Yeah, it’s the same problem for people who rely on exposure to get business. Artists, for example, are pretty much locked into Twitter. Because they rely on a large user base for their work to be seen and spread. And switching to another site (even if it has better quality of life) isn’t feasible if the massive user base doesn’t already exist there.
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Make declaration of war a mandatory vote for every citizen. Anyone who votes “yes” (or illegally abstains) gets registered for the draft. Anyone who votes “no” is unregistered.
I know it’s not really feasible because governments need to be able to react swiftly in times of war. But these days with computers and cell phones, there’s very little reason that the government couldn’t push a “go download our secure voting app/visit this link to cast your vote” notification via the emergency alert broadcasting system.
Yes. OW1 cost money, but you got all the content. The only paid service was cosmetic outfits for the different characters. You could buy loot boxes for cosmetics. But you had all of the characters, maps, game modes, etc available to begin with. You got the whole game, then could grind for cosmetics.
OW2 takes that and flips it on its head. The game is free, but each character costs money. The problem is that they shut down OW1, so now the players who owned 1 are having to grind for everything. They’ve also had some weird server bugs, with players getting indefinitely locked out of characters they already own.
I’m honestly looking forward to watching him clamor to get in front of a news camera to break the order.
We all know from the E. Jean Carroll case that he’s physically incapable of stopping himself from talking shit. Because the very first thing he did after losing that defamation case was jump in front of a news camera and defame her again.
At a certain point, the lawyers will simply need to resort to documenting all of their communications with Trump, so they can start distancing themselves with the “against the advice of legal council, our client…” lines. Basically make it abundantly clear that when Trump breaks the order, that he has been warned and that the lawyers tried to stop him. Because if Trump tries to say that his lawyers okayed it, they’ll also be in some deep shit.
I mean, apparently his sex tape is available somewhere. So you’re welcome to go find out for yourself.
Yeah, my last apartment had toilets that weren’t compatible. The supply hose going to the tank actually had a compression washer and went all the way through the tank before attaching to the valve. Like I couldn’t just unscrew the water hose from the bottom of the tank to tie in, because there wasn’t anything to unscrew. The hose just went straight through to the inside of the tank.
I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. It honestly had me baffled, and I was left settling for baby wipes until I could move into my current place. And you’d best bet that during my walkthrough for my current place, I checked the toilet to see if it would work with my bidet. The leasing agent looked at me like I was crazy when I dove behind the toilet, but it’s a new checkbox on my list.
Are you-… Uhh… Are you using Pringles to wipe, in some sort of Three Shells system?
It isn’t compressible at all, really. As far as a compression algorithm is concerned, it just looks like random data.
Imagine trying to compress a text file. Each letter normally takes 8 bits to represent. The computer looks at 8 bits at a time, and knows which character to display. Normally, the computer needs to look at all 8 bits even when those bits are “empty” simply because you have no way of marking when one letter stops and another begins. It’s all just 1’s and 0’s, so it’s not like you can insert “next letter” flags in that. But we can cut that down.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to count all the letters, then sort them from most to least common. Then we build a tree, with each character being a fork. You start at the top of the tree, and follow it down. You go down one fork for 0 and read the letter at your current fork on a 1. So for instance, if the letters are sorted “ABCDEF…” then “0001” would be D. Now D is represented with only 4 bits, instead of 8. And after reading the 1, you return to the top of the tree and start over again. So “01000101101” would be “BDBAB”. Normally that sequence would take 40 bits to represent, (because each character would be 8 bits long,) but we just did it in 11 bits total.
But notice that this also has the potential to produce letters that are MORE than 8 bits long. If we follow that same pattern I listed above, “I” would be 9 bits, “J” would be 10, etc… The reason we’re able to achieve compression is because we’re using the more common (shorter) letters a lot and the less common (longer) letters less.
Encryption undoes this completely, because (as far as compression is concerned) the data is completely random. And when you look at random data without any discernible pattern, it means that counting the characters and sorting by frequency is basically a lesson in futility. All the letters will be used about the same, so even the “most frequent” characters are only more frequent by a little bit due to random chance. So now. Even if the frequency still corresponds to my earlier pattern, the number of Z’s is so close to the number of A’s that the file will end up even longer than before. Because remember, the compression only works when the most frequent characters are actually used most frequently. Since there are a lot of characters that are longer than 8 bits and those characters are being used just as much as the shorter characters our compression method fails and actually produces a file that is larger than the original.
Ding ding ding. It’s all about the tracking data. Also, notifications. They want to be able to buzz you with spam, to remind you that the app exists.
but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution to society they may be able to make to society.
Yeah, I touched on that with my last sentence:
It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.
There are two problems with that. The first is that “maximizing contribution to society” can easily be interpreted as “being forced to stamp license plates for 16 hours a day.” We already know this is a possible interpretation, because that’s how our system already interprets it. Either way they’re locked up against their will, and are being forced to perform labor to someone else’s benefit. The very nature of their confinement means that any contribution they make will be for someone else and not themselves. And the simple word for that is “slavery”. The second problem is that it’s still prison. We haven’t actually solved the prison problem at all in this scenario; We’ve simply given it a mask so we can say prisons have been abolished. Like if we don’t call them prisons, we can say we don’t have any prisoners.
Prisons will still be necessary for the most egregious and irredeemable criminals. The sad reality is that there are certain people who simply need to be sequestered from the rest of society for the general public’s safety, and no amount of rehabilitation or intervention will solve that. But that should be the exception, not the norm. The massive prison population is absolutely a problem, but it isn’t something that can be completely abolished. It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.
The stockholders have improving profits. That’s all the media cares about. If profits go up, the media will be praising it even if inflation is killing the bottom 90%.
It’ll be like the “States’ Rights” people, but infinitely worse. Being raised in the south, you’re taught that the civil war was over states’ rights, not slavery. That slavery was just the one that historians tended to latch onto, because it’s the most inflammatory topic and makes the south look bad.
And if you’re a good student and don’t bother to question that, you’ll enter the adult world believing that the south wasn’t fighting for slavery.
It’s built into the connector. The connector isn’t just wires soldered to contacts; It’s a PCB with actual circuitry. When you plug a device in, it uses that chip to tell the charger how much power to send. Then the charger receives that signal, and sends the appropriate amount of power.
If the signal isn’t received, then the charger should only send the bare minimum amount that any device should be able to handle, for things like flash drives or peripherals. This is why some of the cheaper cables won’t charge your newer devices, because those newer devices need more power and the old cable isn’t negotiating a high enough power transfer.
It’s ironically one of the biggest complaints that people have about USB-C, because it causes a nightmare in regards to compatibility. Old cables and chargers are constantly being phased out as the standard gets developed for more and more power transfer. And that outdated equipment is still sitting on shelves, waiting to be bought. A cable or charger that you bought a month ago may not be compatible to charge a device that you buy today, because that unit is actually a year old and was phased out six months after it was manufactured and shipped, but has been on a store shelf ever since because a retailer bought a bunch and doesn’t want to write them off as a loss.
It means people are constantly re-buying the same gear at higher specs, simply to keep up-to-date with existing standards. And if you don’t re-buy everything then you have a hodgepodge mix of cables and chargers that all look the same and only some of them will charge all of your newer devices. The older stuff looks the same on the outside, but your new phone will refuse to charge when you try to use them.
I was actually surprised to find out that we’re federated with exploding-heads. Most instances will just immediately defederate from them.
Yeah, but that only works when your device uses less than 100W, because that’s what USB-C is currently rated for. Gaming laptops can easily use two or three times that amount while simply idling on the desktop. Once you start looking at GPU/CPU power requirements and active cooling, the power consumption quickly stacks up.
These devices usually have IEC power bricks with a fat barrel connector, because that’s what they require to be able to get enough wattage into the device. Requiring them to charge via USB-C is going to have them using two or three USB-C ports just to break even and avoid losing power. The power adapter would look like some weird fan-out adapter with one IEC power cable going in and three or four USB-C cables on the other end.
I’m laughing at the idea of a device having three or four USB-C ports, and not being able to use any of them for anything except charging.
God that last one drives me up a fucking wall. My partner’s laptop refuses to charge with anything except the officially supported power adapter, even though it’s just a USB-C connector. Everything I’ve plugged it into has been rated for the 100W that the laptop needs to charge, but the damned device locks out anything except official chargers under the guise of safety.
I’m chuckling at the idea of someone plugging in an early USB-C device and watching it go up in flames as it gets hit with 48v instead of the 5v that it’s rated for. I know USB-C has a chip that is supposed to negotiate power transfer, but it’s still a funny “what if” thought.
Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.