The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.

Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.

My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.

This is less of a "caught driving drunk" situation and more a "caught driving with one taillight out" situation. You want to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there was no real danger from this single instance.

The basic assumption here is that the rules as written beat physics and common sense. When you play that game, you have to do it rigorously. You can't say that rules trump physics one moment, and physics trump rules the next.

> There's also the rule of cool. If it makes the story better/ more enjoyable: have at it.

That does rule out the Peasant Railgun more thoroughly than any rules argument.

Seriously expecting the DM to behave like a buggy video game and give you ultimate power because you found an exploitable glitch in the game mechanics is...well, that has also always happened in D&D, but it's hardly praiseworthy or in the spirit of things.

If that's what OP thinks, I'm not sure they actually know what a vaccine is.

The only reason I'd ever consider telling someone that "canceled" is wrong is if the other spelling was firmly established in the actual codebase. Not in comments. And absolutely not with the ridiculous claim that the language you're coding in has opinions about how to spell your comments.