This is the second Onion headline in two days that I only realized was an Onion headline after I clicked the link.

I must admit, "Linux becomes the refuge of luddites" was never on any bingo card I could have conceived of for 202X.

We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!

Except our walled garden!

Don't worry, a key part of toxicity is the dosage. If you're following a prescription from an actual doctor instead of taking handfuls of horse medication at the behest of extremist politicians you're fine.

I would imagine that anything that's in an airtight sealed container, such as chip bags, would be fine. That would also include cans. Your refrigerator and freezer, also, would probably count as a sealed container.

Smoke in a building fire can contain all sorts of weird chemicals from burning plastics and whatnot that could get deposited onto stuff, so even if you can't see any soot in your apartment I wouldn't dismiss all concerns. How tight is your budget?

There are species of seals who actively keep holes open in the ice to use as breathing holes, allowing them to hunt fish even in frozen-over bodies of water.

They're all ocean-dwelling species in the arctic or antarctic oceans, so this isn't the answer to your specific question, but I just think they're neat.

To be fair, the bug report was utterly useless too.

A laser that is powerful enough to hurt a human target (especially a human target with body armor) is going to be powerful enough that it'll be ionizing the air to some degree. It'll be like a lightning bolt, there'll be flashes of light and sharp cracking sounds. That's also ignoring the fact that the random bits of terrain that the laser is hitting will also be exploding. Someone under "suppressing fire" from a laser weapon would be quite aware of the fact.

Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...

Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.

Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called "Holy Word" that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.

When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It's a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.

This is part of the classic The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this" post chain. It's definitely part of my headcanon, if only in general spirit instead of literally that's-what-happened. It conveniently explains so much about why these shows focus so much on humans. It's like reality TV, it's pointless to focus the camera on the well-adjusted ones.

Edit: I should mention that my headcanon extends humanity's hold-my-bear mad science bent to the social sciences. Why else do you think we so rarely see other multi-species governments, or when we do it's just a boring old "boss species conquered a bunch of subordinate species"? Humans were probably warned by the Vulcans that different species tended to have incompatible governing interests and doctrines and the humans thought "but what if we gave them all a vote anyway and see what happens? Maybe a Federation will go twice as fast!"

To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.