The only person older than Trump to ever run in the general election is Biden.

Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.

So - ignoring the time he sent a mob to try and overthrow the US government, how about we use the fact that he literally said he’d be a dictator?

Or maybe the fact that his legal defense against trying to overthrow the government was that the President is immune from all crimes. His lawyers even literally said he could have his political opponents murdered, and so long as the surviving politicians don’t impeach and convict him he can’t be held liable for it.

They’re arguing a legal framework under which he can murder the opposition, and then kill anyone that tries to remove him from office.

I like the bleep-boo sounds of the command prompt scrolling by on computers.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Yes. But at the same time I’m actually okay with ads for products that are legitimately good and are relevant to me, so long as I know they’re an advertisement.

Products need marketing. It’s reality. I’d rather get my marketing in the form of a recommendation or review from a trusted source than a random video shoved down my throat.

A easy example of a good source for me is MKBHD. He gets free stuff and sponsorships, but is selective regarding what he’ll accept sponsorships from, is very clear when a segment is sponsored, and will absolutely say a product is bad or overpriced even if he got it for free.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

We actually bombed the moon on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement!

Seriously though, it was a middle finger to Bush more than anything.

Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.

It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.

Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.

I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.

If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.

The billionaires don’t have to be intact on their flight.

With the trillions they steal from the rest of us we should be able to fund the project fairly easily.

And installing Linux and axe-murdering anyone with a car.

It also partially explains the Western feeling to Star Wars. Lots of Kurisawa films were made into Westerns.

Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven (and Bug’s Life!). Yojimbo and Sanjuro became A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More.

Of course people tend to get better with experience. But the retail worker who gets trained in 2 days can be reasonably good at the job within a few weeks and an expert in a few months.

Compare that to the years of training required prior to the first day on the job for an engineer or a doctor, who also get better with experience.

Autocorrect’s version of “having fun”

It’s an advertising display. They’re just having fun with it.

It costs 4 grand and has a resolution of like 3480x600, making its pixel density pretty much useless for a monitor.

What creates demand on I-10 in Houston is population growth. People haven’t swapped from taking the bus to using a car. Houston leads the country in population growth. You add a couple million people to a me triplex and the infrastructure needs upgrading.

And trying to make people swap to a car by making traffic shitty works in some areas, but major cities that were largely developed after the invention of the car are almost impossible to retrofit for public transit. It’s even worse in hot climates where the city was largely developed after air conditioning. My commute in a different Texas metroplex has gone from 45 minutes to 2 hours because of traffic, but between housing costs in the city and the lack of infrastructure to build transit I still drive every day and can’t consider anything else.

Houston spends bonkers money on its light rail that nobody uses between May and October because last-mile transit is a problem in a city where you’ll sweat through your clothes waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop. The office would smell like a gym if people used it.

I work in municipal development, and it’s a rite of passage for planners to come in from out of state all excited to kill parking standards and shut down roads to make downtown pedestrian-only. Then they spend their first summer here and realize that when you have months of uninterrupted 100°+ days that you can’t just wish away the necessity of door to door transportation.