Especially as they call them “illegal aliens”. Does this imply that the little green men are “legal aliens”?

Frag einfach mal Hershey, wie sie Amerikanische “Schokolade” machen.

Smart move. Too smart for Americans, though. They simply don’t grasp the simple concept of less guns=less shootings.

The new shape suspiciously looks like Cyprus

Not the most awful person, but I met one of the assholes who bullied me in school. He was a homeless druggie, begging for money at the train station.

“May have thought” - that would be to strong for him. Thinking has never been his strong point. He reacts to what people around him tell him. He picks up ideas at random and turns them into executive orders.

Interesting read. My wife and I both have A4s, bought at the same day in the same shop. Her phone does not really fast charge anymore, but my still seems to do it. And even more surprising, mine went from “battery holds one and maybe a half day at normal use” to “battery works for two days again at normal use”.

My coworker and his wife had the bad A4s (bought earlier than ours), and were offered the $50 refund.

wrecks the thing I care most about: copying and pasting details that I need to write articles. Instead, I often get garbled, shortened pieces of other parts of the document intermingled with the text I want—assuming I can even select it in the first place.

There are two things doing this: PDF optimisation and document obfuscation.

The Optimisation thing is something I’ve seen with many Asian PDFs. If they want to use a non-standard font, and want the document to actually use it, they have to embed it into the PDF, potentially blowing it up size-wise. In comes the optimiser: It looks which of the thousands of glyphs of that Asian language are actually used in that document, and creates a new font with only those glyphs. This font has a totally different numbering scheme from the original font, so it also replaces the numbers in the document that represent those glyphs. Result: A much smaller PDF. It looks the same, it prints the same. You can still “copy” the characters, but as their only meaning is related to the internal representation of the font, you cannot past them into e.g. Google Translate. It’s just gibberish.

Example: The text is “Jack and Jill”, and the numbers in the document representing those characters would be ASCII/UNICODE: 74 97 99 107 32 97 110 100 32 74 105 108 108 (74 being ‘J’, 97 being ‘a’, etc.). This is standard and works basically everywhere. The optimizer sees the letters " Jacdikln" (sorted) and assigns them numbers starting with e.g. 0 for " " (space), 1 for “J”, etc. The images for all other characters are thrown away, as they are not needed. The internal numbers for the text are now 1 2 3 6 0 2 8 4 0 1 5 7 7, which are not standard ASCII/UNICODE, and copying them to another application would just result in problems.

The Obfuscation is often done by putting additional text in the background color behind the main text. You cannot see it, it does not show up in prints, but when you select a piece of text, it gets copied along, if you like it or not.

So you see “Jack and Jill” in black, but behind it is “went up the hill” in white, and you copy something like “Jacwentk upandth hiell”.

I wonder when I can set default options for importing images. I’m using Open/LibreOffice since nearly the beginnings as StarOffice (I think I still have the CD somewhere), and one thing really irks me: Whenever I import an image (which I do rather regularly), it always imports the image as “Anchor->To Character”. For me, this is the wrong default, I always need “Anchor->As Character”. For thousands of images, I have to set this manually.

The thing is this just makes it “cooler” among the Nazis because now it’s illegal.

Only until they are caught.

Just as Putin commanded him to do. Trump is a Kremlin asset.

Santorini is shaking. The phlegreian fields (SP?) are shaking, the border region between Turkey and Syria is shaking. “Boom, boom, shake the room” is looking for a comeback in the charts.

Just wait another 15 or 20 years…

A hot dog is a sandwich.

I was sitting in a restaurant, when the people on the next table discussed how to suppress certain topics from a minister-level EU meetings, as one person wanted to delay any action on that. The discussion also involved passing an envelope, and the one person covering the rather substantial bill.

Deport him to the US.

Better having a WHO without US finances than a WHO run aground by American dipshits, science deniers, and antivaxxers.

It has to be American people and courts.

I’d judge Tesla drivers if they bought the car this year.

“We don’t need no education” – Pink Floyd, The Wall, 1979 & Donald Trump, Crazy Actionism, 2025