Qwertystop

I saw that in Pratchett's _Snuff_; I thought it was a joke, an exaggeration!

I have difficulty seeing Unicorn (the scooter company) here as anything other than an intentional joke on current VC. They call it Unicorn, they put nothing into actually making a product, and they close up shop immediately after spending all the money on growth -- unlike with Wag, that really doesn't seem like something accidental.

GPS-enabled devices are the first such improvement to have a novel downside: you can now be tracked, whether you want to be or not.

You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?

Are food trucks not "the familiar"? In my experience, if there's a food truck, I can find it in the same place at the same time, either daily or weekly, all year round (unless it's seasonal, i.e. catering to college students or not something people want much of in winter).

I currently go to a food truck once a week or so because it provides a hot lunch, of reliably decent quality, both faster and cheaper than nearby sandwich places. Other food trucks I've seen at other places and other times of my life have followed similar patterns, and if I've gone to them it's for similar reasons.

I'm not sure the "independent thought" bit is justified; if you can't distinguish between illegal and legal things, or can't manage to not do illegal things that are fairly easy not to do, it seems reasonable to question whether you can be trusted to keep (information requiring a clearance) secure.

I prefer the Lyttle Lytton[1], personally. These get kind of long.

[1] http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

IPA seems to describe areas as far as I can tell; each consonant is how-do-you-make-the-sound and where-is-the-sound-made, not specific frequencies, charted on a grid. The vowel chart is "where is your tongue in your mouth".

I'd guess you could get zapped if you accidentally touch the metal part of the bulb (or the socket) while unscrewing the old one or screwing in the new one.

Presumably, because it's (technically) breaking federal law, and someone who breaks federal law probably shouldn't have a federally-granted security clearance.

Specifically on Pokemon (so Game Freak), not everything Nintendo's done. Grandparent specifically said "the Pokemon team"

And the later ones (and all the 3DS ones) have the option to do that perpetually in the background, which would probably be why this issue comes up here instead of on other local multisystem Switch games that only do it at specific times.

They've always been pretty conservative as far as game design goes; somehow I doubt they'd be pushing any boundaries on the backend.

So, is the Switch (in certain circumstances caused primarily/only by this game) breaking 1, or is the Roku breaking 2? Neither seem to have broken either until this particular interaction.

The Switch is capable of communicating both over an existing network through a wired or wireless router, and through wireless peer-to-peer communications with other nearby Switches. Previous Pokemon games (and other games on the Nintendo 3DS) have used local wireless as a constant background feature in this manner, but to my knowledge, most Switch games that use local wireless only do it at specific times (when playing multiplayer) instead of always-on in the background, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that only the Pokemon game causes this problem, or that it would be heard by nearby devices on other networks. Other games would break it only when someone is actually playing local multi-system multiplayer Smash Bros or something, which is going to be rarer and you're probably less likely to be trying to use the Roku at the same time.

The only thing I would find implausible about breaking Rokus by proximity would be why the Rokus are picking up the communication from a Switch, when presumably they didn't break whenever someone used a 3DS within ten yards (or we'd have heard these complaints years ago). But that could easily be down to changes in protocol by Nintendo between the two systems, such that one is ignored and the other is mistaken for relevant data.

I don't have a Roku or an easy way to inspect nearby wifi packets, so I can't easily test this theory.

If the victim is yourself, either you were coerced (and the coercion should be the crime) or you consented (and it shouldn't be a crime). If I kick myself in the shin, is that battery, now?

Not anymore, is it? Last I heard they were in pretty significant legal trouble due to not actually having the 1:1 real-doller backing they claimed to, or other assets of equivalent value, among other issues.

There are other cryptocurrencies (eg Tether) that follow USD (eg 1 Tether is almost always equal to $1.00 USD), to avoid issues with volatility.

One of us is behind the times on Tether; last I heard they were in pretty significant legal/financial trouble re: money laundering, not actually having most of the backing dollars they claimed to, and possibly market manipulation.

At a guess, people are less likely to make a fuss about fraud when they're embarrassed to admit they were trying to buy such things.

I thought essentially no one uses mini-A or micro-A, so I don't know why you would want that. I thought USB 3 was just about faster data. If a cable always blocks data, then I don't see any use for USB 3.

Presumably, if fernly wants a mini-A, it's because they do use it and that's why they want it. USB 3, I would assume USB-C was meant, and that becomes an issue of plug shape.

I am paying for one-quarter of the 4-bedroom apartment (that is, one bedroom plus shared spaces), which comes in at $950/mo. I am well aware that this is absurdly cheap for the area. Probably part of the discount is from the lack of insulation and also lack of a lease (month-to-month rent, no legally-enforced guarantee that rent won't go up or I won't be kicked out, though the landlord thus far seems like a decent sort and I'm not too worried). I don't know the rate on the other apartments.

There are many buildings of about that size in the neighborhood, though I don't know how they're divided internally, and it would of course be more expensive if you're renting a full house worth. I don't recall the square footage of the apartment.

I'm in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and my apartment is a 4-bedroom. Building used to be owner-occupied, now converted to two addresses with two apartments in each plus a shared basement with a single-room fifth apartment, price is astoundingly low for the area because the landlord is just the senior who grew up there, I think the other apartments are all 1-2 bedroom or studio. It might be a bit cramped, but you could rent the entire big apartment and fit four to six kids plus two parents.

Storage and production costs for something available in UHD are the same regardless of whether someone streams a downscaled version. Storing multiple resolutions (assuming they do that rather than downscaling live from the stored highest-res or making the client do it) is where additional costs for more versions would show up.

Eh. US Pop culture was a lot more unified before Netflix (and especially before VCRs, and before the number of channels got so big). I'm told there was a time when everyone watched whichever current sitcom, or the Simpsons, to a much greater degree than the article's "everybody watched the Game of Thrones finale". Even if we had another manned Moon mission, or even a manned Mars mission, I doubt it would have as many people watching as the later Apollo missions (much less viewed than 11).

On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have problems; they always do.

On the other hand, Disney owns Hulu. Why is this a launch day of anything other than the cosmetic parts of the frontend and a new empty copy of some databases? What is there to break that's not already well-established?

Mostly sounds true, but one thing Netflix offered that none of the per-studio streaming services can: it was one subscription with everything.

All the others will have their own catalog, but they won't have each others'. Is everything you want to watch coming from the same place? Which one will you pick, or do you want to manage five accounts each with their own bill?

(admittedly, if you only watch movies and not much TV, the answer might be "yes, Disney")

My personal solution to this is to subscribe ad-hoc, without renewal, only when I want to watch something; basically I'm treat it as the individual-rental model with a discount if I happen to want to see two things from the same service in quick succession (hasn't happened yet). If you watch more than me that might not be practical; I usually watch less than five shows or movies in a year, and half of that is when family members want to show me so it's on their accounts.

Assuming that Bezos lives in a fairly large house (and/or has several houses), evicting him could help quite a lot of people previously living in small shacks. I grew up in a NY suburb and you could probably fit two families (three in the larger ones) in any house in the neighborhood without anyone being particularly uncomfortable, and with no construction beyond the conversion of a half-bathroom to a full-bathroom. Given funding to more thoroughly renovate, you might be able to manage three. And that's just upper-middle-class suburbia, not billionaire mansions.

"modern city", maybe not, but there's a world of difference between, say, a shack in the woods and an apartment with aircon/heating/insulation (as appropriate) and easy access to groceries.

I don't know where the line is, but if you say the basic right is just "house", and that gets enforced, someone's going to try to draw that line as low as they can. Probably a few developers try to argue that if everyone gets a house then zoning laws need to be relaxed so they can afford it, and (hyperbole) we're back to windowless apartments with one room per family and one bathroom per floor.

Yes, but the line of credit is the credit card, not the purchase. You wouldn't have to go to a bank every time you wanted to buy something on a credit card, but you would have to go there to get a card.

Utility bills are forgeable paper, yes. So is any other proof short of the strong cryptographic kind, which is going to be a lot more trouble to get set up infrastructurally. Also, forging them, or theft of mail, is a notable threshold beyond "just say you live there". Generally, in my experience, proof-of-address is coupled with some other requirement to prove your identity, so a genuine-but-stolen utility bill would need to be coupled with either a forged ID or a remarkable resemblance to the actual owner.

It's not perfect, but I would say that in most cases it's better than nothing. It's a bit lacking for of subletters, but when I've needed proof-of-address, showing the signed lease has also been acceptable.

(I actually am in a month-to-month with no lease and with a roommate's name on the utility bill, so the last time I needed proof of address I needed something else. Can't now remember what it was.)