hellotomyrars

My iPhone (SE, 2nd gen) is used with reckless abandon in the bath and shower. I’ve dropped it in a river, even. (Very lucky it didn’t sink before I could grab it.)

I have had the battery replaced under warranty without issue.

There are a few of these and Goldberg is my preferred method. Most games that enforce a check beyond this default are also trivially bypassed with another application that simply rips the validation out in the first place.

There are also quite a few games that don’t institute any validation and will happily run without steam at all. It’s up to the developer to enable either level of validation and many don’t.

The only games on steam that have any meaningful DRM are the ones that go out of their way to do so. Nothing about steam is actually meant to serve as DRM that is more than paper thin. Valve tried to make a push a lot time ago with the custom executable generation technology around the time Civ 5 came out (2010) and it didn’t hold up for long and the appetite was not there.

Broadly speaking only Denuvo and very niche solutions for obscure games that are completely homespun (so the demand just isn’t there for people to properly crack them) are the only pure DRM being used on steam now.

(I own over 1500 games on steam to be clear, I do however often pirate games to try them out because 2 hours is a pretty narrow window for most games, especially the ones I enjoy. I buy what hooks me.)

I got way in to Meshtastic when I was doing some group backwoods camping in national parks. Satellite was really the only other option at the time for long range, highly reliable communication and is so expensive! I got some t-beams and was super impressed by how well they worked. The interface at the time was very clunky and the software was in its infancy. In practice the devices were only usable in the context of showing their GPS location/distance from each other because the iOS support was specifically non-existent. That said I wanted them just to make sure if someone was gone for a long time, you’d know if they were okay by proxy of them moving and be able to find them if needed. It worked for that as a bare device.

The software has come a long way and I’ve been really impressed even though I haven’t been in a situation to take advantage of it again. I’ve got one of these on order though because it just tickles me.

To be fair, this is not a Firefox issue.

Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).

More than one thing can be true at the same time. Deals are usually made because interests are aligned. There is a direct benefit to an overwhelmingly dominant player to be able to point to any competitor. There is also a direct benefit to having people use your product. There is even a tertiary benefit of the money theoretically going to development for Firefox that could feed back into their own product.

If you look at the situation in the reverse, what sense does it make? Why would you pay a direct competitor to exist when the amount of money you put in to them is an incredibly large majority of their revenue? Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.

I'm not saying the only reason Firefox exists is for Google to point at it. That doesn't mean it isn't a major one. It also is pretty clear to Mozilla because they sure keep trying (and failing) to find other revenue sources

The goal is obvious and not new. Firefox as a product is only useful to them as a handout from google to use as an antitrust defense.

The problem is that Mozilla hasn’t been able to find any product that generates any meaningful revenue.

It makes perfect sense for them to try to be an entity that can exist without their biggest competitor tossing them scraps.

How they should achieve that is certainly up for debate but it’s also clear that their attempts to add monetizable aspects to Firefox isn’t moving the needle much either.

I think the speed isn’t where the focus matters. Obviously speed is a factor in severity and a driver who is bombing down the highway is probably more dangerous than your average bear, but safe follow distance is the thing people just overwhelmingly do not practice or care about. If you’re able to react in time if something happens in front of you, that’s what is going to keep you out of (preventable) trouble more than if you’re sticking to 60 instead of 70 on the highway.

The unfortunate thing is people take your propensity to maintain a safe follow distance as an invitation to cut aggressively in front of you, potentially across multiple lanes.

It sucks all around, but I don’t think AVs are the solution and I definitely don’t trust any company producing AVs is delivering a product that does what it claims. Waymo doesn’t acknowledge in this about the part where their vehicles have human operators take control when the car doesn’t know what to do. I assume they’re not including that data. That’s going to skew the result. Even if the car is super safe in most driving conditions, ignoring what is arguably the least safe conditions the car can be in in your data analysis is fucked and intentionally dishonest.

You can argue the should but I very much doubt that it would. We are very happy to let other countries do the dirty work of manufacturing and import the product, and the places that are most likely to manufacture are the least likely to outlaw the production themselves.

I would say it is likely that importing it would be the most cost-effective option, so it’ll still be used heavily. I imagine it’ll only fall heavily in usage if its manufacturing is outlawed in the places where importing it from would be cheap. I think that is pretty unlikely.

And if production is banned, industry is going to likely want to find something else to do with the input materials, which could easily be exporting it to where the production gets outsourced to.

Define unknown?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I often download obscure games I see on steam to see if they’ll actually hook me or not. I pay for what I actually am able to sink my teeth in to.

The vast majority of movies I download are me going out on a limb. In some cases I’m subscribed to a service they’re available on. I still download them though because I’d prefer to use my own player on my own terms. You can’t even get higher than 720p on Netflix on PC without using edge. Horseshit. It is also not infrequent that there is no way for me to pay someone to watch it online. I’m not going to buy a used copy of a DVD/blu-ray to watch something I’m interested in. Ain’t nobody making money off a used copy. Is resale of used media ethical?

Well actually (Yeah I’m going to well actually you) many movies are quite literally produced in such a way that structures the production companies to not make any money and instead shift any profits up the pyramid while extracting the maximum value of possible tax credits and grants offered any number of political entities, as well as disbursing themselves from several liabilities.

On paper many incredibly successful films lose money. The game is rigged. The industry more than makes do.

People are free to draw their own lines. I pay for some things and don’t pay for others as far as digital content goes. The structure of it doesn’t even necessarily fit into this clean cut idea however. If I pay for Prime and download something that I could watch via prime ( and I do, because I’d rather watch it in my preferred video play whenever and not only if I have an internet connection or on specific devices or god forbid the thing I’m watching or intending to watch in the near future slips off the service) what is the math in that?

For third parties at the mercy of Apple? No.

For Apple? Demonstrably so. Apple has stated as much in court filings against Epic. This is largely an American trend, third party messengers are much more popular outside of the US as the defacto standard, Apple sees clear value in the blue bubble.

What is the point of asking what the point of someone’s comment is because it seems fanciful and impractical? Good grief. They’re not hurting anyone.

Also there are a lot of things people could say “You know what you’re describing is never going to happen.” That did happen.

I’m not suggesting this one is. I don’t think so either, but it isn’t a very productive attitude.

It isn't the best way to do it as far as effectiveness goes but it it is pretty good, especially for web browsing. It is the easiest way to do it on my iOS devices (as a fake VPN profile) and can be switched off in a corner case where I need to access something it is filtering out.

It isn't as flexible or powerful as other methods, but it is very simple. Tools are all about how you use them. Ignoring them isn't any better than suggesting them.

It is very good and useful to actually ignore a reasonable question and engage in any discussion they might contradict your way of thinking and instead point and yell at things that literally aren’t representative of what was posed.

What a joke. It didn’t used to be this way in the US and we weren’t North Korea then, but okay. Point at a bogeyman and accept the status quo (to the benefit of those with unimaginable wealth by the way, of which they aren’t going to give you any for defending them.) instead of I considering how to make a world where things are better for everyone.

They won’t agree and would file suit but legally this isn’t a highly tested area. The closest we get is Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. as far as I’m aware and that can be seen as more of a win for the reverse engineering than Sony. The particulars are but different to be sure though.

Realistically it unlikely that anyone would attempt to decompile and fully reverse engineer excel and attempt to package it as a product that they own. It just doesn’t make sense practically. But throwing something in Jira isn’t the same thing as actually putting in the work to reverse engineer it and make it effectively a perfect replication. You don’t unbake the cake, you can’t. You just figure out a process to end up with the same cake.

As for TOS goes, that’s its own other legal issue that has a mixed history erring on the side of TOS not actually being enforceable.

The people who did this work I think are fine to ask people to respect their license. They don’t have to worry about the US/Israel knocking at the door to tell them they can’t claim ownership anyways.

This is indeed pure speculation and not how a CPAP works or even sound in thesis.

There is not an oxygen supply problem in a room even if it isn’t actively being ventilated. If there was, you’d have bigger problems. Also plenty of people do have some form of ventilation or air circulation in their homes.

Unless you’re sleeping in a tiny cramped space that is almost fully sealed, this is not an issue.

Are you kidding? How does someone go about obtaining skills? Education is expensive, even trade school. Not having to worry about living expenses or being one unforeseen major expense sinking you gives you huge leg up on obtaining skills.

Sure you can work from an entry-level job all the up to the top. How many people can do this? Meanwhile if your parents pay for you Ivy League education you walk your way in to a well-paying job.

Being poor is a disadvantage and to pretend like it isn’t is to literally deny reality. It impacts literally every aspect of your life in negative ways. Terrible food is cheaper. Healthcare is expensive. Meeting your basic needs as a human is an incredibly taxing process when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and trying to support yourself.

I’m not saying “Abolish the rich” even. But the kind of transfer of generational wealth we have now is a detriment to society.

We let the rich have and keep more of their money than ever before. The wealth gap isn’t a gap anymore, it’s an abyss that you couldn’t ever hope to see the bottom of.

If the bar for being successful is to inherit a pile of money that means you never have to worry about anything ever without losing it all, then boy is that a low bar.

Plenty of people with a stupid amount of money lack skills and have bad habits. The difference is if you’re born poor you’re at a disadvantage from the jump. It is harder to climb out of poverty than to lose hundreds of millions of dollars of your inherited wealth. Give me a break. Good grief.

Obtaining skills costs money and time. People in poverty are less likely to have the money needed and the free time to do so because they’re working a ton of hours at a low pay rate. Someone born into extravagant wealth doesn’t have to worry about survival and can do whatever the hell they want, even if it is to work hard and obtain skills via education, they have the time and resources to invest.

I’m not going to claim everyone with money didn’t earn it, but many don’t and the generational transfer of wealth is a problematic at the scale it has gotten to.

I live in a small town in Washington and this change recently took place. Until this article I had no idea it was part of a broader shift.

For our local post office it hasn’t had an impact on the mail itself, but they’re a lot busier handling incoming packages. One key difference with our community vs a lot of others though is we do not have any local mail delivery. It was always a crap shoot of if your orders are going to show up at your door or end up at the post office. But people are already accustomed to having to go to the post office and they don’t have to coordinate the delivery. We’re also talking about a community of 2,000 people at most.

I agree that many people get dogs that are not suited for their lifestyle and it is a shame. I don’t think having a harness on a dog in public is a problem though. I have 2 Australian cattle dogs and they are great off leash but not sociable to other dogs. One is friendly or indifferent to strangers but wary of children because she didn’t have exposure to young children growing up or even now. The other is deaf and is nervous about other people.

We go out on long hikes in the timberlands when possible and they aren’t leashed and they’re great about being mindful of where I am and don’t stray too far and come back if I stop. That said they still have their harnesses on, for safety (people hunt there, blaze orange) but also there are unexpected situations that can happen.

Day to day they spend a 1-2 hours of active play in the backyard as well as intermittent play inside. If they aren’t getting enough exercise in they let you know it.

My biggest problem with the oldest one (9) is that the wear and tear on her body from being very active shows and she has a stupid pain tolerance. It is hard to try to engage her in low impact play when she is limping but still happy to sprint across the yard to catch a ball.

For truly big dogs, like a Pyrenees, their later years are really sad because their back tends to just give out on them and they have a ton of trouble just getting up and moving around.

The worst part of dogs is that they don’t live long enough but I’m also not personally interested in artificially extending my dogs lifespan, just making sure they aren’t suffering in their older age.

I pay for prime currently and Netflix in the past

I still used torrents for content that I had access to because it was significantly more convenient to have an mp4 file. I prefer to use my player of choice. Also stupid restrictions on quality per device. You can’t get more than 720p on Netflix unless you use edge. That kind of restriction is so boneheaded stupid.

The economics of it all is so insane anyways. How much money is a company getting if I watch their film once on Netflix vs how much are they getting if I buy it on physical media. The difference is difficult for me to justify . Also I don’t want to have a bunch of physical media taking up space.

Do I rip them and sell the discs? Throw them away? Donate them? What is the morality of that?

Anyways instead of trying to square the ethics of capitalism with the content I like, I’ll just do it on my own terms. Things do go down the memory hole though even in piracy. Less obscure stuff vanishes entirely.

Wild. Uber isn’t telling people that their battery level impacts the price. So aren’t they the ones hiding information?

Also a better offer for who? Uber obviously.

This is a level of corporate apologism I can’t understand. If Uber is the only one to gain by using this information (and they are), this is purely a negative for consumers. Not sure why anyone would defend this practice and hand waving that people still have to accept the price is absurd.

If Uber put up a line item on your transaction that said “Low battery fee” then fine. They’re not. They didn’t want people to know.

Agreed, but I’m also someone who thinks dryer sheets are a scam as well.

We are? I must not know how to count because those are not the numbers I have. What year is it where you are?

Yeah I mean regardless of any of Unity’s limitations, this is entirely upon the developer.

However, I also find the suggestion that because there are other high profile examples of unity projects with performance issues, it must be a problem with unity.

You don’t hear that about Unreal Engine, despite the fact that there are poorly optimized UE games.

Such a bizarre set of assumptions.

Wholeheartedly disagree they there is nothing they could have done.

Am I surprised? Not really. The whole thing is a pisstake because it seems so inconceivable on its face. Nobody would expect someone to do this in the industry at that level for sure. And so the kind of processes needed to mitigate it were unlikely to be employed.

However, in a very tightly controlled and regulated industry such as this I also don’t think it is unreasonable to expect that they should have the level of verification and just plain awareness of their suppliers to not get caught with their pants down on this en masse.

This isn’t exactly counterfeit and legit bins in an Amazon warehouse getting mixed together before you get the die roll on if you get the genuine $10 kitchen tool or if you get the alibaba special when it shows up at your front door.

I think they could absolutely make it work as a single company. The hurdle is proving the technology actually works and manufacturing it.

If they can actually produce the product they claim, I don’t think failing to break in to the market will be much of a concern. They’d be in a league of their own. However, if the tech doesn’t actually work they way they claim, or if competing tech can do the job better, then they’ll go nowhere.

Realistically, if they deliver on the product they claim to have they’re not going to last long but not because the company fails. They’ll be swept up by a bigger player in the industry.

The question of why they would use ads is answered literally in the statement about it. You can disagree with it, but it is already explained and isn't a surprising answer.

I agree. A natural monopoly doesn’t make sense to be private in any circumstance.

Thames Water is like the poster child for people who say anything government run is inherently bad because only the free market can optimize it and make it profitable. Except for the part where it’s private.