No, the tongs are for when the vacuum wants to take you alive.

It’s a good thing none of them were armed…

He’ll also have to come and help, unless he just wants to watch you go at it alone.

Mine says “cleaning”, “charging”, etc.

Why would Internet Archive have people’s passwords stored?

The bad news is that you have an Internet Archive account, your username and email could well have been captured by the site’s attackers.

Oh so it’s not a problem for anyone without an Internet Archive login?

I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.

With that said, the computer wouldn’t be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn’t going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn’t a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don’t comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee’s can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human’s could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven’t been good to chimpanzees.)

I don’t think you’re imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word “AI”. They’re not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they’re imagining a computer that’s better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better. In any case, climate change wouldn’t be our problem anymore.

Doing things like this when you’re certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on…

You underestimate the power of the Dark Side.

Unfortunately it’s fake.

licensing issues

I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.

When I buy a shatterproof ruler, I expect it to be forged by the dark lord himself and destroyable only in the fires of Mt. Doom.

Battletoads

literally impossible to beat (in 2-player mode)

not the herpetology-themed NES game in the meme

Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.

I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.

With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.

I don’t see how this is bootlicking. I don’t gain anything from saying it; it’s just my sincere opinion. The USA as it is now, with the tech billionaires, is very rich and very powerful, and this does benefit ordinary Americans and not just tech billionaires. My impression is that many people on Lemmy focus on the problems in the USA and lose perspective of how good it is here compared to pretty much everywhere else. There’s a reason why so many people are desperate to immigrate, and that’s because they will be better off here even as poor Americans.

I expect some people are going to think of countries like Sweden where the standard of living is claimed to be better than it is in the USA. I’m not convinced that it actually is; I’d rather live here than there. However, even if people in Sweden do enjoy a higher standard of living, it’s because they benefit from the world order established and maintained by the USA since the second world war. Their defense and their access to international trade is subsidized by the USA. (That’s one thing Trump is right about, although the way he went about saying so was foolish because it undermined the perception of NATO unity that is so important.) If they USA declines, Europe will decline with it.

And yet somehow I trust Google acting in its own self-interest to benefit Americans more than the government breaking up Google with the intent of benefiting Americans. American companies dominate the internet (outside of China), this is to America’s great advantage, and I don’t think the government should risk losing that advantage.

Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn’t. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.

They managed to fit something into the trunk of a BMW coupe? I thought that was impossible.

This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

Tandem fork-lifting should be an Olympic sport.