The ID verification is the purpose. Keeping minors off is a smokescreen, tracking every citizen on social media is the real reason for this law.

Silent? I fucking wish you idiots were silent.

Anything with a nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times. The complete works of Shakespeare consist of 5,132,954 characters, 78 distinct ones. 1/(78^5132954 ) is an incomprehensibly tiny number, millions of zeroes after the decimal, but it is not zero. So the probability of it happening after infinitely many trials is 1. lim(1-(1-P)^n ) as n approaches infinity is 1 for any nonzero P.

An outcome that you’d never see would be a character that isn’t on the keyboard.

“Guess what! I’ve named a boil on my ass after you. It, too, bothers me every time I sit down.”

-Gheed, Diablo 2.

To quote the Onion themselves:

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say “oh that’s neat”, it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.

We could have had that. Now, we might not even have an FTC.

Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they’re mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They’re just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it’s not breaking any laws of physics.

Not too long ago, this would be a career-ending display of corruption.

Sure. Let’s just apply that consistently then. Atoms are binary, the vast majority (with fewer than 1% of atoms being exceptions) can be accurately identified as one of two distinct elements, hydrogen or helium.

Yep. Same software, same hardware, just different config files.

The worrying part is the implications of what they’re claiming to sell. They’re selling an imagined future in which there exists a class of sapient beings with no legal rights that corporations can freely enslave. How far that is from the reality of the tech doesn’t matter, it’s absolutely horrifying that this is something the ruling class wants enough to invest billions of dollars just for the chance of fantasizing about it.

Privacy regulations are to the left of the Overton window. The idea that corporations don’t have some divinely ordained ownership of our personal data is unthinkably radical.

In other words, emulators are crucial for game preservation? This shows that Nintendo knows that, and when they say it’s not the case, they’re not simply wrong, they’re lying.

If it turns out that we’re actually truly past the point of no return and nothing we do will save our species, I don’t think the response is going to be as passive as billionaires would like.

This is why I’m looking forward to the first few seasons of PoE2. It sounds like they’re starting out focused on making the moment to moment gameplay more interesting. They’ll cave to the zoom zoom crowd soon enough and ruin the game with power creep within a year, so I’m very much planning on treating it as a temporary game, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.

The warrior-king model certainly had its own flaws, but at least when the king declared war, he picked up a sword and fought.

No, they’ve alternated between good and bad ever since 98.

98 - good

ME - bad

XP - good

Vista - bad

7 - good

8 - bad

10 - good (eventually)

11 - bad

Just in time for SSDs to be commonplace so load times are short enough not to need them.

The story is hard to grasp because you’re starting off halfway through it. The entire first half of the campaign is lost media.