I get my laptops from a city bureau.

They sell old laptops of Helsinki public servants. The hard drives are very thoroughly emptied and Ubuntu is installed. It’s a kind of a workshop for unemployed people, with the purpose of keeping them used to the concept of work. They get a tiny bit of extra money atop their unemployment benefit by working there.

This has all kinds of weird side effects, like how the actual buying process runs. Once you’ve decided what you want to buy, they print something akin to a receipt to you, and you need to walk some 100 metres or so to a wood workshop where they have a worker with a permission to handle money. You give them the receipt and money, and they give you back a other receipt to prove you have paid. And then you take that back to the shack made of corrugated metal that works as the computer shop, give the receipt to the guy there and carry your laptop home.

At one point they were selling old laptops of the.fire brigade. They were built so that you could very well use them as a hammer 🐳

Anyway, the shop is on the backyard of the Kyläsaari recycling centre in Helsinki. It closes at 15, so.it’s a little bit difficult to visit if you’ve got an eight to four job.

Thinkpad X280.

And if you tell where the hell my key for the cellar is, I can go downstairs and check what model the Thinkpad I bought in 2017 for 30 €. It’s now in my pile of broken laptops from which I should extract useful files some day :P

Something you can buy for 20 €.
Okay, I paid 60 € for mine and it’s good enough to play Skyrim and Stellaris :)

But the same shop sometimes sells laptops for 30 €. They come preinstalled with Ubuntu Linux and are absolutely fine for browsing the web.

There have been Finnish politicians joining Mastodon in in the last few weeks.

Does that still mean that the concept of “time” is not defined in a useful (human-understandable) manner in a black hole?

Doesn’t a black hole stretch time in a really weird manner? That would mean that no sensible answer can be given to the question. It could easily be that it takes either one billionth of a second or a trillion years, depending on where you are standing when observing the occurrence.

the underlying OS has improved in a few areas

Which ones are those?

I can’t make head or tails of who would be fighting whom in that war.

If a WW was to break tomorrow, it would probably be because of Trump making true his threats to attack NATO in order gain definite control over Greenland?

Probably USA would be its own side without allies?
Then there would probably be NATO as one side, most likely with Australia and Japan on the same team as NATO. And, I’d say, probably all of Southern and Central America.
And the Russia and Iran with China? Pakistan would probably be on their side, so India would seek something else. More likely NATO than USA?

But then again, WWIII would be such a big deal that it feels weird imagining it might end up a three-sided war. The loosest piece on this board is USA… If it allies with one of the sides, will that side be that of NATO or that of the Russia?

Hm. Well, if it allies with China and the Russia, it gets super difficult for NATO to keep shit together. Then again, the Canadian border is not all that far away from DC, and Latvia is not far away from Moscow. We’d probably also have Ukraine on our side, and they can teach a lot about modern warfare!

All in all: If USA manages to ally with someone, that side is likely to win. If it remains alone, it will probably lose. I would say that in a situation where USA doesn’t ally with anyone, NATO would be the side losing the least.

But, in the end nobody wins in a war.

They are having a conversation in the Fediverse.

Nuff said?

Why what?

Sundials were absolutely surely invented several times around the world, also in Australia etc. After all, a sundial is nothing but a stick in the ground.

If mechanical clocks were invented before colonizers arrived, then the colonizers’ clocks eventually replaced them. But, I understand they were invited only after all of the southern hemisphere had been colonized by less civilized nations, so they follow the colonizers’ standards everywhere.

Sorry, I did understand all of the words in your comment, but not what you actually meant with it. Could you paraphrase, please?

So does Finland:

(Except in internal timetables of bus companies, that typically run until 30 o’clock, as it still officially counts as the same working day)

Have you noticed how common it is for buses and trains to leave at 23:59? The idea is to make it clear what evening the train is really running.

In Finnish we call noon “12 o’clock” and midnight “0 o’clock”. Makes things a lot more clear.
And the first hour of a calendar day is indeed 0:00 until 0:59:59.99… Since there are only 24 hours in a day, there cannot be a “24:30”. (Except in internal timetables of bus companies, that typically run until 30 o’clock, as it still officially counts as the same working day)

I know it’s called that way, because I’ve seen the same movies. But was SolidShake meaning his comment sarcastically, meaning that “There was no way for me to know that most of the world uses the normal clock” or without sarcasm, meaning “I had always assumed that most of the world uses the normal clock.”

He could really mean either one. I could probably delve into his comment history and make some kind of a psychoanalysis based on those comments? But, meh.

Yeah. Which is what I said. 11:59:59.9999999 is indeed AM, jos like you said. And then comes a tiny sliver of time that is precisely at the border, but a trillionth of a picosecond after that, you’re in the PM world. After the infinitely short moment that is the actual precise noon.

Why?

In general?

Everything after midday is PM. 12:00:00.00000001 is after midday. Therefore it can only be PM.

That’s the logic I use :)

I would be interested in knowing whether this was said with sarcasm or without. Because both are plausible!