Frankly, I’d really rather that the Irish Star not encourage him to be spending more time making policy.

This is, in fact, the etymology.

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

The word tank was first applied in a military context to British “landships” in 1915 to keep their nature secret before they entered service.[3]

Origins

On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place at the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction’s Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as “Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers.” In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:

Mr. (Thomas J.) Macnamara (M.P., and Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) then suggested, for secrecy’s sake, to change the title of the Landship Committee. Mr. d’Eyncourt agreed that it was very desirable to retain secrecy by all means, and proposed to refer to the vessel as a “Water Carrier”. In Government offices, committees and departments are always known by their initials. For this reason I, as Secretary, considered the proposed title totally unsuitable.[a] In our search for a synonymous term, we changed the word “Water Carrier” to “Tank,” and became the “Tank Supply” or “T.S.” Committee. That is how these weapons came to be called Tanks.

I’ve got tabs open! Don’t close my tabs! I need those tabs!

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox

To bookmark all open tabs in a window at once:

1. Right-click on any of the tabs and choose Select All Tabs from the context menu.
2. Right-click on any tab again and select Bookmark Tabs….
3. Give the new bookmarks folder a name and choose which folder to store it in.
4. Click Add Bookmarks to finish.

Some context: this was 130 years ago, back when the US had an okay — but certainly not top-tier — navy, and a relatively-weak army. We’ve got some hindsight to see how things played out.

On annexations of islands:

• The Cook Islands today are a country in free association with New Zealand.

• Fiji is an independent country.

• Hawaii was annexed in 1898 and became a US state in 1959.

• I’m not sure why Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands are listed separately. Might be terminology in 1895 differed from present-day terminology.

• Cuba is an independent country.

• Haiti is an independent country.

• I think “Friendly” refers to Tonga, which is an independent country today.

  Tonga became known in the West as the “Friendly Islands” because of the congenial reception accorded to Captain James Cook on his first visit in 1773

On “Licking John Bull out of his boots” — at the time, the British Empire and the US considered each other fairly likely candidates for fighting in a war, made war plans for each other, and the conflict never actually happened. After the US wound up fighting alongside rather than against the British in World War I and World War II, the two wound up allied.

On “sweeping his enemies from the seas”, yes; the US is the biggest naval power (and allied with most of the other substantial naval powers). We’ll see where the growing China rivalry goes over time, though; in 2024, China has more warships than the US, though the aggregate tonnage of US warships is significantly larger than China’s.

On “establishing formidable and invulnerable coastal defenses”: well, not really in the sense that Puck would have thought of it, with naval forts and guns, but due to aircraft and warships, it could ward off a naval invasion easily, so kind of functionally similar.

On the Monroe Doctrine: I’m not sure that it’s quite as meaningful today; it really dealt with an era where there was a potential “scramble for the Americas”, where the US didn’t want opposing major powers entering the Americas. Kerry called it obsolete, Trump’s referenced it. I suppose if a major power started annexing new chunks of the Americas, the US would probably take issue with it today, but unless China decides to do so, I don’t think that anyone’s likely aiming to do so, so…shrugs

EDIT: Oh, and one other note: the “torpedo” in the image will refer to something akin to what we today would call a “naval mine”. Terminology shifted.

For context, I don’t actually think that the sugar tariff wound up getting dropped, in fact, at least not fully.

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

The Act removed tariffs on sugar, molasses, tea, coffee, and hides but authorized the President to reinstate the tariffs if the items were exported from countries that treated U.S. exports in a “reciprocally unequal and unreasonable” fashion. The idea was “to secure reciprocal trade” by allowing the executive branch to use the threat of reimposing tariffs as a means to get other countries to lower their tariffs on U.S. exports.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13856/c13856.pdf

Table 6.4. The fate of reciprocity treaties, 1840–1911

1901, Russia, Senate rejects

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program#an-overview-of-u-s-sugar-policy

An Overview of U.S. Sugar Policy

Barriers to imports of sugar have been employed nearly since the republic’s founding; a tariff on the product was first passed in 1789. Duties remained in place almost continuously save for a four-year period from 1890 to 1894, but modern-day sugar protectionism can be traced back to the 1934 passage of the Jones-Costigan Amendment. This legislation, passed as an emergency measure to provide assistance to sugar farmers and later incorporated into the Sugar Act of 1937, had as its key provisions domestic production quotas, subsidies, tariffs, and import quotas, all designed to restrict sugar supplies and boost prices.

After posting an old Puck political cartoon in another comment, I thought I’d go take a look at the archive at the Library of Congress. They have high-resolution TIFF scans of a ton of them, so I thought I’d have fun skimming through them, maybe compress a couple of them as webp, and throw 'em up here.

Given that we’re arguing about the merits of tariffs today, just like back when McKinley was in office and doing his tariff thing, seemed germane.

Puck is an American humor magazine that ran until 1918; I’ve enjoyed some of its political cartoons before.

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

In 2008, Robert Wang, Yi Qin, and one other friend, all former employees of Nortel in Ottawa, Canada, started working on designs for the Instant Pot.[4] Wang is credited as the inventor of the Instant Pot.

Apparently, the Instant Pot is out of Canada, interestingly enough.

The title is a bit click-baity.

Steam had a setting where it would only run Proton on games on which it had been verified to work. Some people would inadvertently flip this setting off. Now the setting is gone, so they can’t accidentally do this.

GNU cat

You mean GNU cat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_700_Club

The 700 Club is the flagship television program of the Christian Broadcasting Network, airing each weekday in syndication in the United States and available worldwide on CBN.com.

Not to be confused with The 300 Club.

Genetic engineering is still in its infancy.

Mate demand with time, and one tends to get supply.

What they need to do is to set up a bunch of freezers at the Pentagon, then have a fixed contract with various pizza delivery places to deliver N pizzas every day. If they actually want the pizzas, they eat them. If they don’t, they stick 'em in the freezer and donate them N days later — whatever degree of delay they require against traffic analysis on their pizza deliveries — to a food kitchen or something.

There are still other information-leaking indicators, though:

• Lights in windows, for offices with them.

• How full parking lots are after hours. During Operation RYAN, Soviet intelligence used this as an input.

  https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/forecasting-nuclear-war

  The bulk of newly available Stasi and KGB documentation on RYAN from the BStU Archives in Berlin does not address Able Archer 83. However, it casts an unprecedented light on Stasi and KGB perspectives since 1984, as well as on the operational details, structure, and scope of the RYAN project. The collection includes a KGB catalogue from 1984/85 that, in excruciating detail, outlines the 292 indicators that might precede a potential “surprise nuclear missile attack.” Many of them refer to activities in and around Washington offices and buildings, including the White House parking lot. The collection also includes summaries of monthly KGB reports up to April 1989, which list possible global indicators of preparations for a “surprise nuclear missile attack.” These records tell us that hundreds of KGB officers were assigned to work on the RYAN program and a special division was created inside the KGB exclusively for this purpose

The majority are, well, what you expect: various ways to make Eve and other women in the game various levels of nude (with the most popular level being ‘fully’). Someone did put her in an apron, though, which I suppose leaves something to the imagination. There are also a lot of main menu replacers that just put hardcore smut of one variety or another right there on the home screen, if that’s your bag.

Now. Look. I have no issue with what adults do in the privacy of their own home. If you want to turn your copy of any game into an overstimulating carnival of omnipresent erotic delights, please do so with my blessing. But I am a tad mystified. I do wonder what kind of lifestyle it is that leads a person to turn a videogame main menu into hardcore pornography.

Up next, a reaction video of Joshua Wolens as we expose him to progressively more-intense degrees of the Skyrim mod library.

Sharing is okay too.

It’d theoretically be possible to run a straight GNU/Linux tablet or laptop

“GNU/Linux” is the full way to say what sometimes gets shortened to “Linux” — a family of operating systems based on the Linux kernel and a lot of software from the GNU project. This explicitly distinguishes it from Android, which also used the Linux kernel.

The former is not, in 2025, typically used to run smartphones. The latter is the most-common smartphone operating system in the world. If you buy a smartphone that isn’t an Apple smartphone, it almost certainly runs Android.

with a 5G cell modem for data

5G is the current generation of cell phone radio protocols. Communicating directly via voice over this protocol is not something that I believe is available to GNU/Linux in 2025. However, it can send non-voice data.

, use SIP service

SIP is a protocol for running voice over a data connection to the Internet. If you have an Internet connection, you can use SIP. There are companies, SIP service providers, which will, for a fee, provide a phone number at which one may be called or call others from a computer that can make use of SIP.

and a GNU/Linux dialer,

A dialer is the piece of software that on a smartphone, a user would probably call something like “the phone app”.

and then run Waydroid for any specific Android apps that one has to run.

Waydroid is a piece of software to run Android apps on a GNU/Linux system.

Idle power usage is gonna be a lot higher than on a phone, though.

Phone hardware and software has had a lot of work put into optimizing it for very low power usage. A larger device, like a laptop or tablet, will probably also have a larger battery, but it will consume more power as well.

And a lot of Android apps are made with a touch interface

Smartphones, due to physical space constraints in one’s pocket, typically have an entire side be a touchscreen. They do not have a keyboard. In general, software optimized for this works somewhat differently from software optimized for use with a keyboard and mouse.

Most GNU/Linux software is written with the intent that it be used on a system that almost certainly has a mouse and keyboard available. Most Android software is written with the intent that it be used on a system with a touchscreen available.

This means that even if one can run GNU/Linux software on a phone, much of the (large) collection of GNU/Linux software available will not be designed with an interface ideal for use on a phone.

and small screen in mind and are aware of things in a cell environment, like “only update X when on WiFi”. Not really common for GNU/Linux software to do that.

Smartphones have two widely-used mechanisms of accessing the Internet — connecting to the often slower cell network, or to a much-shorter range, but faster, WiFi network. Many people connect their smartphone to a WiFi network at some times and a cell network at others. Because this is so common, a lot of Android software has behavior designed to support this and act more-appropriately, like having an option to only transfer lots of data when on a WiFi netwprk. This is not the case for most GNU/Linux software.

I mean, you can restrict stuff with only a few customers by controlling trade tightly.

But for common parts — to use a past example that I saw in a report, voltage regulators — they’re everywhere. You can’t do much about that unless you’re willing to economically partition the world. Even then, other countries could make them.

Right. What I’m saying is that the benefit that VRR provides falls off as monitor refresh rate increases. From your link:

If a game on console doesn’t deliver new frame on time, two things can happen.

Console can wait for a new TV frame, delaying display time about 16.7 ms (VSYNC). Which leads to an effect called stuttering and uneven frame pacing…

If you have a 60 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame goes to a static refresh rate screen is 1/60th of a second.

But if you have a 240 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame is sent to a static refresh rate screen is 1/240th of a second.

OLED monitors have no meaningful framerate physical constraints from the LED elements on refresh rate; that traditionally comes from the LCD elements (well, I mean, you could have higher rates, but the LCD elements can only respond so quickly). If the controller and the display protocol can handle it, an OLED monitor can basically display at whatever rate you want. So OLED monitors out there tend to support pretty good refresh rates.

Looking at Amazon, my first page of OLED monitor results has all capable of 240Hz or 480Hz, except for one at 140 Hz.

That doesn’t mean that there is zero latency, but it’s getting pretty small.

Doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to VRR, just that it declines as the refresh rate rises.

Reason I bring it up is because I’d been looking at OLED monitors recently myself, and the VRR brightness issues with current OLED display controllers was one of the main concerns that I had (well, that and burn-in potential) and I’d decided that if I were going to get an OLED monitor before the display controller situation changes WRT VRR, I’d just run at a high static refresh rate.

It does sound like there’s a way to ask GNOME to use VRR only when fullscreen stuff is running:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1brlzqj/mouse_cursor_stuttering_on_gnome_with_vrr_enabled/

I prefer Gnome+Dash2Dock- there I have set it to do VRR only in fullscreen apps (aka games).

But the user doesn’t specify what he’s done to enable that setting, and I’m not familiar with GNOME’s (mutter’s?) Wayland settings. But if you are okay with VRR only with fullscreen apps, looking into that might address the issue.

Setting a high refresh rate is somewhat of a given, but won’t negate anything which VRR helps with - screen tearing.

I mean, I’d just turn on vsync; that’s what it’s for. VRR is to let you push out a frame at the instant that it finishes rendering. The benefit of that declines as the monitor refresh rate rises, since there’s less delay until the next frame goes to the monitor.

If you’re always playing with VSync on and getting constant frame rates, that’s not an issue

looks blank

Constant framerates? You’re saying that you get tearing with vsync on if whatever program you’re using can’t handle rendering at whatever the monitor’s refresh rate is? I mean, it shouldn’t.

Running a static refresh rate with vsync will add a tiny bit of latency until the image shows up on the screen relative to VRR, but that’s a function of the refresh rate; that falls off as the refresh rate rises.

What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on adaptive refresh rate, which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time.

I don’t totally get what you’re trying to accomplish. If you don’t want VRR in the desktop environment, are you wanting VRR only to be active when a fullscreen game or movie player is running or something?

EDIT: I’d also add that my understanding is that brightness fluctuation is kind of part and parcel with VRR on current OLED display controllers. I don’t think that it’s a fundamental limitation, that you could make a display controller that did a better job, but I’ve read articles matching up OLED monitors, and all of them that I’ve read about suffer from this. Like, if I got an OLED monitor today myself, I’d probably just set a high static refresh rate (which, fortunately, is something that OLED does do well).