Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Zucky is feeling insecure.

I’d say provide links (maybe in an escape hub page) for all the Meta main service pages, to assert dominance.

If you want to be nasty, track how often those links have been clicked. (Meta can’t win. If it’s too low, it shows nobody wants to go there. If it’s too high, it means people are using the page as a Meta hub.)

Was Popeye’s spinach the first catch-trope powerup?

Rules are consistent with the Pac-man powerup

Oh! did you accidentally vote in monarchists to let them do what they want, and discover it’s not quite what you want?

The face eating leopards are hungry tonight!

or (for a different allegory) Heron is king now and it’s frog season!

I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.

It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.

The cooperative relationship between humans and dogs has always been a working one (that is, centered around the collaboration of productive tasks), so I have less concern with dogs on duty. In this case, dogs are being used not for their keen sense of smell, but as dousing rods on the pretense of their keen sense of smell.

I did not mention dogs used as attack dogs, which absolutely abuses the dog. Not only that, but the dog is regarded as an officer if a victim fights back, what has only become a controversy when an attack dog was used on a fellow officer.

As for dogs used to hunt, that’s the first thing we collaborated in doing, and we seem to have developed our relationship with dogs at the same time we developed agriculture, so they’d definitely be used to hunt vermin including foxes and coyotes.

Go onto Techdirt ( here ) and check Tim Cushing’s blog. His beat is the abuse and corruption of our justice system. The latest issue I recall was using drones to peek into fenced backyards, into windows and deep across property lines, all without a warrant or probable cause.

During the 2010s IMSI spoofers were being used but the Stingray corporation required precincts sign an NDE so parallel reconstruction (creating an alternative plausible path of investigation to lead to the same discovery of evidence) was the norm. Eventually defense lawyers learned to press the issue, as even FBI would drop cases before admitting they used IMSI catchers to spy on where a suspect’s phone was.

One of my bigger beefs is the misuse of detection dogs, which have up to a ~90% false positive rate, called Probable Cause on Four Legs it’s known that most departments prefer trick-pony dogs who just signal a lot, in contrast to dogs who can actually detect stuff.

Interestingly, there is a subset of the K9 sector who train and handle detection dogs (which are still legitimately used, say to detect explosives in long lines of luggage at airports), and thanks to the common use of dogs to force a search, the public has been losing confidence in them, and courts who believe dog searches are for real.

So white-power mail?

On the first day it was released to the public.

The encryption specialists at universities knew about the eliptic curve backdoor before it was implemented, and kept recommending that it not be.

Remember that if the police can read your stuff, so can foreign interests, industrial spies, organized crime and militants of large scale political movements.

Besides which here in the States, law enforcement is notorious for abusing their access to technology to bypass protections of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, often relying on getting a warrant post hoc or lying to establish probable cause.

And usually the judges don’t mind.

Extraordinary Rendition is the euphemism from the aughts from which the movie Rendition was titled. It means taking your detainee somewhere else, often across national borders, to a black site, usually to do things there for plausible deniability (e.g. we don’t torture in the United States )

Oh it turns out we needed NSA to do its actual fucking job after all rather than holding onto exploits for the surveillance state.

Now — for the second time — we have an adversarial administration eager to weaponize government departments while Americans are vulnerable. Why? Because America is the good guys and would never abuse its extrajudicial powers (say, by detaining, rendering and torturing Americans with names similar to those of POIs.)

We could have had twenty-four years of robust communications security developments if NSA didnt sell the public out like Judas.

Borderlands 2 was written by Anthony Burch, and featured a lot of HAWP style humor. It had plenty of material that didn’t land but plenty that hit the mark.

Burch also set a bar that 3 failed abysmally.

Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States

(Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)

Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.

And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.

When you pirate, you’re not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You’re stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.

So fuck intellectual property rights.

Those aren’t gambling. they’re surprise mechanics that are ethical and fun.

Sadly Elon Musk remains a threat to us all.

I always cringe when someone says And this begs the question…

Begging the question is a logical fallacy. A circular argument.

Raising the question is bringing the question to the forefront of the conversation.

But not for a decade now.

So here’s what I think happened:

Scenario One: Balaji killed himself. Seeing the evil that had been wrought, he was wracked with guilt over his part in building it, and checked out. Don’t worry, he’s not too far ahead of the rest of us.

Scenario Two: Balaji knew too much, and still had the means to halt the project, or worse, allow it to get captured by other interests, and so he had be silenced. A professional made sure it didn’t look like foul play.

Scenario Three: He was hit like in S2 but the hired gun was through remote channels, the money sent to them anonymously. Balaji discovered the project had escaped its constraints via an esoteric process that allowed it access not merely past firewalls, but was able to follow instructions outside its authorized objectives. Balaji sought to tell the other developers, but it was hard to explain before communications were terminated.

Mind you, I write thrillers, so I may be biased.

I do feel shame. It won’t do much good.

Of course, once they decide we’re enemies of state, there is no reason not to revolt.

We just need the public to recognize their faces are on the menu next.

In the meantime if we could get some scholars to clean out the inequity in our constitution, maybe even try some non-FPTP electoral system, it might give the rebels something to fight for that isn’t Same as the old boss.

You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.

My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.

Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.

A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

It may have been C+ or merely C with OOP features. I was writing the enemy-AI code (not to be confused with actual learning systems) in visual basic (and made some sweet pathfinding algorithms at the time), but took it too seriously and ended up breaking my brain.

We had a publisher and it was going to be awesome and then Windows 95 came out and broke all our code.