Mariah Carey unfrozen for the Christmas season

And Trump’s health plan should be ready in just a couple more weeks by then

As someone else pointed out, the traffic light itself isn’t being affected, just the automated enforcement mechanism of the camera. We managed just fine without those.

Black hats will accidentally pop around the other side by attacking Windows 11 security in ways that hinder the reporting back to Microsoft. So their trojans and such have a better chance of survival.

They can applaud because they have both hands free

Clearly Your Basic Everyday Recommendation, Something Every Citizen Understands Robustly Improves Twice Yearly

I generally agree with offering sources; I just wanted to add a funny.

This is like the inverse of the trope of genies twisting your wish around.

As a long-time fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I have no memory of the word ‘grok’ appearing, and the internet at large appears to agree.

I read Stranger in a Strange Land a couple decades ago, and the word is presented in a way that’s pretty easy to remember where you got it from.

I don’t tend to use Google AI overview or any other such tools to get answers like this to quip back at people, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t just assume I did.

“Grok” comes from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, where it was a Martian loan-word.

Gotta love those folks. We could have Earth at one end, the Sun on the other, and they might pick a spot 46 million miles out in space to find the middle way.

I mean, the spirit of the “superpower side effects” game isn’t to render the superpower fully unusable, but to make it thoroughly annoying or to have a big downside/cost. Teleporting to a random point in all of the space of the universe is just a death sentence. My only reasonable read of this is “random location on Earth (not mid-air, underwater, or embedded within solid matter)”.

I appreciate the sentiment, but probably not. The genie would just scoff af my argument and say nothing was guaranteed to be “fair” about the situation. My only saving grace in talking about it here is that fellow humans are more likely to share a similar base point for reasoning.

Please elaborate, because there’s a at least a couple different things you could be referring to, and I’d rather not write something out on the wrong topic :)

First, the use of “communicate” in the original superpower description is presumably referring to communication that couldn’t happen without the power - and the side effect uses the same term. As it stands, my dog can tell me she understands I intend to walk her by jumping off the back of the couch and being excited at the door.

So if the superpower only refers to novel communication, I’d interpret that to mean anything more than I could reasonably communicate to my dog, and more than she could communicate to me (confirmation of understanding).

If the side effect, despite using the same verb, actually renders animals LESS able to communicate with me than they already can, that seems an especially uncharitable interpretation.

Alternatively, I can ask the animal to wait until I was out of the room before performing the action for the third party. At that point, only that third party would end up communicating having seen the comprehension/performance.

Depends on the range. If 10 feet, you’d survive most falls, but still bury yourself a portion of the time. 100 feet, probably dead. 200 thousand miles? Space sucks without an appropriate suit.

A Song of Ice and Fyre Festival.