Overzeetop

Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.

Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)

It took me searching the blacks to notice. Where I play there’s usually enough glare I wouldn’t get good blacks if you swapped the LC layer for vantablack.

Its a joke - yes.

Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It’s harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.

Sad, but true. About the only way to control it would be to require online comments to be directly identifiable to the person. Even Republicans appear to be embarrassed - and attempt to expunge their vitriol - when their homophobic, misogynistic, and racist comments and activities online are publicized. And even that wouldn’t eliminate it, it would just push it back underground to further fester.

And we know how strict these big companies are about voluntary compliance to the GDPR. ;-) I’m glad at least someone is putting in rules against this fuckery but, sadly, once that data is sold to the first outside vendor (Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, etc.) it’s out there and lives on the internet forever, even if the big boys are brought to heel by the EU.

If you’ve ever had a contact allow a service to read their contacts, you are in their database. That then gets cross-referenced with the (relatively few) online store providers the first time you use that address - or the obfuscated emailname.store@* version that was meant to serialize or identify spammers but which the simplest script can undo. Now your shipping/billing address, phone, and partial purchase history can be linked with every social media company that weird chick who did upside down keg hits with you that one night decided to allow contact access. Or your aunt Gertrude.

And it’s not even that complicated. Are you in the contacts list of anyone who has ever used the internet? Google, yahoo, or microsoft definitely know who you are in their internal databases and can create a web of contacts and likely contacts just from a couple of emails. Heck, I remember when there were “contact synchronization” websites where you could transfer your contacts between gmail addresses, or to/from other mail services. It was free, so I can just about guarantee they’re selling all of your info, which has been checked and corroborated by however many of your contacts decided to use their services.

That “not having” Facebook or [insert nearly any other major information-based corporation] means that those companies don’t have your information and profile already completed in their database.

I had high hopes for Dex when it was first announced and I was on android for my phone, but dragging around a monitor was more work than just bringing my laptop. I got a 12.9" iPad a couple years ago as a portable library, then last year thought I might replace my (Windows) laptop by adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad so I wouldn’t have to take both into the field for minor work. I’ve also got a Samsung S7 so I tested it out as well. The capability/usability gap between the full desktop version of Word and the mobile versions made me give up. Understand I have a dozen templates, from simple to complex, in Word, and around 20 calculation or tracking Excel sheets - so transitioning to Pages/Docs and Sheets/Numbers would cost me about $20k in productivity time. And I still wouldn’t have my CAD, finite element analysis, or industry-specific utilities with me.

100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren’t good enough about the game. I’ll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn’t play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I’m kind of over that.

I was kind of hoping for fallout and elite; real space flight and exploration, but with an actual story and story line to follow. I’m mostly over real-life gaming that looks like a cartoon, so I’m glad it’s not nms.

Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn’t feel like working on.

First rule of finding yourself in a hole: Stop Digging.

So…does it allow you to eventually download the files, or are you limited to simply streaming from the remote cache?

If you pay the one time fee or the subscription fee, the system unlocks all the paid features for all of the users on your account. Under your account you can have multiple users, each with their own viewing history (and restrictions, iirc). So if your users log into Plex on their devices using your account username and password - abbadon420 and Hunter1 - and then select their user profile, they will all have access to the features.

The one time fee unlocks forever (the lifetime of Plex, of course) and the subscription unlocks the features for the term of the subscription and then you revert back.

Meta, Microsoft, … Amazon

Yeah, that’s not a group I would associate with communal altruism.

Interesting. I find most pass-through (including the Airpod Pros) to accentuate the higher frequencies, which both makes speech less intelligible and my tinnitus worse. Background noise does mask the phantom sounds somewhat, but I’ve mostly learned to tune out the whine (since literally none of the popular “tricks” work for me). In noisy environments (airplanes, for ex), I find the ANC of the APpros to do a good job of filtering out everything and letting enough speech through it’s actually clearer than w/o ANC.

I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.

We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.

I don’t even know why we want them to move. If they want to be hateful and angry - let them squabble amongst themselves. And let Reddit hire paid moderators if they want to manage it. It’s officially not our problem.

Put another way: Those who fall behind get left behind.

It would have been a brilliant business move if it had worked. Shysters and cheats have been mixing in expired or substandard additives to food and drug products for all of history. As long as nobody dies, and you don’t get caught, it’s just free money in your pocket. I believe it was Heintz, around the turn of the 20th century, who lobbied strongly in favor of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in the US because he felt it would give him a competitive advantage over others by requiring the additives in food be safe. Crazy concept, right?

I’m with you. I make fun of people who walk off of cliffs while trying to get that perfect selfie. Individually, it’s very sad. But they were also excessively stupid.

Added to this is that the occupants of the sun are not, on any way, sympathetic individuals. They weren’t doing it to feed their family, or to flee oppression, or to advance scientific knowledge. They were people so rich they paid ten years of normal-people wages for a joyride to look at a ship that is the graveyard from a hundred year old tragedy. And the leader was a fake-it-till-you-make-it slimy, rich businessman who lied about his abilities and contacts and flaunted every regulation put in place to keep people safe.

I also make light of it because my job, as a licensed professional engineer, is to make sure the places people live and work are safe. Safe in a hurricane. Safe in an earthquake. Safe in a blizzard. Safe when they’re dancing with friends in a nightclub. I see people- businessmen with greater love for money i their pocket then their respect for the lives of others- try and skirt the regulations which are written in the blood of people from our past. I fucking hate people like Stockton Rush because he’s a danger to himself and others and he lies and uses his family’s amassed wealth to circumvent the very process which attempts to give everyone a fighting chance. I can be sad for the son who was rightfully scared to go, or for the explorer who may have been duped as to the crafts safety but I’m personally thrilled that Rush is no longer living on this earth and am sad that his death, in particular, may have been painless.