

And now you know why the Captain spends so much time on the bridge at sea. BTW, every time the Captain comes on the Bridge or leaves it is logged in case it later becomes important. (I was in the Navy too.)

Paypal used to be a useful tool that did useful things. Now it's just a way for rich people and con artists to extract money from others who apparently don't know better. It's infuriating how many nonprofits are losing truck loads of cash to paypal as the fees continue to climb. The ones I'm involved with switch to Zelle a while back for the majority of all transfers and that has been a huge step in the right direction though of course not without its own set of tax weirdness.

Yeah the cops need to take this one seriously.

You're making a common mistake here: the cops don't have any authority to prosecute criminals or to decide how, or even if the perps get punished. That's up to the court system and to what the local laws say. Yes, I agree that the perps here need to be punished, but let's be realistic about who gets to do it.

That sounds a bit circular there. The argument is to get the newest hardware to run the newest software, but the newest software is specifically written only to run on the newest hardware - actual benefits of the hardware be damned. Certainly Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be selling these newest consoles if there wasn't money to be made doing so (regardless of where the profit actually lies for them).

It's just a hugely diminishing return at this point from my perspective. 2nd generation consoles -> 3rd generation consoles was a tremendous leap. 3rd generation -> 4th generation was a tremendous leap as well. 4th generation -> 5th generation was a bit less of a leap than before. 5th generation -> 6th generation was still significant but still smaller than before. We're now in the 8th and 9th generation of consoles, and not only do many people find the 8th and 9th generation titles indistinguishable from each other, many people have a hard time seeing benefits of even the 9th generation over the 7th generation.

Obviously the whole bit still makes a ton of money. Obviously folks don't care what I think of it. I'm going to say it anyways. Maybe I'll go yell at a cloud after lunch.

Why do the Islamists have so much trouble assimilating?

What makes you think that they want to assimilate? From how they act, many of them want to take over the countries they move to and impose Sharia Law on them.

If these were highly remote locations and getting a human to them in time to fix a problem was going to be a challenge, then maybe remote controllability would be important. But this is a damn supermarket; there's going to be somewhere there or nearby constantly. Dear Lord.

There's no reason that there can't be a thermometer and controls built in, and only accessible from the back. Add on a clipboard with pages printed with lines for date, time, temperature, initials and you have a way to keep track of the temperature without outside access. Add on controls to adjust things and you've got everything you need.

I'll start by saying I've never owned a console from Microsoft or Sony. I've seen them, I've seen game demos in stores, etc, but I've never owned one.

To me as one random consumer I fail to see the drive to upgrade from PS4 to PS5, or from the previous XBox to the newest. The games don't look that different. For that matter, it doesn't seem that the two consoles are really offering much difference from each other either. Both consoles are primarily hawking the newest Quake look-alike, or the latest professional (or college) sports titles. I see very few games for either that don't fit into one of those categories.

In other words my argument here is that they have sold to their core market already, and the demand has dissolved for the rest of the public. Even if we ignore the cost, the benefit is no longer clear to many people. Why upgrade to the newest console, other than to say you have it?

I remember an episode of NCIS where McGee used a paint gun to cover the lenses of some surveillance cameras so that DiNozo could get into a junk yard and retrieve some evidence they needed.