Yup yup.The Rebel Flag is a modern invention of racists, it was never officially flown in battle or otherwise. The one it was based on was square, making it a different flag, and only flew over one company in the Confederacy. Most Confederate soldiers wouldn't have even recognized it. Didn't have to, there were many Confederate flags but only one union flag. They only needed to recognize the one.

Ancient. Technology.

It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.

It's this. It's a business decision. You don't spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there's contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven't even looked at it.

That sounds a lot cooler than "civilizations have to do something with their poop".

This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won't be the ones to do it.

You guys all knew that right? Doctors don't administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won't be administering gas either. Some po'dunk cop will.

Because doctors take an oath that begins "first, do no harm". This has forever been the problem of the very notion of "humane execution", there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.

Know what's just as effective? Bullets. But we can't call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It's not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They're lynchings. Violent theatrics. That's the point.

They shouldn't be legal, it's barbaric. But you already said you weren't for them, so I'm just preaching to the ether.

And even those wouldn't be affected by a shutdown. When the government shuts down, it's not like the justice department grinds to a halt. Federal trials continue.

He's a fascist troll. Block him. Check his history. Classic "rack up reputation in game subs and then spam right wing hate speech everywhere else". Dude is a total fash troll, again, block him. Fedi works best when we block those guys because just responding to them is spreading their messages through your network.

Bo Peep and Woody flirting isn't universal ... and being unwed, the sexual innuendo presents a double standard. But that's not politics to you.

But make her a him, call him Beau Peep and change nothing else in the same sentence? "Politics". Ugh.

Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It's literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

I really don't get why people think he's all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn't sell, theft and litigation.

This is important for managing heat on a human level in cities. So I'm not saying this is stupid.

But don't get this twisted: This is useless for addressing the climate change problem. It's not even a bandaid on a stab wound, this is equivalent to offering someone bleeding out a glass of warm water and fanning them with a brochure about new plastic doodads. A trillion trees planted tomorrow wouldn't even be a pebble on the pavement to that SUV flying down the fiery freeway.

I detect sarcasm. Y'all think those same minds weren't participating in any shit? Great minds led to climate change after all. Great minds are behind average rich chumps like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Great minds enable horrific things throughout history. It wasn't stupid people developing plastics and chemicals through the last century. So let's remove the idea that any of these people are inherently good.

Beyond that, compartmentalized knowledge is kind of the whole schtick of military intelligence. They're good at it. Arguably that's the whole core framework all military hierarchy is built on, otherwise it's just militia. We've built cities in secret before, military bases exist in secret all over the place. And many of those secrets involved quite literally the greatest minds of the century. Hard to keep quiet about bombs though, right? That was going to come to light. What if it weren't a bomb though? What if it could stay quiet?

Over and over and over history shows us great minds faced with the ethical problems of developing weapons of war and what do they do? Arrive at the nearly universally the same conclusions. Bigger weapons mean fewer wars, so they develop them. Archimedes to Oppenheimer, Da Vinci to Einstein. Tesla. Von Braun. Seriously all of them were weapons makers for the same idyllic reasons, "ending war".

But were they wrong? Isn't war much less than it ever was?

I'm a fan of looking to history for answers about our future because human beings - despite all the technological and social changes - really haven't had the time to truly change in even five thousand years. The brains still work largely the same as always, we're just given more tools to work with.

If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can't engineer it, there's a question of why. As much as we'd like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they're linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It's entirely possible there's "new physics" at play even if they're only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who's to say, really?

So while I'm not gonna disagree with you, and you're right there's a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don't really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We're talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That's magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it's possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.

Until then? Hard to close doors other than just "do we need this for the story". And aliens don't need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That's just another example of "any secret is the exact secret I want it to be" kind of thinking. See also "everything I don't understand is a communist" or more recently, "everything I don't like is woke". I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There's more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would've had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? "Because it's absurd." Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.

I'm gonna propose to the alien believers a different explanation of UAPs: they're black projects. Yes all those physics defying things are man made, and they probably have an understanding of physics we don't currently know about in the wider public.

Technology trends exist. We can see them. It's no wonder that every generation's stereotype of unidentified craft always always always mimicked the latest generation of military flight tech. That's what's been true since the inception of the whole thing. It's true today too, thirty years from now we'll get a public look at the crafts they're testing out in the skies today. Be that because they get used or because they become obsolete. Thats how it goes.

So why the hearings in Congress? Because they're black projects. We're talking trillions in this rabbit hole. Congress very much has an urgent want to understand what they military might be keeping from it, vis a vis private contractors. We're talking multiple times the budgets of nation-states and we're getting receipts that are basically "trust me bro"s.

But Congress can't very well tell the truth of all that without undermining the American military, and thereby America itself. So they go along with the same "aliens" reasoning, "uhh yeah, let's go with that, okay", and keep pressing for more information.

Is that crazy? Yeah, you bet. But it's no crazier than believing all that and that there's aliens. Because the alien conspiracy crowd asserts virtually everything I just said, just, with aliens. Aliens aren't necessary for any of it though.

In the history of nations there's never been a more sure-fire way to lose democracy than making an enemy of the military complex propping it up. So Congress ought to be careful too, keep a little plausible deniability for themselves.

Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.

Sounds like they could though?

Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of "let's pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law" actions by major companies because ... well, who's stopping them?

Counter point, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I'm not gonna argue your brother ("my sister in law is the wife of a cop" is a strange way to say that) is evil simply for being a cop, no, but your brother does defend bad cops all the time. Every cop does. They call it a brotherhood for a reason, and the expectation is that their brotherhood runs deeper than yours. Be aware of that and keep him aware too. Because if he's "one of the good ones" he's in real danger if ever he spoke out against the bad ones. Real, life threatening danger. That I can say that of police and back it up with a dozen examples of cops killing other cops should at the very least give you pause.

By the way if you do the "don't assume their gender" thing from my assumption that it's your brother, oh boy they're in a lot more danger than I originally thought.

And guns are still legal after countless school shootings, so don't hold your breath.

Case provides further evidence. We know peppers can lead to serious consequences. Case in point, these chips have warning labels on them already. Don't eat if pregnant, nursing, heart condition, etc.

That last one is the active player here. The kid had an undiagnosed heart condition. It's not his fault, it's not the fault of the chip maker either. It's just a sad happening. Not every sad happening needs to result in legal actions and regulations or ... anything, really. Guns are still legal after all, I don't want to hear fuck-all about banning fruits and vegetables.

I think this is worse, arguably. Don't get me wrong, Wakefield wasn't good. But this is actually worse.

Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn't care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.

So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.

This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there's frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn't saying any of that. It's simply saying "here's a reason not to trust climate science at all". That's the argument. That's way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.

Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn't take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.

Somehow? I'm not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I'm correcting you. That's all.

I'm not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don't do this childish "well fine" act where you pretend I'm controlling what you can and cannot say.

By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn't it?

Call me a hypocrite, that's fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.