Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you’re part of the machine, and you don’t even know it. 😔 “This form of the Internet” == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you’re just grousing about the details of paying for it.

The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don’t care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.

The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless…

Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.

Or don’t. It’s hard, I know. Just don’t pretend that your Jellyfin server means you’ve broken free of the system.

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?

From that description, it sounds like you were circumcised at birth, and then had your frenulum removed later.

When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.

Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?

Hamas is Israel.

That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.

Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.

Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.

All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.

Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.

There was a Republican chode here in Wisconsin who voted twice to prove that people could vote twice. (The clerks caught his double vote, and he got prosecuted.)

Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.

Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.

Funny, isn’t it?

Have they been hunting Palestinian people across the globe? That’d make the Israeli regime worse than the Nazis, which is a bold claim. I think that, like the Nazis, they just want their targets removed from the land they claim as their own. They just happen to be fine with genocide to achieve that goal.

I think you have some stiff competition on the shortest war from the Conch Republic. You’d have to sign the peace treaty in 59 seconds to beat the record. (Be sure that the enemy sets their killbots for a very low preset kill limit.)

Yep, punishment must be part of the deal, even if it costs us 3 times as much. This is how we know that, for conservatives, the cruelty is the point.

Okay, so it looks like a number of people want to get into the weeds in analyzing this analogy, so let’s do it: People need to get places, so car traffic has a legitimate function, whereas DDoS traffic is entirely useless, right?

But cars don’t need to get places, only people do.

There’s some overhead in IP packets, not all of the data sent over the network is payload. It’s kept to a minimum. Perhaps we could say that a packet is like using a 10kg bicycle to move an 80kg rider. But what about using a 2,200kg vehicle to move that person? It’s like using IP packets with 27kB of headers for each 1kB of data! If lots of users hit a server with a data stream like that, and bring it to its knees, that sounds a lot like a DDoS. If that users know in advance that it’s going to bring down the server, how’s that not a DDoS?

It’s mostly the velocity. Orbiting a planet just means having enough kinetic energy to fall toward a planet, but continually overshoot and miss. They need some way to slow down dramatically, which is usually accomplished with rocket thrusters. If they just strapped on parachutes and jumped out, they’d orbit the Earth alongside the ISS.

Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).

How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody’s name, without the lending institution verifying that it’s actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.

I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It’s the system that’s broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.

Show of hands, did anybody think that this was not Russia’s goal in convicting these guys?