If you believe the Mock Turtle, there certainly is.

Yes. But if you stop one by grabbing it the top half will indeed dry off, and even fairly quickly if you do it on a hot summer day in the sun.

When they truly do disappear in the machine, what’s happened is most likely that one got pulled through the seal in the front or rear of your dryer drum. On most machines, this “seal” is in fact a strip of felt. Small objects can make it through.

This is also why the bottom of your dryer’s blower motor housing is probably full of buttons and loose change. Mine was, on the machine that came with my house. I got nearly nine bucks out of it when I took it apart.

These guys know how it works. They don’t “fly” anyone anywhere. They have low paid lackeys available in any and all of the areas they operate whose job it is specifically to hang around in courthouses and defend their tickets. It’s not like they drop everything and bundle an executive on a plane to go to Podunk, Missouri or whatever to argue about a one-off ticket.

In my case this outfit only operates in our state, to my knowledge. They wouldn’t have to go far.

It doesn’t have to. They send a representative from the camera company whose job it is to show up in court and rationalize their bullshit at the judge. I know this because I actually had to go through this process once, many years ago, to fight a clearly fraudulent ticket from one of these damn fool things in our local downtown.

Unless it’s vacuum sealed it will absorb water from the air and eventually go kind of manky. I don’t know how it is in all parts of the world, but most pasta here other than the exceptionally fancy stuff is just packaged loose in cardboard boxes that are in no way airtight.

If you stuck your spaghetti in one of those vacuum pumped storage containers to get all or most of the air out of it, it’ll probably last until the heat death of the universe regardless of what the packaging said on it.

Ok.

The weird brand names are because Amazon requires the products you sell to have a “brand” in order to provide them plausible deniability that your product is not generic OEM stuff from China. So the sellers of generic Chinese OEM stuff have adapted by making up nonsensical brands and registering the letter jumble they come up with as a trademark. Now Amazon can claim everything on their site is a “brand name” product, see? It’s all totally above board.

What you’re describing is the LTSC IoT editions, which are what I run on my Windows boxes.

https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Clarkson was a step ahead of us this time.

Contacting Meryl shortly before that fight requires getting her CODEC frequency, which is not told to you directly in-game. It’s on the gameplay screenshots on the back of the box.

Lest we forget, this is the man who infamously required you to have access to the CD case in order to progress the plot in his game.

Consumer burnable CD and DVD disks often have an astonishingly short storage life, especially if they are not stored very carefully. They’re not an archival medium. Competently pressed commercial (aluminum) disks meanwhile have a storage life that is near as makes no difference to infinite provided they are not physically damaged in some way.

I’ve got tons of burned disks of pirated old games from the early aughts that don’t read anymore. This is highly annoying from a preservation standpoint as I can’t get them to play despite possessing them on disk, and they’re now unpopular enough that they’re likewise difficult to impossible to pirate again.

Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?

The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.

You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)

Which problems would those be, exactly? Because I can still play Combat or Yar’s Revenge or even history’s most godawful version of Pac Man on my Atari VCS right now if I wanted to. That’s a 44 year old game at the time of writing, for anyone not keeping score at home.

Go try to play, I don’t know, Babylon’s Fall on your PS4 right now and let me know how that works out for you. Or try to track down a copy of Demons Age if you missed it when it came out.

Just so long as you stay away from modern TCGs, anyhow.

For similar reasons I just flat out haven’t bought a console since the PS3, except for the Switch. And even that I kind of regret. I really don’t see any appeal anymore. The PS4, PS5, and various 'Bones are just cut down, locked down and DRM laden PCs anyway. There are no interesting architectural quirks anymore, the content and even input methods are all basically interchangeable now, and thus there’s no reason to not just play on the PC I already have aside from exclusivity pigheadedness from Sony or Microsoft.

You can warm your hands until you reach thermal equilibrium, and/or use the boiling water to cool your system by allowing the water vapor to escape into space!

*Rocket fuel and other launch costs not included.

They’re ideological, a hangover from the cold war.

The first world: The US, plus its allies in NATO which were mostly in Western Europe.

The second world: Russia and the USSR, plus its sphere of influence through the Warsaw pact.

The third world: Literally everyone else.

So for example the underdeveloped backwards hellholes of… er, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland were all non-aligned and thus technically “third world” nations.

And do what with it? You can’t use heat to do work without there being temperature differential in the system. Maintaining that differential requires keeping your cold side cold, which means it still must dissipate its heat. In space you would have exactly the same problem doing that as just radiating that heat in the first place. Once your system reaches equilibrium between its hot and cold sides, no work could be done with that heat energy. It’s just a radiator with extra steps.

If capturing heat energy to do something with it did not require sinking the waste heat from that selfsame process someplace, every satellite in orbit would already be covered in Peltiers or similar.