I mean, presumably if I’m standing outside my car with a key, I just unlock the door and open it. Can’t do that with a dead tesla.

I think Selaco beat him to the punch there. I am by no means a game designer but it’s seriously impressive what they did with the gzdoom engine. I have a hard time imaging anything that could top it within the same engine.

Huh. I didn’t actually know that. Interesting.

Even if you are just doing it for fun though 99% of cops will bag you for impersonating an officer of the law. You might go free later but that isn’t likely to stop the arrest.

You can also go to jail for wearing a shiny policeman’s badge when you aren’t one. This is no different.

Not if you use a VPN. But now it wouldn’t matter even if you were using a VPN because if you want any porn you’ll need to submit a state-issued ID for “verification” purposes.

Ol’ Ronnie is about to find out that you can’t really stop artists from making art, but you can encourage them to make art elsewhere where it’s profitable, and you can also significantly increase the likelihood that said art depicts him getting swirlied in a porta-potty.

And that’s fair, I guess in that sense it is a true paradox. It just appears a little different in theory and in practice - the theory is the paradox, the practice is not.

Sorry, calling out that it’s a social contract is a bit of a knee-jerk response for me, after years of having people whip out the paradox of tolerance as some kind of “gotcha, LIBS!!!” because being tolerant of unfamiliar lifestyles doesn’t mean I won’t punch a nazi when it’s relevant. And that’s poorly understood. My rights end where yours begin, and vice versa, but if you start actively infringing on the rights of others and souring that contract, it is our duty as righteous citizens to put you back in your box. Sometimes that means “hey knock it off asshole”, sometimes that means hunting down bigots and deleting their kneecaps. Depends what you’re guilty of and where.

The “paradox” of tolerance isn’t a paradox, it’s a social contract. If you do not abide by the terms of the contract, you are not protected by it. It’s that simple.

And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.

Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.

We’re about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I’m all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what’s left of our world will be a better place for it.

Every person I know who has flown in the last six months has inquired about the manufacturer of their plane before boarding

Signal also does jack all unless both parties are using Signal. In this case, might be fine. Need to talk to anyone else in your life? It’s back to iMessage.

I love Signal and will probably never get rid of it but the use case for it has shrunk tremendously since they removed the ability to message non-signal users.

Ah, fair enough, I missed the sarcasm. That’s on me.

Want to unpack that one for the class?

Can’t stay rich without people to buy your shit. Genuinely don’t understand how they don’t realize that. If the middle and lower class dies, so does their income stream. And even besides that, if all that’s left are rich folks because everyone else either cooked to death or left the area, being “rich” loses meaning because you’re now all on an even economic playing field. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is a killer metaphor - as in, anyone left with a bigger cash stash than you becomes the de facto upper class and you do not.

95% of their customers are businesses, who no, they don’t understand that. But their IT department does.

Where is hbomberguy when the world needs him

They know it’s rigged because they’re the ones rigging the damn things

It’s impossible for them to understand the idea that the Democrats might not also be desperately trying to counter-rig every election, and rather just have such a shit ton more voters outside the hostile voting environments that they still occasionally pull out a win now and then

A cornered animal is dangerous, and will do anything it deems necessary to ensure its own survival. I don’t disagree with you here, but there will come a reckoning about this and it won’t be a fun time for most people. It may even come as early as the upcoming 2024 election.