slackdog

If only Dianna had been boosted 5 times instead of 4.

Incidentally, it was while working at Amazon years ago that I first encountered the divisive and paranoia-inspiring form of DEI training which I described above.

I suppose it's probably an unrelated effect, but electron beams are often used for sterilizing things like food, medical packaging, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_processing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation#Electron_beam

My experience has led me to believe that most individuals in favor of corporate DEI initiatives are earnestly and in good faith attempting to put into practice the recommendations of critical race theory and related frameworks.

Yes, of course they are. As explained by Chomsky's model of propaganda, corporations hire true believers for these roles because they are the most effective and reliable.

most managers and employers are not so crafty

Amazon being so crafty is a documented fact; it's naive to think they're the only ones.

If an alcoholic tells you he wants to quit but never seems to actually quit, does that make him a liar? Of course not.

AFAIK they don't use pressure vessels for pressures this high; they use diamond anvils.

Nature has a well known bias for papers with sensational titles.

Corporate DEI initiatives using divisive rhetoric designed to foster paranoia, in order to keep workers on edge around each other. ("You're all racist. Even if you think you aren't racist, asserting you have no subconscious racial biases only proves that you're overtly racist. You're constantly commit racist 'microaggression' offenses against your coworkers without even realizing it.")

Such paranoia between coworkers is a serious impediment to labor organization. The more diverse the workplace, the better this works.

Residents need jobs. Alaska is one of the most beautiful states in the country, but there are relatively few opportunities for work. If there were more jobs, more people would consider moving to Alaska.

We got a taste of this effect when remote working became common. A lot of people moved to other states and cities they wouldn't or couldn't live in before when they were expected to live near the office. But of course remote working isn't possible for many industries, particularly for blue collar labor, so if you want those people to move into your area, you need to have job opportunities to offer them.

A lot of the old software they host can be run in an emulator in your browser. I don't think there's much cause for concern in these cases.

Doom via in-browser DOSBox: https://archive.org/details/doom-play

It's at least an indication of a general preference for privacy, which sycophants for surveillance capitalists often try to claim doesn't exist ("only you nerds care about privacy, normal people don't care")

Even without tracking, virtually all advertising is a form of psychological warfare. Here's a common sort of ad: an image depicting young popular people having fun in the park, with cans of cola next to them. The message? If you drink our cola, you can have this lifestyle. This sort of advertising is designed to exploit insecurities people feel about themselves and their social life. This is psychological warfare for commercial gain, and it's standard operating practice for the advertising industry.

That is misleading, the article doesn't say that.

So you're going to give up and die because you have a broken finger. Got it. If I believed you I'd call you pathetic, but I know you're almost certainly bullshitting because you lost the context of the conversation, made a stupid argument, and are now trying to save face by doubling down.

Nobody rolls over and dies because of a broken finger. People regularly walk around with broken limbs after accidents, oblivious to their injuries because adrenaline has that effect to keep people alive. But you're here arguing that a broken thumb will render you unable or unwilling to call for help? As if you don't have two hands. As if you don't have 9 other fingers. As if you couldn't use your broken thumb to lightly touch a touchscreen if your life depended on it. Give me a break dude! If you die because of a broken thumb, your will to live must be completely nonexistent and you should go talk to a therapist because there is a real risk that you might starve to death after neglecting to eat out of apathy.

wall of text of other irrelevant bullshit

What even was your point in posting that? I don't like touchscreens in cars either but that has nothing to do with this conversation and you know it. Stop bullshitting.

Sure, I get that. But it's their problem, not my problem. I'll only switch when it becomes my problem.

I'm not worried about some specific risk coming from Roku itself. But Roku contributes to the normalization of surveillance capitalism which I think is fundamentally corrosive to a free and democratic society. Having such a business model makes Roku a willful part of the problem, so I want nothing to do with them.

I'm hoping that KSP1 gets an open source engine re-implementation, ideally with optional physics fixes. Performance and physics jank were the two problems with KSP1 and it sounds like KSP2 didn't address those at all.

I mean, adding trees to a rocket game? Who asked for that? All they really seem to have done is make the game require a more expensive GPU for no good reason.

I'll switch when IPv4 stops working. Until then, I have no reason to switch.

It's costing ISPs

I hate my ISP so this is actually a feature. If they add an IPv4 surcharge to my bill then I'll reconsider.

It's a very outdated but common notion, popularized around about in the 17th and 18th centuries by the likes of Rousseau. It often gets tied up with enlightenment ideas and is popularly espoused by many (naive) people even today.

It is associated with the controversial phrase "noble savage", which is sometimes said sincerely and sometimes sneeringly.

My impression was that the 2013 SimCity was effectively single player if you didn't connect the game to any of your friends, but that it had always-online DRM which they tried to excuse as something other than DRM.

All my fingers work fine on a touch screen. If your thumb was injured and you needed emergency assistance, would you really give up instead of trying to use your index finger? Really? You would just lay there and die because you can't or won't use your index finger instead of your thumb to call for help? Really?!?

I hope this isn't true and you've merely lost track of the context of this discussion.

Usually when game or movie publishers do this kind of crap, everybody slaps the year onto the title anyway. "Prey (2017)", "Dune (2021)", etc.

Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)

so if I actually fell and broke my thumb,

Thankfully most people have four backup fingers on the same hand..

You should design your site so that you can troubleshoot it without using real user data. Failing that, you should receive voluntary informed consent from the users, and exclude those that don't consent.

A/B testing / etc is a form of human subject research, the only way to experiment on humans ethically is to have voluntary informed consent. The fact that you're 'merely' running psychological tests on website users instead of performing medical vivisections doesn't free you from the moral and ethical obligation to acquire voluntary informed consent.

American checks and balances aren't relevant to the EU. The CLOUD Act requires that American companies turn over data stored in the EU without any involvement of EU due process and checks and balances, violating EU laws. The CLOUD Act effectively drafts all American companies into the American intelligence community. This is not acceptable to the EU.

punnerud is not confused.

Edit for response:

Which European countries aren’t able to compel a company to help them by providing data in a matter of national security?

EU companies being so compelled by EU governments isn't relevant to the EU; which obviously supports that.

This idea that all American companies are somehow arm in arm with the USIC is a ridiculous notion that isn’t supported by facts.

That is the purpose of the CLOUD Act. That's what it does. If Microsoft has a server in the EU with EU citizen data on it, the CLOUD Act requires Microsoft to hand over that data in violation of EU law if the US Government requests it. The fact that the US Government has checks and balances of its own is not relevant, the CLOUD Act still compels American companies operating in the EU to violate EU laws.

There is a reason why most American tech companies in particular make a point to repeatedly and very loudly proclaim [...]

Their proclamations are irrelevant. US law requires them to violate EU law. As long as this is the case, the EU has no rational choice but to ban EU companies from giving EU data to American companies.

The CLOUD Act allows the US government to compel a company to turn over their data even if that data is only stored in servers in a foreign country, with no due process in that country. It requires American companies to violate EU law. The only way the EU can protect themselves from the CLOUD Act is to forbid any EU data be stored with any US company. Maybe you could accomplish that with a wholly EU subsidiary of an American company that is able to refuse and block requests for that data from their American parent corporation, but the CLOUD Act would still require the American company to hand over that data because the EU subsidiary is owned by the American company.

The only rational response from the EU is to ban EU companies from storing EU data with American companies.

They definitely detect the explosions themselves, not just missile launches (remember that ballistic missiles are only one method of several for delivering nuclear weapons). This is for monitoring compliance with nuclear test bans, as well as just generally knowing what is going on. If a nuclear weapon goes off for any reason, the US government and other nuclear powers obviously want to know about it. These systems would also be able to distinguish non-nuclear explosions such as bolides from nuclear explosions, which is important for MAD if you don't want an accidental war. The systems to do so are now built into GPS satellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_MASINT#Space-based_Nuc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Mili...

I don't see how anything you said contradicts anything punnerud said. What is punnerud supposedly confused about?

By lay-observers, probably. But probably not by the systems actually designed to detect nuclear explosions, because those systems can distinguish nuclear explosions from other sorts of very large explosions by looking for characteristic emissions signatures, like x-ray emissions and the double flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter