Japan has 3 writing systems and this comic seems to be conflating Katakana and Kanji together as “stabby”, leaving Hiragana as “adorable”. All of them are (long ago) derived from chinese, but only the Kanji still look similar.

I would have introduced Chinese first, and then in the Japanese panel present the stabby and adorable ones both being attacked by flying contraptions. (And a few floating around the korean one, too)

Netflix’s short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that’s a problem.

Honestly, “country of origin” will have straight lines drawn on a map that are so far removed from where the people who lived there originally considered their borders even that’s probably not pinning it down well enough.

This is why you keep a several hundred megabytes history file set to remember “forever”

fiercely confident of their own independence

In fairness, if you let the average cat out into nature it would be fine. Dump the average libertarian into nature and they wont last the night.

This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.

If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

Yes, this helps, thanks.

I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.

Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.

I will need to read up on Taler’s docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to “load up” a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it’s far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn’t a difficult concept (it’s how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.

It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account’s protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.

There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I’m missing here.

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as ‘Palantir says it has given up on AI’. Then I read the article and was left dejected.

Adjusted to the initial sale value of the car - Less easy to cheat by not declaring income, and bigger cars (likely more expensive) that take up more space, pay more.

You’ve actually seen trans people, in person, threaten to burn down a surgery building? I doubt this.

As for people being suicidal, that’s a known problem which happens as a result of being trans in a country that wants to deny them support, which is exactly why trans people are trying to get recognition in the first place. Denying that isn’t exactly going to make their mental health any better, and they can’t be blamed for that.

(aside: I keep messing up with parsing the acronyms ECHR and EHRC.)

I doubt this will lead to anything positive, possibly even starmer aping conservative’s desire to leave human rights bodies altogether, but I wish them luck all the same.

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It’s an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

A true “Thanks Obama” for modern times

• No job, grind away the entire waking day with a low paying zero hours contract while filing job applications, No videogames, no relaxation, more stress, costs healthcare providers more

• No job, spend some of the day working while filing job applications, Yes Videogames, relaxation, lower stress, costs healthcare providers less

Yet another case where if the politician seriously thought about the issue for just half a minute they’d realise their attitude makes no sense.

I’m not sure if centre-right is a characterisation you can make of ferengi politics in this way.

I usually associate the left/right distinction as an indicator of mainly economic policy. We know that things like unions, worker rights, etc (leftist economic ideals) have never been big on fereginar. I don’t think there’s been that big a shift even with union man Rom at the helm.

I think that attitudes towards social issues like women’s rights are completely orthogonal to economic ones. It’s easy looking at current human political tribalism to group everyone on a left/right binary, but consider that during DS9 Rom, the economic leftist, did not at all like his mother wearing clothes and being open. If anything, the economically right leaning quark was less bothered by it.

https://jisho.org/word/可愛い

those kanji in that order are read as “kawaii”