Everything ICE/DHS did/does (officially, not murder), was done before ICE existed. It was created for the purpose it’s fulfilling now. INS and USCS already existed.

The point of the creation of DHS (and by extension ICE) was to give the Bush admin a way to utilize the over-reaching powers they granted themselves after the World Trade Center. Because they believed in a Unitarian executive, they wanted all power under the Presidents direct control, and out of agencies that may not go along with their agenda.

Well, the beast ate it’s own fucking tail didn’t it.

Limited to paying subscribers. So the only thing stopping people from creating CSAM, and fake sex pics of famous people is $8 a month?

Yeah… that’ll show them.

Putting himself in harms way deliberately to have an excuse to murder someone.

Im with you. I don’t belittle or make fun of anyone’s disabilities… unless they do it to others… and he does…

Fuck him and his shit filled diaper.

I used an AI to analyze a piece of writing I did years ago, long before AI was a thing. It determined that there was some huge margin of my work was likely written by AI, and when I asked why, it stated by use of sentence structure, words spelt using British spellings, oxford commas, and emdashes indicated I was AI — which I am not.

So many things wrong with this.

I am not a programmer by trade, and even though I learned programming in school, it’s not a thing I want to spend a lot of time doing, so I do use AI when I need to generate code.

But I have a few HARD rules.

1. I execute all code and commands. Nothing gets to run on my system without me.

2. Anything which can be even remotely destructive, must be flagged and not even shown to me, until I agree to the risk.

3. All information and commands must be verifiable by sourcing documentary links, or providing context links that I can peruse. If documentary evidence is not available, it must provide a rationale why I should execute what it generates.

4. Every command must be accompanied by a description of what the command will do, what each flag means, and what the expected outcome is.

5. I am the final authority on all matters. It is allowed to make suggestions, but never changes without my approval.

Without these constraints, I won’t trust it. Even then, I read all of the code it generates and verify it myself, so in the end, if it blows something up, I bear sole responsibility.

I can’t believe no one has said The Thing yet.

The creature effects are so good, it holds up today.

Once you see the pterodactyls, you can never unsee them.

I have a buddy who won’t switch his streaming box because he thinks his in-laws will be too confused by a different button layout on the remote.

I front-end mpv with smplayer.

It’s enough for my purposes.

An effective monopoly is not the same as actually being a monopoly.

As long as Steam doesn’t act like a monopoly, there really is no problem. Yes, every PC game will likely end up there, but it’s not like other game stores don’t exist. Steam also doesn’t have enforced exclusivity.

75% of respondents were senior managers of C-suite level, with 77% from studios with more than 50 employees.

I think it’s laughably ironic that game PUBLISHERS are complaining about someone sitting in the middle, taking a % while contributing little.

However, it also noted that developers have started utilising other platforms including the Epic Game Store and the Xbox PC Games store.

Almost half of those surveyed (48%) have distributed a title to both stores, while 10% have used GOG and 8% have used Itch.io.

So… not a monopoly?

I have terrible sight, and on my TV in my living room, I can tell the difference. But I also don’t cheap out.

Because he has a history of knowing and caring about rules?

YES!!!

I hate that language.

“Donald Trump has lost out on the Nobel Peace Prize”

No. He was never in the running. He lost nothing. Just because he was nominated by some obsequious sycophant, doesn’t mean he ever had a chance.

While everyone else was in competition for the “race”, he was at the starting line shitting his diapers and crying like the giant baby he is.

Pretty confidently incorrect there.

For the cheap seats.

https://www.reagent.co.uk/blog/paracetamol-history-of-a-pain-reliever/

Paracetamol aka acetaminophen, has been around since the 1800s. Tylenol as a brand has only been around since 1955.

So while we all know this link is bullshit, the 1911 defence falls apart based on facts.

I think a better response is show me a peer reviewed study from actual researchers who follow actual scientific methodology and have not had to be retracted.

Ad hominems. The last gasp from the confused or clueless who just can’t admit when they are wrong.

Did you have anything of substance at all to add? I assume not, since several posts now not doing so.

Did you completely miss the point that I was talking about pre-internet days? In my first response to you, I literally talked about an album release in the 90s.

Maybe your entire experience in life isn’t as old as the pants I’m wearing right now, but the world existed before you did.

You’re making a lot of bold assumptions, none of which are true.

Keyword being “local”. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.

So you had them, and they were shitty. Not quite the same thing as not having them. Did you ever ask if they could special order? The store I used to go to carried music zines that catered to a variety of tastes, and they would talk about any number of new albums and bands that were doing the rounds. If a band we saw live had a new release listed in one of them, we would go to the store and order it.

We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.

So they had a single DJ that worked 24/7? And since you mention autotune, which doesn’t become prominent until the 2000s, you clearly have no clue, because it was already possible to discover new music then without having to hunt it down.

Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.

There was, let me check notes… cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.

And we had these really cool dual cassette radios, which you could one button copy to a blank cassette. So many of my music collection that I bought from bands I saw came from the band using one of these to copy their tapes.

https://u-mercari-images.mercdn.net/photos/m83247247555_1.jpg

I had probably a half dozen carrying cases full of albums of various music.

No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.

Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn’t mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads… all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.

If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I’m happy for you, really, truly, and I’d like to hear more stories, but most of us didn’t, at least not those of us born after '97.

In 1997, I was downloading music from the Internet from IRC. From album releases to bootlegs some guy at a show made holding up a tape recorder. You could also take CDs out from libraries and rip them to mp3 for long term storage. I would keep CDs full of mps, that I would then burn to CDs (because MP3 players didn’t exist yet) so we could listen to them. If you were lucky, you would get 128kbit, 44khz, but we would settle for 64kbit or 96 if it was what we could get.

If you were born after 1997 and you couldn’t find music you liked, that was a you problem. It was out there if you went looking for it.

Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there’s no one you gotta know, there’s no place you have to know to go to, there’s no subcultures you gotta be part of, there’s nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.

And if you were born after 1997, that’s been true your entire life. As long as the Internet has existed, there have been people putting music outside of the mainstream online. I used to DJ for an Internet radio station. We started in 2001 (and is still going), and went out of our way to discover new music. The founder was a musician himself, and wanted to spotlight lesser known music. We played anything from any drama, and had a robust request engine that people used to request music. We pre-recorded podcasts for play so long ago, it pre-dated the term podcast.

You’re completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you’re in Pakistan or one of those places ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.

Even if I lived in ye olden times, there’s no way in hell I would’ve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn’t have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it’s more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.

It’s awesome you mention Cleaners from Venus, because they distributed their music on cassettes by mail order from listings in zines and word of mouth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_culture