Kaspersky. Back when the russians started getting weird with things, and kaspersky... got dubious... I canceled my subscription and switched to a different AV. when it was about to expire, they sent a 'we'll automatically renew'. So I tried to log in- my credentials were invalid- I use a PW manager, so no. It wasn't a bad password-
the password reset option wouldn't work (literally wouldn't send the validation link.)
Called their CS who told me that subscriptions were handled by a 3rd party in the US- Digital River.
Digital river said I should cancel it on their website.
got DR and Kaspersky's CS on the same phone call. they finally complied and canceled the subscription.
A year later... "Your subsctiption will automatically renew!"

called them again. sent a letter. thought that was that until I saw they billed me anyhow.
tried to call them. they were giving me the run around.

Called the bank. to report fraud.
They were useless until I told them my next call would be FBI's financial crimes people. Suddenly, that charge back became super easy.

here's the actual poll

they sampled an incredibly small sample size. It's extremely easy to get fucked up results from assuming that you can make a poll representative of Americans as a whole. Like. where I live... most people in the state want him locked up (or you know. burned at the stake.) But, you go an hour out the cities and even the democrats there would be likely to express some hesitancy. Because it's trump country out there.

and that assumes the poll wasn't meant to get this result (for example polling in ways that get maybe more conservative democrats. or people simply lying and saying they're democrats.)

We already dump enough trash in the oceans.

I've not seen somebody driving a ford truck made in the last decade that was doing "Real" work. this includes construction contractors. most the working trucks are Chevies or Toyos. though I'm also seeing an increasing number of Nissan (the NV's)

I like the whole "save water" bullshit. like in california. Or anywhere else being fed by lake mead. Like, "You need to take shorter showers! conserve water". the ten minute shower they're berating consumers for... is literally nothing compared to the water straight up wasted for California's agriculture. (and by wasted, I mean water lost before it even gets to the plants.)

Most of Lake Mead and the Colorado River aren't used by people. it's used by corporations that don't give two shits because nobody gives a damn about them wasting water- can't harm the jobs, now.

And knowledge that it was illegal.

Laughing at Desantis’ ignorance or crying because republican voters are just as ignorant and eat that shit up.

Or my favorite… alternating between the two

and incidentally, this fear of accusation causes an inherent bias in the opposite direction. Slap him in jail already. Communication only through his lawyers. or maybe only through court appointed lawyers. Because, you know, his lawyers are also likely to be criminals.

It's the Collosseum. They should make them participate in gladiatorial games for tourists.

So… when is their beef going to be settled with mud wrestling?

Cuz seriously… I’m getting PH cat fight vibes

Assuming they’re on the bottom, they’d have to get a ship with about 4 km of cable to pull them up. (More probably. The titanic is at about 3.8km; as well as the ROVs

I’m not sure it has a hatch that can be used to transfer passengers onto a rescue sub. Kinda sounds like it doesn’t. (Assuming they even have a rescue sub in the area.)

truck nutz. like. not new (which might be a gag. I did zip tie some onto a friends car once. But, uh, it was a prius, and they were dragging on the gorund.)

the only content on reddit is bots reposting shit... and Spez playing the sad trombone.

I remember once, on a world building forum for a group of sci-fi nerds... I dropped a meme to troll trek nerds. (okay so it was a screen grab of the TOS episode where kirk and spoc crashland on that planet where Cochrain was staying with the energy-creature-hottie. You know the scene where spock is building a universal translator...)

Yeah, so the gist of the joke was that Star Wars was better than Star Trek because even Spock wanted a lightsaber.

After their outrage subsided the freaking nerds started trying to figure out a way to build an actual lightsaber. They got everything down 'cept the power source. It was glorious. And not something that would happen on today's reddit.

The people getting into Harvard, many of them get in because of social connection’s rather than merit. The social connections of their parents. It’s also super common to just buy their way in.

The students getting in on merit are the ones they let in because they have a reputation to maintain and can’t have everyone being dumb. That would look bad.

Further, even if that weren’t true, the reason “the most qualified” seem to be rich white kids from rich white families is simply because they can afford much better educations. So, if you want to promote diversity it can’t just be about academic qualifications because you have people who’ve always been in power buying academic quals for the kids- so they always will be in power.

Affirmative action isn’t about taking away from one group and giving it to another, it’s about giving back to a group that historically has been taken from- its about righting a past wrong- you can’t do that solely on merit, when the system was designed to perpetuate a certain kind of status quo

Well fast forward a week, I keep texting her to set something up, but she’s not responding. I think she’s ghosted me. I mean, that’s fine, but if you don’t want to date me anymore, then just let me know. I will respect your decision.

well... about that. it might not be, but it also might just be that's her general way of breaking things off. There's a truly shocking number of guys that don't respond well to rejection and get all crazy. It may not be a you-thing, just a past experiences thing. She has no way of knowing, really, how you will behave until it happens.

Any one, from any where in the world, can do it.

Between VPNs and VOIP phones, it’d almost impossible to sort out whose legitimate and whose not without showing up.

As a short term fix, people who are frequently swatted, usually coordinate with the local/responding cops so that if there’s a call at their adress, they call first before breaking down doors

Or just contracting with fiber layers directly to lay fiber.

It would be simpler to just do it when they update the interstate highways…. But they sat around with their thumbs up each other’s asses too long and can’t wait for that.

Literally anything innovative.
Laziness is the root of all invention.

We didn't invent the wheel because it allowed us to work more- we invented it because it was easier than carrying the same load before.
Computers? we invented the abacus because counting that much on hands is difficult. Easier to use an abacus. and computers were just one more step along that journey. Sure... it enables very much more complex math...
... computer modeling/simulation? invented because it's less work than building physical models and testing that way. (especially if you consider expenses as being a measure of other kinds of work- like fund raising.)

there's very few things that were innovative, that weren't ultimately developed because somebody had an idea for easing workloads.

Especially considering we have enough evidence in the public sphere to demonstrate just cause.

Not investigating is inherently political.

but is it really inconceivable that aliens visited earth? Or that they influenced our culture?

Actually. yes.
Okay, so lets take this one thing at a time.

the solar system is actually quite boring. It's pretty typical. there's no surprising elements. there's no materials that we haven't detected in several other worlds and such. as far as we know, it's a pretty bog standard star, with a pretty bog standard system. the ONLY thing worthing noting- that makes this system unique is us. More specifically. Life. it has life. As far as we know, it's totally unique. (we don't know all that far.)

This means, we're the only reason any society would come here. it's easy to assume there are resources much closer to home, much more easily harvested and exploited.

now, establishing that, lets look at how they'd know we'd exist:

• the JWST is our most sensitive space borne telescope. it's capable of identifying atmospheric compounds of exoplanets. some of those compounds, we associate heavily with the presence of life; it's reasonable to assume any species capable of coming here would have such technology. It's detected such things on several worlds over the past year that it's been active; and has been answering questions and opening new ones for that year.

It's therefore possible that some hypothetical society could identify our presence from such a similar telescope. This gives the outer bound of detection of life at something like four million years. Lots of stars exist in that bubble. Lots. I mean, I don't know that we actually have a count on how many. JWST is finding more all the time

This assumes they're looking at it. maybe those 'earliest life' compounds are... how shall we say super common. Maybe they'r emore interested in say industrial pollutants? The industrial revolution started in 1760- about 250 years ago. Lets say those pollutants weren't really concentrated enough to be highly obvious, until 50 years after the start. that would mean 200 lightyears is the minimum distance to know that humans were altering the enviroment, specifically.

• alternatively, they could have detected our radio transmissions. We're a noisy species. the Arecebo message was sent to messier 13 in '74- about 50 years ago. it wasn't a serious attempt to contact anyone, but it's a powerful signal that could attract attention. We've been broadcasting into space for about a hundred years. here's a picture of just how small 200LY's is,

but that article fails to talk about detectability. Most signals we transmit would be indistinguisable from background radiation. probably the oldest signals that would reliably be detectable are military radar signals intended for detection of ballistic missiles.- creating a bubble with a 60ly radius. 40 for a steady stream of soaps and reality tv.

lets be honest hear. aliens watching Days of Our Lives Reruns probably get a bad impression. And lets not talk about all the, uh, premium, channels.

ALL THAT to say, it's extremely unlikely they actually know we're here.

Now, we need to consider would they come here. Hypothetically, they could be curious about us. Hypothetically, they want to know how Land Before Time Saga ends. (hey, the last one was in 2016. unless they're at proxima centauri, no chance they've seen it yet!)

it would be a serious undertaking to even have the ability to get here in a reasonable time frame... it would take a shit load of energy. Like, on the order of global annual energy consumption. And that's just for the payload. Forget about the size and mass of the fuel tanks necessary- and just to get up to speed. This doesn't include the whole 'slowing down so we can moon them' thing.

basically... any species capable of getting here, and motivated by curiosity about us enough to get here, is probably going to abstain simply because they have the ability to realize we're psychotic fucks who nuked ourselves. multiple times. It's extremely unlikely that any society capable of getting here won't have enough social control in place to prevent idiots from joyriding and mooning the psychotic primitive apes. because if you think nuking people is bad, we won't even need nukes. Just take their giant rocket and point it at the planet- no need to even slow down. (actually, it works better if you don't!)

Do I believe aliens Exist? I believe it's probable.
Do I believe they've come here- ever? Highly unlikely.

the reality is, the jobs they're wanting to get kids into aren't well paying, and most, you can't support yourself, never mind a family on. rather than increasing pay... which they could absolutely do... they've decided that employing their bought-and-paid-for congress people to roll back protections so they can exploit kids (who won't know they're being underpaid, presumably.)

Until he’s in fact convicted…. And in jail and not immediately pardoned…. It’s all just for show.

Granted Jack smith doesn’t fuck around, and I don’t think he’s really the type to do a dog and pony show…. But….

I've got a neighbor whose cat is veritable feline Houdini... he gets out every so often. And usually, it's to come over to my green house and steal carrots. (yeah, don't ask. he doesn't eat them. doesn't take them home. We have no idea what he does with them.)

Don't ask questions. just embrace it. (I've gotten to catsit Sykes on a few occasions now. the old man is a blast.)

It's not even all that innovative. carbon fiber hulls have been used for deep sea hulls for ages. you want to see innovative? look at Triton Subs.

I’m definitely pro library. Public libraries are awesome.

Ours has a living- seed bank of heirloom veggies, 3d printers, they do community events- including a Mongolian acrobatic circus (Friday-),sewing/quilting stuff. Oh and they have a lot of books … and that’s just off the top of my head.

while I agree in principle.... my issue is that the russia hasn't been a conventional military threat in ages. they wanted us to think they were- and we maybe believed them.

The real issue isn't the conventional weapons-those are dangerous to Ukraine, and any other they choose to invade (Which is unlikely... they have their hands full with Ukraine...) The real issue is the nukes that may or may not be in decent repair. I would expect at least a few are capable of being detonated- maybe not loaded onto a ballistic missile, but you can always truck in a nuke and set it off that way.

The closer they get to ceasing to exist... the more likely those nukes come out to play. because Putin et al are fucking cowards.

white loves matter

Why does that sound like some kind Log Cabin porn?

I find the 19yo kid’s death tragic. He was probably coerced into going. Everyone else, I quite agree with you.

we all know, The Internet is For Porn

(we'll go with the WoW version of it this time, for nostolgia.)

This seems to part of it. Another part is a large portion of their power comes from the reputation of abject impartiality... and the dobs ruling definitely calls that into question.

Exactly this. The reality is his submersible was dangerously unsafe, it’s a bit of a misconception that it was a ticking time bomb because of fatigue- that is a thing related to metallic (crystalline )structures and stress cycles-as a composite, CF doesn’t have that.

What Cameron was getting at is that with titanium and steel, it’s can be modeled very easily- and because steel has a relatively high tolerance before fatiguenstarts… they literally can engineer around it and make parts that effectively don’t have fatigue (unlike aluminum, where every elastic bend degrades it’s structure.)

The problem with composites is that they are very difficult to model. You degrade the polymer (that is epoxy) and it weakens the hull. You drop the sub on the deck, get a delaminated bit. Whatever, once there’s damage to the structure it’s done for.

CF bikes for example, used in professional bike racing are retired after a crash because there’s no way to examine delaminating off the edge, which makes them extremely dangerous to ride,

The kind of people unwilling to have 3rd party certification to do much as validate your pressure hill is thick enough is unlikely to scrap an entire custom pressure hill because some idiot screwed the monitor into it. (Or dropped it. Or noticed that there was some delam around the hatch or whatever else.)

sanctioning by some governing religious authority. Like the Catholic church.

alternatively, this guy wasn't a cleric at all and only hired to pretend to be one. from the article it sounds like he was basically a paid actor.

sell it in 20 years for a tidy sum as a "collectible"

what I'd say we really need, is to treat ISP as a public utility. low cost, reasonable speed.

it's always a bad sign when the Onion gives up on satire and just starts reporting the news.

I tip my hat off to you. that was awesome.

Or vegetables.

Super easy to just, forget to install the firmware…

Okay…. So… if y’all want a goldfish wearing a top hat for a profile pic…

Welcome to a club of weirdos.

Honestly? It probably irritated trump that he had a “big, the biggest, red button” and he was never allowed to actually push said button.

Trump probably was hoping one of those plans involved nuking Iran, just so he could push said button.