PhasmaFelis

A few kilobytes of text is not a resource that needed saving.

Mostly that's because devs want to drive people to the app, where they can track you a lot better, so they make their mobile sites shitty on purpose. Plenty of mobile apps are just webapps anyway under the hood. There's absolutely no reason for a mobile site to be massively worse than the app unless the devs want it that way.

Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.

It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a complete idiot.

The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.

Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.

This reminds me, some years ago as Google was expanding its translation service, someone tried translating text into and out of an obscure African language (don't recall which) and it always came out as weird Biblical-sounding semi-gibberish.

My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.

Human bodies are scarce because you can't pay most people to live there. They're not mutually exclusive.

When a generally smart person makes a humiliating million-dollar mistake, then you can trust that person, more than any of their coworkers, to never make that specific mistake again. That's the "expensive education" here.

But they didn't have to, and a bit of thoughtful consideration would have (and presumably did) make that clear.

This is less of a "caught driving drunk" situation and more a "caught driving with one taillight out" situation. You want to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there was no real danger from this single instance.

> Since this wooden rod travels several miles in a 6 second time frame - traveling more than 500M/s on average - don't we have to assume it accumulates?

The basic assumption here is that the rules as written beat physics and common sense. When you play that game, you have to do it rigorously. You can't say that rules trump physics one moment, and physics trump rules the next.

> There's also the rule of cool. If it makes the story better/ more enjoyable: have at it.

That does rule out the Peasant Railgun more thoroughly than any rules argument.

Finding fun and unexpected rules interactions is certainly D&D. Finding obviously broken and unintended interactions that make no sense in-universe, purely as intellectual sport, is also D&D.

Seriously expecting the DM to behave like a buggy video game and give you ultimate power because you found an exploitable glitch in the game mechanics is...well, that has also always happened in D&D, but it's hardly praiseworthy or in the spirit of things.

Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?

Some "significant effects" are a lot bigger and more broadly negative than others. You know this.

Whatever your feelings on the current US administration, no reasonable person could deny that it's having significant effects worldwide.

I want to know why the organ features an image of a man in the instant that his hat falls off his head.

Yearly flu vaccines have been a thing for decades.

If that's what OP thinks, I'm not sure they actually know what a vaccine is.