EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...
I know that I've played EA games before, but I don't think that I've played stuff from them recently, so I don't have a personal preference on their games.
As long as they also provide some option to pay more and not have ads, I don't really see an issue. It just becomes another option to buy the game -- if you want ad-supported, can do that, and if you want to pay directly, you can do that.
If they don't have any option to pay for an ad-free experience, then it seems like it could be obnoxious for people depending upon their ad preference.
I think that all the games that I would play -- setting aside the issue of EA specifically -- I'd rather pay for an ad-free experience, but eh. Games with ads -- as well as the option to buy an ad-supported or ad-free version at different prices -- are a major thing on, say, mobile, so obviously there are people who would prefer the ad-supported route.
Back in 2022, EA patented a system that generates in-game content and ads based on a person's playstyle.
Personally, I don't really think that I want to have my activity logged and data-mined either way, though. I would pretty much always rather pay more than have my activity recorded. I care more about that than the ads. I'm fine paying more for that, but I want the opt-out. I'd also really prefer that vendors like Steam make it very clear that if a game is being subsidized by extracting data on a user, what data is being extracted. Right now, it's kind of a free-for-all, and the games aren't running in a jail, so they can do pretty much whatever. I think that just making assumptions about what they do isn't a great idea.
I remember when I saw a comment from some guy in an airport whose phone first set off an alarm and then told him that his gate had been changed and started giving him arrows to the new gate. He hadn't told Google that he was flying anywhere. This was also back when Location Services was pretty new, so people were less-familiar with it. What had happened was that (1) Google had his location, (2) while he was indoors, while GPS didn't work well Google had identified the location of other fixed devices with Bluetooth and WiFi radios emitting unique identifiers based on other people's phones reporting them and building a global database, (3) Google could infer his position from getting their signal strengths, (4) Google had been scanning his email, seen the email that the airline had sent him about a gate change, scraped the email, and determined that he'd had a gate change.
That could be a useful feature, but the point is that he had no idea that any of that was happening or that Google was making use of the data at the time. And that was many years back -- I guarantee that data-mining has gotten no less-intensive.
I remember talking to one friend who was a software engineer in the video game industry who was involved with some game where -- after recording your gameplay for a while -- they could, with pretty good accuracy, based on correlation with past users, infer with reasonable accuracy data that included one's IQ and a set of "employability" statistics. That's probably got value to an employer, but I suspect that most people aren't thinking that they're in a job interview determining their future employment status when they're playing a video game in their living room. Like, if you're working out what a video game costs, you probably aren't thinking about the potential for it to creates information asymmetries in future job situations, where a potential employer has more data about you than you do about them.
Were they going to stock it in all stores to begin with?
Like, I assume that they don't just use a fixed strategy to stock stores across the country. Even aside from regional fashion preferences, you've got varying climate as an input. Part of what they do as a retailer is gonna be recording what people buy and making optimal use of advertising and stocking space to sell to people, and in a computer era, I'd think that they'd be doing that at a more-fine-grained level than nationwide.
googles
It looks like Target pulled Confederate flag gear from their stores in the past too. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that they probably weren't selling them in, say, their San Francisco locations, even prior to that. Similarly, I'm also guessing that they probably aren't selling "pridewear" in rural Mississippi or whatnot. That isn't even to deal with people getting grouchy about it being there...just that those items aren't gonna sell well.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in northern Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools. Four years later, the board approved a motion to restore the names....
I mean, same general region, northern Virginia, but not really his place of birth. Something like a hundred miles away.
It sounds like he was one of a number of people who got appointed via political connections.
I'd think that if one wanted to choose a Confederate military leader who did well, there'd be a lot of better choices. Like, the North-South division ran right next to Washington, DC, due to the Maryland/Virginia split, Richmond wasn't that far away, and so northern Virginia was the location of a lot of important Civil War stuff and my impression is that generally, Confederate forces in the east performed better than those in the west. So one would think that the northern Virginia region would have a lot of prominent options.
If you wanted to pick a Confederate cavalry commander, I'd think that I'd pick someone like J. E. B. Stuart, who really did outperform.
Like his intimate friend, Stonewall Jackson, General J. E. B. Stuart was a legendary figure and is considered one of the greatest cavalry commanders in American history. His friend from his federal army days, Union Major General John Sedgwick, said that Stuart was "the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America."[83]
Plasma (also known as Plasma Desktop) is a graphical shell developed by KDE for Unix-like operating systems. Plasma is a standard desktop interface. It was declared mature with the release of KDE SC 4.2. It is designed for desktop PCs and larger laptops. In its default configuration, it resembles KDesktop from K Desktop Environment 3 and Microsoft Windows XP; however, extensive configurability allows radical departures from the default layout.
The PinePhone is a smartphone developed by Hong Kong-based computer manufacturer Pine64, intended to allow the user to have full control over the device. Measures to ensure this are: running mainline Linux-based mobile operating systems, assembling the phone with screws, and simplifying the disassembly for repairs and upgrades. LTE, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and both cameras can be physically switched off. The PinePhone ships with the Manjaro Linux operating system using the Plasma Mobile graphic interface, although other distributions can be installed by users.
"Rice" isn't a technical term. It's a reference to "ricing", derived from "rice rockets", inexpensive Asian cars that are heavily modified with things like spoilers and LED lighting and whatever to look glitzy. A "rice" is the result of "ricing" something.
Rice burner is a pejorative term originally applied to Japanese motorcycles and which later expanded to include Japanese cars or any East Asian-made vehicles.[2][3][4][5] Variations include rice rocket, referring most often to Japanese superbikes, rice machine, rice grinder or simply ricer.[3][6][7]
Wingding with a blender goose nunchuk paddleboat.
Well, you could goose Blender with some theming, I guess.
To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the "ready aircraft" were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn't available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.
“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.
I mean, there just wasn't any realistic threat that we expected from Russia or China or such. We've got sensor networks that should be able to pick up any aircraft even being prepared, much less flying in from a long ways out, even if they did take off.
There's some accident-risk price to pay for readiness -- like, you can have accidents with weapons, and any time that weapons are floating around outside arsenals, there's at least some potential for them to go astray. And the more weapons systems you have in a "ready to engage" status, the more-twitchy it makes everyone else. Suppose we kept a couple thousand fighters armed and on the runway. That's gonna make some other countries twitchy that they have little time to react.
The "DEFCON level" is basically a slider that trades shorter response time for increased risk of things going wrong.
Armed forces ready to deploy and engage in less than six hours
DEFCON 3
ROUND HOUSE
Increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness
Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes
DEFCON 4
DOUBLE TAKE
Increased intelligence watch and strengthened security measures
Above normal readiness
DEFCON 5
FADE OUT
Lowest state of readiness
Normal readiness
If we can, we keep it at low levels. Minimizes risk of accidents, avoids putting pressure on other parties.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had it at an elevated level. That means that we can respond rapidly, and we're more-prepared to get hit with a major nuclear strike and still hit back as hard as possible. But it also...creates room for things to go rather badly, accidentally.
At 10:00 pm EDT the next day, the US raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command (SAC) forces to DEFCON 2. For the only confirmed time in US history, B-52 bombers went on continuous airborne alert, and B-47 medium bombers were dispersed to various military and civilian airfields and made ready to take off, fully equipped, on 15 minutes' notice.[114] One-eighth of SAC's 1,436 bombers were on airborne alert, and some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles stood on ready alert, some of which targeted Cuba.[115] Air Defense Command (ADC) redeployed 161 nuclear-armed interceptors to 16 dispersal fields within nine hours, with one third maintaining 15-minute alert status.[92] Twenty-three nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union so it would believe that the US was serious.
As part of that, military aircraft were loaded with nuclear weapons, including a fleet of interceptors, and dispersed to civilian airports and airstrips to minimize the number that could be destroyed on the ground in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
Some of those airfields were -- not surprisingly -- not as secured against ground intrusions as military bases. At one point, a security guard saw a shadowy figure moving around the outskirts of one such civilian airfield, fired a burst at it from his submachine gun, but it made it over the fence and away. He hit his sabotage alarm. At that alert level, the presumption is that any detected sabotage attempt would be likely part of a preemptive strike, and doctrine dictated that the whole interceptor force get airborne and start heading towards the Soviet Union. They were rolling down the runways across the US when the sabotage alarm was cancelled -- upon further investigation of the traces left, it turned out that the figure was probably just a bear. But...a shit-ton of warplanes armed with (air-to-air, not strategic) nuclear weapons leaving the ground and heading towards the Soviet Union creates further potential for inadvertent escalation.
We had one incident, some years back, where the ground crew at an arsenal dicked up, loaded a bomber with live nukes rather than inert missiles, and the crew inadvertently flew to another airbase before the crew there checked, noticed that they had live nuclear weapons on their field, and started pushing red buttons.
An example of a Bent Spear incident occurred on the August 2007 flight of a B-52 bomber from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB which mistakenly carried six cruise missiles with live nuclear warheads.[4]
Now, okay, those are extreme examples of risks -- a few F-16s armed with conventional weapons don't pose as much of a concern. But it does illustrate, I think, that there's a tradeoff involved. At the time, the risk of accidents was considered higher than the benefit from having a more-rapid response.
In any event, after 9/11, doctrine was revised, and the ready fighters are now kept armed. I'm not saying that the move was the right one. I'm just saying that there are real tradeoffs to be maintaining a high alert level. The USAF hadn't been told to expect to deal with a civilian aircraft in US airspace suddenly going hostile, so they hadn't structured their response system accordingly. The RuAF may or may not have made decisions about how to deal with civilian aircraft.
The Mathias Rust situation that someone else mentioned, as a I recall, dealt with Soviet doctrine where responses had been relaxed to help avoid accidental shootdowns, and that was part of how he made it to Red Square.
googles
Yeah: "The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]"
Rust disappeared from the Finnish air traffic radar near Espoo.[5] Control personnel presumed an emergency and a rescue effort was organized, including a Finnish Border Guard patrol boat. They found an oil patch near Sipoo where Rust had disappeared from radar observation, and conducted an underwater search but did not find anything.
Rust crossed the Baltic coastline over Estonia and turned towards Moscow. At 14:29 he appeared on Soviet Air Defence Forces (PVO) radar and, after failure to reply to an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) signal, was assigned combat number 8255. Three Surface-to-air missile battalions of 54th Air Defence Corps tracked him for some time, but failed to obtain permission to launch missiles at him.[9] All air defences were readied and two interceptors were sent to investigate. At 14:48, near Gdov, MiG-23 pilot Senior Lieutenant A. Puchnin observed a white sport airplane similar to a Yakovlev Yak-12 and asked for permission to engage, but was denied.[5][10]
The fighters lost contact with Rust soon after this. While they were being directed back to him, he disappeared from radar near Staraya Russa. West German magazine Bunte speculated that he might have landed there for some time, noting that he changed his clothes during his flight and that he took too much time to fly to Moscow considering his airplane's speed and the weather conditions.
Air defence re-established contact with Rust's plane several times but confusion resulted from all of these events. The PVO system had shortly before been divided into several districts, which simplified management but created additional work for tracking officers at the districts' borders. The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]
Near Torzhok there was a similar situation, as increased air traffic was created by a search and rescue operation. Rust, flying a slow propeller-driven aircraft, was confused with one of the helicopters participating with the operation. He was detected several more times and given false friendly recognition twice. Rust was considered as a domestic training airplane defying regulations, and was assigned the least priority by air defense.[5]
Around 19:00, Rust appeared above Moscow. He had initially intended to land in the Kremlin, but he reasoned that landing inside, hidden by the Kremlin walls, would have allowed the KGB to arrest him and deny the incident. Therefore, he changed his landing place to Red Square.[5] Dense pedestrian traffic did not allow him to land there either, so after circling about the square one more time, he was able to land on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge by St. Basil's Cathedral. A later inquiry found that trolleybus wires normally strung over the bridge—which would have prevented his landing there—had been removed for maintenance that morning, and were replaced the next day.[5] After taxiing past the cathedral, he stopped about 100 metres (330 ft) from the square, where he was greeted by curious passersby and asked for autographs.[11] When asked where he was from, he replied "Germany" making the bystanders think he was from East Germany; but when he said West Germany, they were surprised.[12] A British doctor videotaped Rust circling over Red Square and landing on the bridge.[12] Rust was arrested two hours later.[13]
Is it embarrassing? Well, I guess so. Rust made it to pretty sensitive airspace, shouldn't have. But, big picture...odds are also pretty good that if NATO's going to have a war with the Warsaw Pact, it's probably not going to involve sending a little prop plane to Red Square. Not saying that there's no risk there for a decapitation strike or something, but the Soviet airforce had to make a tradeoff in terms of how many of their own aircraft they shoot down accidentally versus whether they make sure to deal with some little prop plane wandering around.
The norm in the US -- lethal injection -- is apparently to essentially knock someone out, then stop their heart. I don't imagine that one feels anything.
In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousness followed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):
Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short-action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the person unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will—even in the absence of the following two drugs—cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.
Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, which causes complete, fast, and sustained paralysis of the striated skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.
Potassium chloride: a potassium salt, which increases the blood and cardiac concentration of potassium to stop the heart via an abnormal heartbeat and thus cause death by cardiac arrest.
There are a few states that differ. Last time I looked it up, one state still permitted the condemned to request hanging, but it looks like they stopped that, probably because it was a pain to do. I recall reading that the last one that was done, the state had to dig around in old records to figure out how the heck you compute drop length for a given weight and such.
In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:
Lethal injection in all states as primary method, in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable
Nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama
Electrocution in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina (primary method)
Gas chamber in California and Missouri
In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, gas chamber in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.
In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; gas chamber in Wyoming).
Apparently Vermont technically still has electrocution on the books for treason.
All 26 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. As of 2021, South Carolina is the only autonomous region in the United States of America to authorize its 1912 Electric Chair as the primary method of execution, citing inability to procure the drugs necessary for lethal injection. Vermont's remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.
However, given that very few people in the US have ever been convicted of treason at all -- despite people liking to claim that something is "treason", it's actually an extremely narrowly-defined crime -- much less under Vermont state law, that's probably largely academic.
Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as "only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, "adhering to the enemies" of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.
Death sentences for treason under the Constitution have been carried out in only two instances: the executions of Taos Revolt insurgents in 1847, and that of William Bruce Mumford during the Civil War.
Constitutionally, U.S. citizens who live in a state owe allegiance to at least two government entities: the United States of America and their state of legal residence. They can therefore potentially commit treason against either, or against both. At least 14 people have been charged with treason against various states; at least six were convicted, five of whom were executed. Only two prosecutions for treason against a state were ever carried out in the U.S.: one against Thomas Dorr and the other after John Brown's conspiracy. It has often been discussed, both legally and in matter of policy, if states should punish treason.
Neither of those was in Vermont -- one was in Rhode Island and the other Virginia, and the only instance of the two in which a death sentence was applied was in Virginia, after the John Brown uprising.
We only know about when humans mastered fire or started using metal. But we know the exact date when the first powered flight took place. What are some really early "first ____" we know the date of for sure?
Skimming some material online, it looks like the best mechanism to get day-level dating for very old historical times are going to be celestial events, like eclipses, because we can run motions of those bodies backwards to compute precisely when the event occurred.
The first recorded notation referencing an eclipse dates to about 5,000 years ago, according to NASA. Spiral petroglyphs carved on three ancient stone monuments in Ireland at Loughcrew in County Meath, depict alignments of the sun, moon and horizon, and likely represent a solar eclipse that occurred Nov. 30, 3340 B.C., NASA reported.
That isn't a first (well, other than in being the first known recorded eclipse to us), but my bet is that it'll be some event on the same day or within a specified number of days of an eclipse or similar.
So that probably places an outer bound on when such an event would have been known to have occurred, unless there's some other form of celestial event recorded way, way back when.
EDIT: Though it sounds like there is some controversy as to whether that is in fact what is being depicted.
EDIT2: and also according to the article, our accuracy in running those back that far starts to fall off:
Perhaps the biggest hole in Griffin’s theory is the date of the ancient eclipse that coincided, more or less, with the tomb’s construction. Earth’s rate of rotation fluctuates just enough over time to make calculating the path of totality for prehistoric eclipses imprecise. In fact, even programs designed to make those calculations can only do so reliably about as far back as the eighth century B.C. Steele says.
“We can’t just calculate back to 3000 B.C. and say that such-and-such an eclipse was visible in a certain place,” he adds. “The 3340 B.C. eclipse might not have been visible in Ireland at all.”
It sounds like one complexity is that while eclipses can be run accurately (maybe not where they are visible), the problem is that when the day occurred is not, and you want to know the day. Apparently, there are some unknown factors affecting the rate of Earth's rotation a bit, and the error is enough that it becomes significant across millennia.
Precisely predicting future eclipses, or plotting the paths of historical eclipses, requires knowing the positions of the sun, moon and Earth. Computers can track the motions of each, but the challenge here is that these motions are not constant. As the moon causes tides in Earth’s oceans, the process also causes the moon to slowly drift away from the Earth and the length of day on Earth to slowly increase.
Essentially, the length of a day on Earth is getting longer by roughly 18 microseconds every year, or one second every 55,000 years. After hundreds or thousands of years, that fraction of a second per day adds up to several hours.
The change in Earth’s day also affects dating historical eclipses — if the difference in the length of day is not corrected for, calculations may be inaccurate by thousands of kilometers. As such, when using eclipses to date historical events a correction must be applied; uncertainties in the correction can make ancient eclipse identifications harder to pin down in the absence of additional information to help narrow down the possibilities.
Measuring changing day-lengths
For those solar eclipses that are well established, they open a window into tracking Earth’s length-of-day across the centuries. By timing eclipses over the last 2,000 years, researchers have mapped out the length of Earth’s day over that same span. The value of 18 microseconds per year is an average, but sometimes the Earth slows down a bit more and sometimes a bit less.
Tides alone can’t explain this pattern — there is something more going on between the moon and the Earth, and the cause is still unknown. This mystery, however, can be explored thanks to solar eclipses.
We can measure a change in length of a day on Earth with instruments now, but we wouldn’t be able to capture that change hundreds or thousands of years back in time without a precise measuring stick and records of eclipses over millennia and across the world. Total solar eclipses allow us to peer into not only our own history, but the history of the Earth itself.
So if you had an event that was recorded happening in conjunction with an eclipse, we could maybe tell you pretty precisely how long ago it was in units of seconds. But we wouldn't know how many days ago it was, because the day is not a fixed unit of time and we don't know sufficiently-accurately how the length of a day has changed over that period.
Sim racers are among the most enthusiastic of all gamers, often spending thousands of dollars on equipment on top of thousands more on PCs and monitors.
These guys are selling a six gauge "starter pack" for about 1500 euros. I imagine that one wants at least the basic controls too.
Looks like 845 euros for the pedals, 500 euros for the yoke, and 230 for the throttle. It also looks like the throttle doesn't come with the throttle controller, so that's another 150 euros.
The breach here is pretty minor, in my book. Name, address, specifics of computer purchased. The name and address is pretty much available and linked already. The computer isn't, but doesn't seem that abusable. Maybe it could help someone locate more-expensive, newer computers for theft, but I don't see a whole lot of potential room for abuse.
I use Eclipse on Android, because it's open-source, I used it on Reddit and was familiar with it, and because Jerboa had some really obnoxious bugs that I don't recall anymore.
A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.
The computer I get. The coffee maker...okay, for some people I get. I dunno if a printer is at the top of my priority list but, hey, I dunno, maybe she needed it for work.
But:
A Keurig coffee maker.
Man, if I were squatting in a store sign, I think that I would be using a Mr. Coffee and Folgers ground coffee, not a razor-and-blades-model coffee maker.
Setting aside whether they want her living in their sign, if they know that she's there and let her stay, I'm pretty sure that they have liability if there are problems. She was living on the roof of a building, no obvious way up or down, and if they say "sure, go ahead and stay" and she is climbing off the roof one night and falls, that's on them. Not to mention that I am pretty confident that a store-roof-sign is gonna violate a long list of code requirements for legal housing, from insulation to having a bathroom.
And even if you're gung-ho on the concept of relaxing liability and code for property owners who don't charge or something like that because you want a lower bar for homeless shelters or something, I am almost certain that the kind of place that they're gonna aim to permit isn't gonna be people living on a roof in a sign.
EDIT: Also, while I don't know the specifics of this store, it's apparently in a shopping center (and the article referenced that she may have climbed up from other commercial buildings, so they're probably adjoining). I think that the way those work is that the stores don't normally own their individual properties, but that they lease from a property owner who owns the strip mall or shopping center, and it's not like the store can just go start treating the property as residential even if it wants to, even aside from zoning restrictions from the municipality.
Lemme check Google Maps.
Yeah, it's the "Northwest Plaza" shopping center. Looks like they share a building with a pet food store and a UPS store and such, and there are other buildings in the shopping center.
Yeah, and at Street View level, you can see that there are more businesses in the same building. Like, a buffet restaurant, a pharmacy, etc.
Like, setting aside the whole question of whether society should subsidize more housing, this just isn't somewhere that it makes a lot of sense to put someone, even if that's the aim.
Squatter's rights wouldn't be applicable here, time aside.
The point of squatter's rights isn't to try to generate more housing in random nooks, but to force regularization of the situation -- like to encourage property owners to act to eject people now rather than waiting fifty years and then, surprise, enforcing submarine legal rights.
Using squatter's rights requires that possession be adverse and open. Like, you can't secretly hole up in a corner somewhere, as the person in the article did. You have to be very clear, have everyone know that you're living there. The property owner also has to be making no efforts to remove the person. Those restrictions aren't just arbitrary -- they're to limit it to situations where is a long-running divergence between legality and the situation in place and where nobody is attempting to rectify the situation themselves (either via selling rights to live there or ejecting a person or whatever).
That can be used as a heuristic, and that may be good-enough to disrupt widespread use of VPN protocols.
But it's going to be hard to create an ironclad mechanism against steganographic methods, because any protocol that contains random data or data that can't be externally validated can be used as a VPN tunnel.
I can create "VPN over FTP", where I have a piece of software that takes in a binary stream and generates a comma-separated-value file that looks something like this:
employee,id,position
John Smith,54891,Recruiter
Anne Johnson,93712,Receptionist
etc.
Then at the other end, I convert back.
So I have an FTP connection that's transmitting a file that looks like this.
That's human-readable, but the problem is that it's hard to identify that maybe all of those fields are actually encoding data which might well be an encrypted VPN connection.
You can do traffic analysis, look for bursty traffic, but the problem is that as long as the VPN user is willing to blow bandwidth on it, that's easy to counter by just filling in the gaps with padding data.
You can maybe detect one format, but I'd wager that it's not that hard to (a) produce these manually with a lot less effort than it is to detect new ones, and (b) probably to automatically train one that can "learn" to generate similar-looking data by just being fed a bunch of files to emulate.
A censor can definitely raise the bar to do a VPN. They don't need a 100% solution. And they can augment automated, firewall blocks with severe legal penalties aimed at people who go out of their way to bypass blocks. They can reduce the reliability of VPNs, make it hard to pay for VPN service, and increase the bandwidth requirements or latency of VPNs.
But on the flip side, steganography is going to be probably impossible to fully counter if one intends to blacklist rather than whitelist traffic. And if you whitelist traffic, you give up the benefits of full access to the Internet. Some countries have chosen to do that -- North Korea, for example. But that is a very costly trade to make.
EDIT: Probably an even-more-obnoxious "host file" for steganographic data would be a file format that intrinsically encrypts data, like a password-protected ZIP file. For protocols protected by X.509 certificates, like TLS, China can mandate that everyone trust a CA that they run so that they can conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on connections. But ZIP doesn't do that -- it only uses a password. Users cannot trivially backdoor their ZIP encryption so as to let the Great Firewall see inside. So if someone starts using an encrypted ZIP file format to use as an encrypted VPN tunnel, China would be looking at blocking transfers of encrypted ZIP files. And there's gonna be less bandwidth overhead to an encrypted ZIP file in terms of encoding than my above CSV file.
And even if China, after a long, arduous effort, transitions people off encrypted ZIP, all one needs is a new file format in use that uses encryption.
As protests at universities across the country—and the responses to them by college authorities and law enforcement—continue to stoke division and anger, the Kremlin appears to have taken a page from its foreign influence playbook, using its disinformation infrastructure in collaboration with state-run media and Telegram influencers in an effort to further divide American society.
That's not how "taking a page" works. You can't "take a page" from your own book. The term refers to imitating what someone else has as their own practice.
The site looks identical to the real Washington Post website, except for the fact that it uses a small variation of the real URL
It should be possible to mitigate this sort of attack via some technical methods, like having something that visually indicates in a browser some metric of "prominence" that a given domain has.
Me. The italics are just indicating that it's narration, not that it's a quote from the article. OpenAI definitely doesn't have anything like a self-aware AI going on in 2024.
But I think they just start to realize how many of their customers jailbreak GPT for that specific purpose
They can see and data-mine what people are doing. Their entire business is based on crunching large amounts of data. I think that they have had a very good idea of what their users are doing with their system since the beginning.
KoboldAI has models trained on erotica (Erebus and Nerybus). It has the ability to spread layers across multiple GPUs, so as long as one is satisfied with the output text, in theory, it'd be possible to build a very high-powered machine (like, in wattage terms) with something like four RX 4090s and get something like real-time text generation. That'd be like $8k in parallel compute cards.
I'm not sure how many people want to spend $8k on a locally-operated sex chatbot, though. I mean, yes privacy, and yes there are people who do spend that on sex-related paraphernalia, but that's going to restrict the market an awful lot.
Maybe as software and hardware improve, that will change.
The most obvious way to cut the cost is to do what has been done with computing hardware for decades, like back when people were billed for minutes of computing time on large computers in datacenters -- have multiple users of the hardware, and spread costs. Leverage the fact that most people using a sex chatbot are only going to be using the compute hardware a fraction of the time, and then have many people use the thing and spread costs across all of them. If any one user uses the hardware 1% of the time on average, that same hardware cost per user is now $80. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more people who will pay $80 for use of a sex chatbot than $8000.
I don't disagree that there will come a day that that will happen, but I think that it may be further away than you might think, if we're talking something that can move around like a human, with human strength.
As far as I'm aware, existing sex dolls, even ones with mechanical components, are akin to industrial robots on car assembly lines. Any significant force they can exert is very mechanically constrained. A sex doll with some embedded offset-cam vibration motors cannot jam those motors into a user's eye socket and turn them on, and a car assembly robot works in a limited space bounded by safety lines on the floor.
Robots that can mechanically physically harm humans -- especially when harder-to-predict machine learning software is driving their actions -- tend to have restrictions on how close humans can get to them. If you look at the Boston Robotics videos, which do have robots doing all sorts of neat cutting-edge stuff, the humans are rarely in close proximity to the robots. They'll have someone else with a remote E-stop killswitch if things look like they're going wrong. In their labs, they have observation areas behind Plexiglass. Even in the cases where they intentionally interact with the robot physically, they're using a hockey stick to create distance. That's a lot of safety safeguards put into the picture.
The problem is that a sex doll capable of moving and acting as a human does, with human-level strength, is also going to be quite able to kill a human. A sex doll is -- well, for most applications -- going to have to be interacted with physically, so Plexiglass or a hockey stick isn't gonna work. And I think that few people are going to want to have someone observing their session with a hand on an E-stop button.
Cars deal with a fairly restricted problem space and are mechanically very limited and doing safe self-driving cars is pretty hard.
Sex chatbots don't have the robotic safety issues. They aren't robotic. But AI-driven sex dolls, at least ones that can physically move like a human...those are another story. My guess is that the robotic safety issues are going to be a significant barrier to human-like sex dolls -- and not just sex dolls, but large, powerful robots in general that interact in close proximity to humans and don't have mechanical restrictions on how they move.
Yeah, but he doesn't do that. Like, his use isn't even restricted to nouns.
There's also a rare use in English where someone treats a non-proper noun as a proper noun to imply that they have entity-like status. I don't know if there's a term for that. Like, oh...
"Jim made sure to leave the toilet seat down. He knew that for Anne, this was one of the Important Marriage Obligations that he had."
But he's not doing that either, though that's the closest thing I can think of.
At one point, he stated on Twitter that he did it for emphasis.
He also does all-caps words, as well as capitalized words. The former is a conventional way of showing emphasis.
GOP disapproval: When she introduced the motion, lawmakers on both sides booed Greene.
If I remember correctly, that's a violation of House procedure -- that's actually a big difference between the House of Representatives in the US (a lot of decorum restrictions) and the House of Commons in the UK, where this is permitted and common.
Those rules can change, but I'd be surprised if they had.
Sanctions and they know who he is? Given that he wasn't arrested, I'm betting the guy is Russian.
reads article
Yup.
...confirmed to be a Russian national named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, 31, of Voronezh, Russia, who reportedly earned $100 million as part of the gang's activities.
EDIT: Russia might be okay with someone being on the loose after targeting organizations in those countries, as a result of the Ukraine conflict, but apparently India and Brazil are the other top targets:
LockBit has targeted various industries globally, however, healthcare and education sectors are the biggest victims. According to Trend Micro, in terms of attack attempts, United States, India and Brazil are the top targeted countries.
Especially in the case of India, I don't know how advisable that is for Russia.
In light of the announcement of Mastodon’s US-based 501c3 Non-Profit, and the reveal of that organization’s board members, there has been backlash from members of the Mastodon community. Some people are even saying that this is the last straw, it’s time for a hard fork of the project!
I feel like there's context missing. What's the objection to the board of the nonprofit?
The announcement also establishes an interesting board of directors: Esra’a Al Shafei of Majal.org, Karien Bezuidenhout from The Shuttleworth Foundation, Amir Ghavi of Fried Frank, Felix Hlatky of SOLARYS, and former Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.
There are two links in the article to content that talks about forking, but it's from people who seem to be arguing about the dev team, not the board of a nonprofit set up to handle contributions.
I'm not saying that governments will necessarily take issue.
I'm just saying that that has to also get past publics and their representatives in legislatures.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to do -- people have called this a "Marshall Plan 2.0", and the original was -- ultimately, though not as initially presented -- both done and overwhelmingly grants. But my point is that if Russia isn't actively-invading a country in Europe, I think that it's gonna be harder to get the political momentum for funds than if Russia is doing so.
And we're not talking pocket change -- it's hundreds of billions. Russia's frozen funds are already in the hundreds-of-billions, so that's a significant chunk of that covered already.
I'd rather have the more-difficult-to-raise-money-for things have the easier-to-get money aimed at them.
I appreciate that there are people who get really into thoroughly beating a video game.
However at the level that they're beating the game during a play session to fill out the high scores table such that they can exploit bugs to patch code using data in said high scores entries to fix the bugs in the game that prevent further progress, I feel that maybe it's time to just declare that you have, in fact, thoroughly beat Tetris and try a new game.
It could even just be a newer entry in the Tetris family.
Messing with 18650s is rather risky, I’m not sure if exposing them as individual cells is a good idea.
I mean, there are plenty of devices with them out there. !flashlight seems to only really be interested in lithium-battery-driven flashlights. I don't think that an 18650 is intrinsically unsafe.
My understanding is that you can get (slightly cheaper) unregulated cells, but that normally, for end users, one uses regulated cells. The electronics on each cell aren't smart enough to do things like measure and report charged capacity, but they should be adequate to avoid fires if the battery is shorted.
And there's no standard for a "smarter" battery pack that would do things like report more information.
The native code of the game will be running translated, but the expensive calls to 3D engines and such will all be caught and replaced by native ARM libraries.
Yeah, that's true -- some games are going to be GPU-constrained, and the instruction set isn't gonna be a factor there.
A significant chunk of what I'm getting at, though, is battery life. Like, my understanding is that Apple's got somewhat-better compute-per-watt-hour ratings on their ARM laptops than x86 laptops do. But having that is contingent on one running native ARM software, not running emulated x86 software. Apple can say "we're just gonna break compatibility", and put down enormous pressure on app vendors to do so because they own the whole ecosystem. They have done multiple instruction set switches across architectures (680x0 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM) and that ability to force switches is something that they clearly feel is important to leverage.
For people who are only gonna run open-source Linux software -- and this thing is shipping with Debian, which has a native ARM distribution -- then it is possible that you can do this, because for open-source software, you can recompile against a new target architecture.
But Windows can't do this, because there's a huge amount of binary software that will never be retargeted for ARM. You're going to be burning up your battery life in translation overhead. And you can't do it with Linux if you want to run binary-only software -- often Windows software -- which is what Steam distributes. That library of software is just never gonna be translated; some of it probably doesn't even have the source around anywhere. I don't even know if Steam in 2024 has a native way to distribute ARM binaries (though I assume that one could have the game handle the target and running appropriate code).
I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.
Oh, that's interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F)
I'm not saying that everyone bothers in comments, but I'd have thought that as a major news publication, The Guardian would bother to use the degree symbol:
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5°C (4.5°F)
Europeans view immigration with increasing suspicion. Seven out of 10 Europeans believe that their country takes in too many migrants, according to a survey carried out by BVA Xsight for ARTE Europe Weekly, a project led by the French-German TV channel ARTE GEIE and which EL PAÍS has participated in, as part of the countdown to...
I was taught that the default is to write out numbers, but if you're comparing multiple numbers, they're normally supposed to be written in numeric form. I feel like they should have either started with a number or restructured the sentence.
googles
Apparently AP style guidelines say that for ten and above, you should use numeric form. Below that, write it out. That may be the driving factor here.
In general you should spell out numbers one through nine in AP Style. Consider the following examples of AP Style numbers,
The Chicago White Sox finished second.
She had six months left of her pregnancy.
You should use figures for 10 or above and whenever preceding a unit of measure or referring to ages of people, animals, events or things. Also use figures in all tabular matter, and in statistical and sequential forms.
I generally agree with most press conventions, and I'd buy into some of that, but I don't think I really like the "ten cutoff" convention.
I'd be pretty confident that it's not. There have been lots of companies that show up in the space, and they haven't been clobbered by other companies via the regulatory process. Those haven't been owned out of China. Those companies aren't gonna care about the ownership of a competitor.
And the US went to extreme measures to ensure that China didn't control 5G infrastructure via Huawei, considered it security-critical, and the competitors there are out of Europe, Ericsson and Nokia. And the US did some local restrictions on Huawei phones (and two other state-owned Chinese phone companies) being sold to military members at bases, but not on other Chinese competitors.
And there are a number of prior restrictions that the US has placed on companies owned out of China company. For example, I know at one point a Chinese holding company bought a solar farm directly overlooking a US naval weapons testing facility and the US mandated that the owners divest.
Like, agree with them or not, I think that it's pretty safe to say that the US government has very real security concerns specifically about Chinese companies.
I mean, I can believe that Google is probably enthusiastic (is "Youtube Shorts" the closest equivalent? Maybe there's someone else who does similar things), but I don't buy that Google fabricated this. If that were the case, you'd expect to see a bunch of prior China-related restrictions, but would expect to see a lot of Google-related restrictions, but what one actually sees is the opposite.
Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine....
type of heavy, single-edged sword, usually slightly curved, 1670s, from French sabre "heavy, curved sword" (17c.), alteration of sable (1630s), from German Sabel, Säbel, which probably is ultimately from Hungarian szablya "saber," literally "tool to cut with," from szabni "to cut." The Balto-Slavic words (Russian sablya, Polish szabla "sword, saber," Lithuanian šoblė) perhaps also are via German, but Italian sciabla seems to be directly from Hungarian. Saber-rattling "militarism" is attested from 1922. Saber-toothed cat (originally tiger) is attested from 1849, so named for the long upper canine teeth.
EDIT: Oooh, etymonline is wrong (or at least not complete). Mirriam-Webster has earlier known uses, says that it was used in the UK first, around the late 1870s.
There is no unanimity of opinion on why we came to refer to this kind of behavior as saber-rattling. Some think that it comes from the practice of 18th-century Hungarian cavalry units had of brandishing their sabers at opponents prior to charging. Others have said that it comes from the habit that military officers had in the early 20th century of ominously shaking their scabbard when issuing orders to subordinates. Our records indicate that the two words began seeing use in fixed fashion around 1880, making it unlikely that it was directly related to either of the causes given above.
Of late it has been in some quarters impossible to mention the word patriotism without having the taunt of being a sabre-rattling BOBADIL thrown in one’s face.
— The Standard (London, Eng.), 19 Feb. 1879
The “Sabre Rattling” of M. Coumoundouros, especially his assertion that by the coming spring he will have 86,000 men in the field, and that this number of troops will have been got together by the 10th of December.
— The Leeds Mercury (Leeds, Eng.), 3 Nov. 1880
The word appears to have begun in the press in the United Kingdom first, and by the early 20th century had spread to newspapers in the United States.
EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again ( www.techspot.com )
EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...
Target will only sell Pride Month collection in some stores after backlash in 2023 ( abcnews.go.com )
Virginia school board votes to restore names of Confederate leaders to schools ( www.nbcnews.com )
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in northern Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools. Four years later, the board approved a motion to restore the names....
[ Kali / Mobian] [ KDE Plasma/Mobile ] Pinephone rice ( lemmy.world )
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5b2ee290-39b1-4c3b-bcf2-811111ff3c7f.png...
A Ukrainian Sport Plane Drone Just Flew 800 Miles Into Russia To Blow Up An Oil Refinery ( www.forbes.com )
Starting anew, after a few months of Skyrim and Fallout, I'm back at the main menu
My GOD did Inon Zur go all out with the soundtrack. It's so fucking good
Record-breaking increase in CO2 levels in world’s atmosphere | Experts issue warning after finding global average concentration in March was 4.7ppm higher than same period last year ( www.theguardian.com )
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9388627...
Alabama sets nitrogen-gas execution for man who survived botched 2022 effort ( www.theguardian.com )
What are some of the earliest "firsts" that we have a definite date for?
We only know about when humans mastered fire or started using metal. But we know the exact date when the first powered flight took place. What are some really early "first ____" we know the date of for sure?
Nintendo Switch Is Removing Integration for X, Formerly Twitter ( comicbook.com )
Corsair to go all in on sim racing with plans to acquire Fanatec and help with its €70 million debt ( www.pcgamer.com )
Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected ( www.bleepingcomputer.com )
what lemmy web app do you use and why?
Homeless woman was living inside Michigan rooftop store sign with computer, coffee maker ( apnews.com )
How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic ( gfw.report )
Archived version...
Peter Thiel was trapped inside a student debating hall by pro-Palestine protesters accusing him of genocide ( www.businessinsider.com )
A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests ( www.wired.com )
OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn ( www.wired.com )
House kills motion to vacate Johnson from speakership ( www.cnn.com )
LockBit ransomware admin identified, sanctioned in US, UK, Australia ( www.bleepingcomputer.com )
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon ( wedistribute.org )
Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath ( aftermath.site )
EU agrees €3B raid on Russian assets to buy weapons for Ukraine ( www.politico.eu )
Late concession by Belgium paved way for deal on using profits to buy ammo for Kyiv’s war effort....
Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game ( arstechnica.com )
The new girl ( lemmy.world )
Source: http://www.geekherocomic.com/2008/03/07/03072008/index.html
This laptop was MADE to be HACKED! ( www.youtube.com )
World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target ( www.theguardian.com )
Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds...
Seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country takes in too many immigrants ( english.elpais.com )
Europeans view immigration with increasing suspicion. Seven out of 10 Europeans believe that their country takes in too many migrants, according to a survey carried out by BVA Xsight for ARTE Europe Weekly, a project led by the French-German TV channel ARTE GEIE and which EL PAÍS has participated in, as part of the countdown to...
How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas ( sherwood.news )
Russia threatens Britain with retaliation if involvement in Ukraine war deepens ( www.pbs.org )
Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine....