Dude, PTSD is more common than you think. It can happen from a single traumatic event. And it doesn't have to involve constant horrifying panic attacks. I was diagnosed with PTSD after I had a nose surgery done. The post surgery involved having my nasal passages completely stuffed with gauze for a weekend. I felt like I was choking the entire time. For years afterwards, every time my nose would get really stuffy, I'd feel an anxiety attack coming on and start to really freak out and panic. It's terrifying. It's been 15 years and attacks can still happen, although it's much less likely now than before. I carry pseudoephedrine and Afrin on me at all times just in case. So, yeah, I can see how such a large proportion of society could have PTSD.

Why would anyone want this? I literally stopped using my desktop after like Win98. I just put everything in the Start Menu. Now, with Windows 10/11 searchable Start Menus, I don't even need to keep the Start Menu shortcuts structured; I can just start typing the name of the program and hit Enter when it comes up. Actually seeing the Desktop would be very, very weird for me, since I'm usually running every program Maximized at almost all times. The only time I use unmaximized windows is when I want to drag stuff from one window to another or when I want to do a task that involves looking at one program while using another. These scenarios, while quite common for me, never involve exposing the desktop. The several windows just get resized an end up taking up the whole screen together. I'm not even sure if there's any icons at all on the desktop anymore, since I only ever see it for a few seconds after a reboot, before my browser restarts. And, for commonly used programs, I just pin them to the taskbar, leaving even less reason to use the Desktop. The whole Desktop metaphor has definitely run its course.

The only person I know who I've seen actively use the desktop in recent years is my dad, who's in his seventies and has a program that can't be pinned to the taskbar for some reason (it's very old and it launches a different program after login, which leaves a second icon on the taskbar, while the launcher icon sits there unused. My dad hates this for some reason, so the launcher icon sits on the desktop.) Also, he doesn't like typing if he can avoid it, so the Start button's search feature goes unused, so he likes to have shortcuts on the desktop for stuff. It's weird, but if that's what he wants, I'm not going to fight him over it. I also can't get him to use an ad-blocker because some of the right-wing news sites he likes get pissy with ad-blockers and he doesn't want to pay for them or learn how to turn off the adblocker for specific sites. It doesn't help that those sites will happily tell you how to remove the adblocker entirely but not how to turn it off just for their site. Assholes. This means that I have to remove his malware on a regular basis.

Well, except for the journalists of NPR. Those guys are the most serious journalists you'll ever see. That's why Trump and his cronies tried to destroy them by defunding public broadcasting. And, no, I'm not being sarcastic. The only reason they all seem like a bunch of liberals is because reality itself has a liberal bias. They (NPR) and the BBC, AP, and Reuters are the most neutral news agencies to ever exist. That's why Republicans (let's be real, Trumpsters) hate them so much.

I don't think squaring the circle is a good example here, since the problem isn't so much a find the number problem, but a find the answer while restricting yourself to a few specific operations problem. So the non-algebraic solution doesn't count because it doesn't follow the rules. People knew what the answer was as a number that you can calculate for ages. They weren't sure if you could do it while following the arcane rules of ancient compass and straightedge constructions. It's turns out that the answer is no.

That's just kicking the can down the road. Besides, every function needs memory to store its definition, so you've saved nothing.

Flat butts are the thing!

It wasn't California who decided to base both houses on population. It was SCOTUS. They said that it violated equal protection to have geographical based representation that didn't spread the representatives equally based on population. They also said that you have to actually reapportion every ten years or so. Before then, a few southern states apportioned their representatives at the turn of the twentieth century and then didn't do it again because the old districts kept more black people from being represented than if they updated the boundaries. SCOTUS said that was BS, along with strictly geographical districts.

Another interesting thing about that 74 drinks per week statistic is that it works out to almost exactly a gallon of beer per day. I guess they're well hydrated then.

A drink is a standard amount of alcohol. It's specifically defined as 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof liquor or the equivalent in any other form. This works out to 12 oz. for most American Lagers and 5 oz. for most wines. Mixed drinks typically have two shots of liquor and so are usually two drinks, but this can vary. Regardless of form, a drink contains 0.6 fl. oz. of ethanol dissolved in however much whatever.

Hey, totally off-topic but I'm going to respond to your sig. It's even worse than you make it out to be. The Slashdot source actually has Unicode support. It has for more than 20 years. The problem is that it wasn't very good, so when they turned it on, assholes got to work breaking things. Rather than actually fix it, they just turned it off and left it that way. What broke, you ask? Direction markers. If you put a right-to-left direction marker in your comment, then entire rest of the page would be interpreted right-to-left as well. Well, until someone else changed it back in a later comment. It was really, really annoying. Rather than forcing the text flow back to left-to-right after every comment, like literally every site that supports Unicode today does, they just said, "Fuck it. We're too dumb," and turned Unicode back off.

Speaking of Quake, I think that Quake may be more influential on PC FPSs than Doom (or even Wolfenstein 3-D). The reason is that Quake is the game that introduced the world to mouse+WASD for FPS controls. Before then, controls were all over the place. The original Doom controls were really quite terrible. The mouse would move you back and forth as well as rotate the player, and if you held shift then the mouse would strafe instead of rotate. Also, the keyboard used the arrow keys, with the right and left arrows rotating instead of the modern strafing. To strafe with the keyboard, there was a strafe key that put the arrows into strafe mode as with the mouse. It was really weird and compared to mouse+WASD style controls that were introduced with Quake, Doom controls are just awful. All the modern Doom ports sort of fix the controls by getting rid of the mouse moving you forward and back and using WASD instead of arrow keys and making A and D default to strafe instead of rotate, but without mouse-look, it still feels a bit weird.

But in that case, it would have to be Angry Birds, which was the first viral phone game, IIRC. Prior to then, phone games (or mobile games, as they're called today) were more of a curiosity until Angry Birds made them a selling point of iPhones and Androids. Farmville was arguably more popular, but it wasn't on mobile at first, but rather on the web. Farmville was the first social media game and is also super influential.

Get used to it. That's just part of the speech of young Americans, particularly on the West Coast. It isn't going anywhere.

Double jeopardy only applies to federal charges because of the separate-sovereign doctrine. On any given crime, each sovereign gets its own bite at the apple. Each state, the federal government, tribal governments, and the governments are all independent sovereign entities. This means that every state involved can charge and try him separately and double jeopardy doesn't stop it from happening. Double jeopardy just stops each sovereign from trying him more than once themselves.

NB: there are a few states that interpret the double-jeopardy rule more strictly than SCOTUS, and in those states, double-jeopardy would apply. I'm not really sure which states these are.

Were they though? I don't remember reading anything about the state charges being dismissed with prejudice. That would have been really weird since no jury had been seated. Ordinarily the charges would have been dismissed without prejudice, since there was no jury, if they were dismissed at all. Often times in these cases, the charges just sit open waiting for the state to get ahold of the defendant or for them to die.

As far as double-jeopardy goes: nope. Doesn't apply. Dual-sovereign doctrine says that states and the fed are separate sovereign entities and so each has their own independent right to prosecute. Double-jeopardy applies sovereign by sovereign.