This is how all military branches have always pressured Congress for more budget. They give a public disquisition with doomsday scenarios about our rivals/adversaries so the public will see the press coverage and call their Congressional reps to demand the military gets built up.

This could be a blessing in disguise… My main purpose would be to avoid Apple-style “client side scanning” which, in the hands of vertically-integrated Google hardware and software, amounts to exposing yourself to constant and on-demand warrantless searches.

Since there is no transparency into the hardware backdoors, the internal workings of the close sourced Google ROM, or the business agreement to cooperate with LE / intelligence agencies, bare minimum is to run an alternative OS that complicates their efforts to undermine user privacy. Hobbled AI features on the chip itself might actually be another safeguard, depending on how it is implemented.

You’re implying that one candidate has a super secret big lead not reflected in polling.

Who? And why do you think that?

No shame in it. Teri Garr was both hilarious and hot in that movie.

Not a lawyer but I believe in the US this would be legal as you are granting the use of the original license and not duplicating any content for simultaneous use by others.

What I would like to see is a gentlemans agreement of sorts where companies agree not to come after people for playing pirate, emulated or archival copies of games that are decades old and not for sale in any format anymore. I guess this is somewhat encompassed in the framework of “Abandonware”.

I 100% expect both camps will have extremely optimistic sounding rhetoric all the way through election day.

Both will claim victory.

Due to some bizarre procedures in at least one swing state we are unlikely to know an actual winner until Saturday (which is kinda crazy since the election is on Tuesday) and if things are even somewhat close there will be lawsuits and recounts.

This could actually end up being a long wait to know the outcome.

Don’t forget it also created a 5-10 year period of otherwise-tech-illiterate ditsy chicks with comm or marketing degrees rebranding themselves as “Social Media Marketing Expert”, because they knew what buttons to click in Facebook UI.

While you should do this to block your TVs telemetry and other undesirable behavior, realize that YouTube native TV app ads can’t be blocked at DNS level alone without also blocking the core functionality of YouTube, due to the way it serves the ads.

I read “totally organic grassroots movement” and hear “PAC funded astroturf campaign”

By Federal law you’re a prohibited person (can’t buy a gun) just for MJ use, even if it’s legal in your state. It’s a bad law that Dems also want to keep in place because their platform is to use whatever tools necessary to disarm as many people as possible.

To be fair I believe the Wehrmacht really wanted to move to issuing more small arms like the G43 and the STG/MP44 but Hitler was shortsighted and spiked the STG44 project personally.

This is and has been a big deal for a while. Do we really want easily trackable movements on every major road? What happens when they start feeding that data into federal fusion centers for cataloging and storage “just in case” they need it later?

What happens when a regime that criminalizes dissent has access to realtime vehicular and individual (via mobile phone) tracking data?

Lots of things about US democracy are vaporware. The two-party paradigm and candidate selection in particular are a joke. Repubs various state party orgs eliminated any real primary challenge to Trump. Democrats spiked any meaningful primary challenges to Biden and then installed a replacement who received zero primary votes.

Then we get to “choose” between these arbitrary figures who were selected by elites and nobody really likes.

If you really need it to be secure and private, and are communicating mostly with known acquaintances within a reasonable radius, with low bandwidth requirements, LoRA with encryption is the best bet.

It is a higher bar of entry but at least you can be confident your messages won’t be intercepted in any useful form.

Yeah, this is dumb.

I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.

Nintendo has some great IP and gameplay, and I guarantee you their sales are not meaningfully hurt by people who pirate/emulate games. Those people were never their customers anyway. If anything the emulation community enabled streamers to boost the popularity of their games. (People like PointCrow did more for the sustained popularity of BOTW than all of Nintendo’s marketing efforts combined)

He did make passing reference to the Migswitch which is why Nintendo is big mad.

I am now of the opinion that you should just download books off indexing sites/IRC/ Usenet/torrents and if you like the book and want to support the author, buy a physical copy, or buy 2 and put one in a neighborhood free library. That maximizes the good you are doing and helps your community instead of just generating Bezos bux.

A vanishingly small number of US voters are even going to watch this. There is wildcard baseball and a bunch of other crap happening at the exact same time.

If the rule is “ballot harvesting is OK” you’re going to get this kind of behavior. And it rewards whichever of the megaparties builds the most efficient political machine.

I’d personally rather have an actual election day with mandated work leave for the entire day, and rare application of absentee ballots for people with extenuating circumstances.

Again besides the overpriced shit like Liquid Death, you never see canned water. Not including flavored sparkling crap either. I’m legit not sure why we don’t see more canned plain water. Aluminum cans are inert, store forever, are stackable, and can be recycled. They have literally every advantage over bottles for medium-term storage of water.