Religion is a well of false hope that leads nowhere.

Not quite true, 1500 years ago was the dawn of that. The point where they began to expand. And they were absolutely more than just “disjointed nomadic tribes”.

You can see the Rashidun Caliphate after the death of Muhammad in 632 was quite big and united.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate

The caliphate’s first 25 years were characterized by rapid military expansion during which it became the most powerful economic and military force in West Asia

And that was the precursor to the Umayyad Caliphate 661–750, that included for instance Spain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_Caliphate

So 1500 years ago is more accurate than 1000.

What’s your point? The library was burned down in a war with the Mongols. All countries at the time experienced war and destruction of cultural sites. They friggin didn’t have ALL their writings in one library. The main destruction of those writings are by their own religion. There’s an awful lot that is illegal to write even under the penalty of death. How is that not an Arabic cultural problem?
The Arab countries collectively lost their sense for culture, and instead turned to fundamentalist religious practices, and sharia law, that makes culture and science as limited as it was in Christianity 500 years ago.

Ha that’s a VERY good point. 👍

I am very curious if China can succeed in finding a balance where politics are as open as they are in democracies. AFAIK a lot of progress was made before Xi, but with Xi it seems to be going the wrong way and become more authoritarian instead of more open and tolerant.

Unfortunately even now more than 150 years after a functioning democracy has been demonstrably shown to be the best form of governance for the benefit of the people and of the country, it is still a minority of the global population that live in a democracy.

PS: I do not count USA and the 2 party system as a functioning democracy, and UK isn’t either. But most European countries are. But only Scandinavia and New Zealand are truly functioning democracies, with Canada Germany and other European counties and Australia and Japan following more or less closely. Combined about a billion people out of 8 billion people in the world.

Absolutely that has made things worse, but religious fundamentalism hasn’t helped either.
We had that too in Europe, but while Europe progressed the Arab countries seemed to stagnate, and even double down on it.
But I’m not a historian, there may be other reasons, I’m just not aware what they might be?

The point is that Arabic countries only represent 1-2% of what they “should” in modern science and literature compared to the size of the language. 1500 years ago however, they were the leaders of the world.
IDK but I think it’s fair to say that something went wrong for the Arab speaking countries at some point in the past 1500 years. So they now are culturally and scientifically behind when they used to be ahead.

Last I heard the amount of literature in Arabic is similar to what is available in Danish.
Arabic has 400 million native speakers, Danish has 6 million.

It’s not like Arabic speaking countries are without literature or science, but they aren’t as rich in it as they should be considering the number of people speaking the language.

Doesn’t make the “joke” work. How don’t you deserve your own actions?

She, and how do you imagine a leopard would be traumatized for killing? That makes no sense.

Normally it would, but In accordance with the content of the article, the “portrait” is a semaphore.

Don’t blame me, blame the researchers that thought it was a good idea to use this stupid wording for what is really profiling.

We had never winter nights, but somehow I never got around to finishing that?

I’m not that sophisticated, I start the copy in a filemanager, and then I open a terminal and use sync to see when it’s actually finished. 😋

I perfectly understand not caring for the hassle to get games top work back then.
I remember when the humble indie bundles were new, it was absolutely amazing to get a couple of games that were actually playable and fun. World of Goo was by far the best game I had played on Linux when that arrived.

I would argue that if you’re being pedantic about the language being used, then why are you implying anyone asked an AI to make a portrait of anyone?

I didn’t I just used the semantics of the article and headline. Obviously it’s not a literal “portrait” you’d have to be pretty stupid to read it like that.

I agree, unfortunately everything you write is true, including USA being on a similar path.
At least there is still hope for USA, as for now it’s “only” half the population that has gone crazy. I think USA is at a tipping point.

I didn’t play it very much, I suppose it was OK, but I think it was a huge failure for Microsoft. Maybe others did like me, only played it for a few days, and then lost interest.
I think we had Playonlinux back then. Before that I personally only used WineHQ and their recommended tweaks. So 100% manual. Goddam there were some weird settings for graphics that could be crucial. 😋 It was quite a chore to get anything to work back then.

just flushes the buffers to the drive and unmounts.

Which can take several minutes.

Thinking about it a bit more, I now recall I had multiple steam clients installed in Wine to start them up with different Wine settings, because the games didn’t run with the same settings.
But to see my first game, I may have to ask my wife, because she had Visa before me.

Weird, I must admit my memory is unclear on that.
On my list it says 5 Apr, 2012 Age of Empires: All in Wonder 13,49€
So if the Linux client didn’t come until 2013 I must have run it in Wine as you say. Because I’ve been running Linux since 2005, and I “only” dual booted for a couple of years.
It may have been my first Visa purchase then? Kind of embarrassing that I paid 13.49 Euro for a Microsoft game. 🙄 Especially since it became free to play soon after. 🤡