Everyone has a unique identifier. If you don’t share that with anyone, how would they know who’s vote it is? Couldn’t the number be randomized and a new UUID provided on a routine basis?

Every American has a Social Security number, but it’s not exactly like we’re told to broadcast it to the world… I don’t see why something like that couldn’t be implemented here using technology.

My point is the general ledger technology of the blockchain which would be beneficial here.

But of course this is all a pipe dream. America is damn near a Kleptocracy and both political parties have written laws to prevent a third political party from ever arising.

I’d love to see that happen, But it’s because America won’t switch to a direct democracy. Instead we have a Kleptocracy run by corporations and the 1% who have power over both parties in America. However if it were possible to create a third political party where every member of the party earns only one vote maybe it would give people power back over corporations. But it’s a pipe dream, I know it’ll never happen.

I personally envision a future where we use blockchain technology to create a new direct democracy party in which every member has a unique identifier and the blockchain ledger system used to track polling data. Every individual member of the party would have one vote in each poll at ever level (federal, state, regional, etc) - for every single thing that gets a vote, and the elected politician representing that party would be required to vote based on the polling data.

Everyone would have access to a copy of the ledger to confirm their votes are counted accurately, and they can review polling data to confirm their elected politicians are voting based on polling data, and the representative would be replaced if they do not adhere to the results

The more tactile, the better I say. The clickity clack is just an added bonus.

Dang, that stinks - I actually enjoy the steering mechanics in this game. It’s the only mobile game I have played in many many years because it’s easy to play a race or two and put the game away.

Well cool, I hope it does. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but the Nintendo Switch interested me for the occasional mario kart session. But all the Joycon drama scared me off from buying one. I’ll hold out for a few more years before splurging - I’m in no rush, I rarely game or watch television anyway lol

I haven’t done much with Excel and Word these days, but I have not had a single issue opening standard documents. The PDF import capabilities for LibreDraw work reasonably well. Many MANY years ago I fiddled with OpenOffice and then LibreOffice before moving to Office365 for a while.

Now I’m back to LibreOffice for the past 5+ years and haven’t had any complaints

I love these types of articles. I feel like there should be a community for these, but I don’t know what it’d be called

Barns are red because of exploding stars - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/barns-are-painted-red-because-of-the-physics-of-dying-stars-58185724/

Cool thanks for that, I’ve honestly never fiddled with Open SUSE, I gravitated to Linux Mint a while back and like that it’s still under constant development.

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Hot dang, I never heard of that mod, I’ll have to check it out! lol

Quake itself was ok. The multiplayer version was fun. But the real fun started when people began modding the game. The original Team Fortress was actually a free mod for Quake which I’m pretty sure quickly became the most popular instance of the game for online play.

Funny random tidbit, I actually remember playing the game with one dude who specifically had to brag about having a high powered 1ghz processor as his username in the game (something like 1gigahertz or something cheesy like that). Pretty sure back then I was still rocking a 700mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor.

Thanks, kbin uses the @ symbol instead of ! to link to communities/magazines :-)

I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.

Back in the mid 90’s, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft’s Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don’t miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don’t miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).

Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn’t a thing for quite a while.

I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I’ve used ever since in various careers over the decades.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That’s when I noticed a big shift in online communities.

For sure. I have a micro homestead with a lot of chickens (dozens upon dozens lol) - we raise them for eggs, meat, and the manure (which we use to make awesome soil for the garden). We keep the coop extremely clean (like multiple times a month we clean it out), and we keep our chickens healthy (constantly treating for parasites, mites, worms, etc) so they live a happy healthy life.

Those eggs come out clean in the nests because we keep them clean as well. I personally would probably rinse it off right before cracking open just because it’s me, but yeah there’s no salmonella in our coop because we maintain sanitary conditions (probably way more than the average backyard chicken owner).

20 years ago, I had an insurance plan with AT&T. For $30 I could “replace” my phone under the insurance policy (once per year). Then the plan changed it was a refurbished phone not new… then eventually the insurance plan went to a surcharge of $200 to replace with a refurbished phone.

Back in the old days I simply upgraded every one or two years under the insurance plan. But that was the days before smartphones really took off.

These days I don’t have that insurance plan, and simply hold onto my phones as long as possible. I don’t get it either.

I have a Galaxy S9 that I’ve had for five years and it just won’t die on me. Not that I’m complaining, I honestly have no clue what I’ll buy next. But I don’t get the need to upgrade annually.

Wasn’t there a huge deal when they skipped from Win8.1 to Win10 - and they pinky promised that Windows10 was the last version of Windows, and they’d simply release major updates every so often? Pepperidge farm remembers.

I’m already tired of my buggy Windows10. I have no desire for Win11 or Win12. I’m installing dual boot with Linux Mint on a few different machines and never looking back haha

Yup, I totally have been making the switch to Open-Source software or browser-based software (like Photopea) for the past few years to ensure I’d be able to easily make the switch when windows finally pisses me off enough. But I think I’m already at that stage - every major windows-10 update seems to break more and more features on my computer lol