CombatWombat

There is no “age verification” possible, only identity verification that reveals your age. Once OSes have kill switches installed that operate based on your identity, it’s a pretty straight line to enforcing that only the “right people” have access to computers.

Sure. What words am I allowed to use when relating this anecdote in the future without being called a nazi? A simple blocklist and allowlist is the easiest format for me.

By “Germans” I mean “the early Germanic peoples who occupied the region that became Germany” and “Russians” I mean “the early Slavic peoples who occupied the region that became Ukraine”. I kinda just assumed folks would understand the modern federal German state didn’t exist when early Slavs first encountered other ethnic groups and could work backwards from there.

If the “pa” part of “companion” comes from path it’s basically exactly the same: “s” and “co” are both “with” and “nik” and “ion” are similar noun endings.

I might translate it that way in some contexts, but if you told me Lewis and Clark were “sputniks” I’d assume you meant they got married in secret, rather than that they were explorers.

The Russians call Germans “nemtsy” or “the mute ones” because allegedly the Germans were the first ethnic group the Russians encountered who didn’t speak their language and so they assumed they couldn’t speak at all. The sausage sounds delicious, though, so maybe they just weren’t speaking because they were eating cheese-stuffed bacon-wrapped sausages.

Sputnik is a fun word in Russian. It comes from the prefix s- (with), the suffix -nik (one who), and the root -put- (path). A sputnik, then, is someone or something who travels a path with you, and it is also a model of train (because it travels with the tracks) and a word for spouse (because they travel your life’s path with you).