Weren’t both of the first 2 lines from Theoden?

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.

“.9…” is repeating, but rational. So it’s actually “1” . Let’s do the math.

.9… / 3 = .3…

.3… = 1/3

1/3 x 3 = 3/3

.9… = 3/3

3/3 = 1

.9… = 1

But the “…” matters.

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.

So I missed y’all’s argument, but I really appreciate how you both realized that you’d made thoughtless posts, apologized, and removed them.

It’s a rare thing to see online.

My one true MMO addiction in my younger days was City of Heroes, where I was an Empathy Defender (healer/buffer). I played pure support and never attacked enemies at all, because my attacks weren’t strong enough to be impactful, and enemies would aggro me and kill me off in 1 hit.

When people asked why I didn’t contribute to damage, I explained that staying alive and helping the other 7 people on my team to do 20% more damage and stay in the fight was a much bigger contribution than adding another percent or 2 to damage before I got 1-shot and the team wiped.

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.

A lot of people don’t consider the future even when writing helpful posts. I’m as guilty as anyone.

If you link the correct answer, the person finding your post in 6 years better hope the link is still good. That’s the legitimate reason scholarly papers needs to cite specific book editions and journal page numbers instead of using hyperlinks in a bibliography.

If a copy of the book or journal can ba tracked down, the citation will still work.

It’s also why online-only published journals are still often formatted like a book with static pages instead of websites. If you find a journal article that’s important, you’ll likely still be able to find an achived copy in PDF somewhere even if the journal stops publishing or they change domains or whatever.

The biggest changes have been the social acceptance of homosexuality.

Looking at the question of people’s perception on homosexual relationships in the GSS between 1973 and 2022, the percentage of Americana who view homosexual relationships as being “Not wrong at all” went from 10% to 61%. And for the first 20 years of that period, it pretty much stayed around 10%.

The question of homosexual sex itself has only been included 5 times on the GSS. The earliest in 1991 and the most-recent in 2018. In 1991 is was 11% and in 2018 was 55%.

In 1973, 1/3rd of people believed a gay person shouldn’t even be allowed to speak in public.

The somewhat scarier number is reagrdining homosexual books in public libraries, simply because there’s a slight uptick in banning them between 2020 and 2022, and while more-recent GSS numbers aren’t out, we have been seeing lots of book-bans in the news…

Other fun stuff from the GSS:

40% of white reponsants were in favor of a law banning interracial marriage in the 70s, and - more interestingly - up until they stopped asking the question in 2002 more democrats supported laws prohibiting interracial marriage than Republicans.

Support for abortion “for any reason” didn’t cross the 50% threshold until the Trump Presidency, and it’s pretty much entirely a trend on the Democratic side. The Dem and Rep voters weren’t that far apart until very recently.

What of there were a model for video games where the games themselves were free to download and play, but things like cosmetics, weapons, stat boosts, and character unlocks were sold piecemeal to those willing to pay?

That model certainly wouldn’t become a cancer on the entire industry and ruin online gaming, making us beg for the days when you could just buy a fucking game and play it.

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.

He’ll be able to vote.

He’s A Florida resident, and the rule for Florida felons convicted out of state is that they are subject to the voting restrictions of the jurisdiction in which they were convicted.

New York allows felons who are not actively incarcerated to vote, so unless he’s actually serving time he’ll be able to vote.