The US has been on a governance crisis for some time now. It is slow and gradual, but they already had a coup attempt. It is the sort of things that is surreal and only possible to see when you look at it from a multi decades POV. Like Asimov’s foundation, it will take centuries and lots of things can happen in the mean time, but you can already see the empire imploding, rotting from within. Rome took almost 3 centuries to fall, and it was more like an erosion rather than crumble. I can see something similar.

Suit evolution is quite an interesting topic. The first known card decks were usually made of several hundreds of cards and were not standardized, some didn’t even have suits. Symbols, images and shapes varied greatly as they were usually hand painted. This European suits are offshoots of Islamic suits. Most likely, each of these suit styles was an attempt to standardize some game or production at different historical points in time and through the interpretation by entirely different artists. The common theory for French abstraction is that they are much simpler symbols which are faster and easier to reproduce in large quantities. Particularly easy to engrave on the first woodwork prints for mass production.

Oops, sorry. Not a native English speaker. Braids, rows, queues? I’m not sure which one is the correct word now. It was an extravagant haircut with lots of braids queued on the back.

A good friend liked to go to these kind of rhetorical legal battles with the school and the dress code. It was hilarious. She used neon green hair for three months due to a weird wording on some rule or another about colored hair. Then they would change it to something more restrictive but she would find the loopholes and challenge them again. She once got us to loan her our watches and wore over 20 wrist watches due to a stupid rule about bracelets. Wore all sorts of ridiculous clothes colors and patterns, and queues, horns and bunny ears. Went as a clown when they tried to regulate makeup. After two years of madness the school board called her to negotiate a truce. They removed the ancillary dress code, uniform was still mandatory but anything beyond the basic four pieces of clothing students would be free as long as it wasn’t nudity or disrupted other students. Skirts were made optional, the origin of the whole conflict. In return she was just asked to stop trying to give the poor principal a heart attack.

She still wore colorful stuff and accessories after that. But at least she wasn’t in heated arguments during detention everyday anymore. She wanted to abolish uniform altogether but in a way she sort of won.

They would be ceased and desisted out of existence. There’s a reason no one on the scene right now discloses methods and streaming piracy is a closely guarded secret. I’m sure it is perfectly possible, as that is how most piracy occurs nowadays. But it is extremely technical and most likely risks exposing any person doing it wrong.

I’m aware of this. But no corporation will ever let anyone get even close to releasing a consumer product like TiVo used to be.

That’s the problem. They already wisened up and HDMI, the propietary standard they forced everyone to change to for HD+, has built-in DRM. Most smart TV have DRM built-in as well.

Don’t they already do that? I swear I saw a streaming service that offered 20% off the price if you agreed to pay 2 years in advance or something like that. That is already a thing on SaaS subscriptions.

Oreo was originally a ripoff so it makes sense.

Didn’t they already had a paid and with ads tier?

Depends on the country, but usually a “background check” is nothing more than paying a lawyer to check if you have ever been convicted, accused or investigated for a crime. Prosecutors have an archive and a office of records to collect and share that public information. This is why clearing records are important in courts and settlements. It’s a big mark to say the person is actually alright and won’t be found in the records if searched, as they were cleared. Other than that it is usually just a phone call to a previous employer to ask if you were an asshole there.

My little cousin was 10 during the height of the craze. I have been regaled with hours of FNAF lore that now lives rent free in my head. My YouTube recommendations were cursed for years. I still tease him about it nowadays and he cringes hard.

The answer is incompressible noise. Hours of full on 8k video and 7.1 channel DTS of pure noise. There’s noise designed specifically to being incompressible and unable to deduplicate. I think some podcasts got in trouble with Spotify for something like this.

The cherry on top, you can’t say no. You can only tell them to “ask you later”.

Bus goes Vrrrroom vrrooom. Fuck AI.

Disruption!

It actually just means to undercut an existing industry with venture capital, taking on a loss until the existing competition is out-priced out of the market. Then once a monopoly is established, tear down quality service, hike up prices, shaft costumers and use the money to pay huge bonuses to the executives. If the company is still profitable afterwards then just recreate the same old industry and competitors but with an iron grip monopoly. If it is not profitable, just sell the company and distribute the dividends amongst the C suite. Rinse and repeat.

I’m more of a walk-in abortion kind of person.

Awesome, Valve still won’t take my money even at full price.

Never underestimate the accumulated idiocy of hundreds of people all focused to be inept on the exact same thing.

This is new hardware piling. What they claim to do requires reworking manufacturing, is not retroactive with current designs, and demands more hardware components. It is basically a hardware thread scheduler. Cool idea, but it won’t save us from planned obsolescence, if anything it is more incentive for more waste.