Schadrach

I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.

Also, I recently rode on Amtrak for a long trip from Columbia, SC to Baltimore, MD. This was my first time on any kind of train other than a subway or metro line. It had its drawbacks (incredibly long travel time and delays)

I thought about taking an Amtrak to Boston for a trip since it was a vacation and I wasn’t in a huge rush travel wise. By “incredibly long travel time” in my case it would have gone from ~3 hours (two roughly one hour flights with a very short layover you’ve got to haul ass through because for some reason the relevant gates are both at the far ends of different concourses at Dulles) to about a day. Wasn’t in a rush, but that’s a bit too far to the other extreme.

I’ve noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click “skip” at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.

(People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven’t tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)

My single worst experience with Linux was getting audio to work with an ISA Plug ‘n’ Play Sound Blaster card back in the late 90s. Eventually I got it to work, but after installing the card I had to dig through documentation and forums to figure out that in addition to audio drivers I needed to install a package for ISA PnP cards, run a tool that came with that to generate a config file, realize that config file contained every hypothetical configuration my card could potentially have all commented out, find and uncomment the actual configuration I wanted the card to use and then restart the isapnp driver. All of that to get basic functionality. For Windows, I literally just installed the card and it worked with basic functionality out of the box, with an option to go to their website and download a driver for some extra functionality specific to that card.

That…soured me on the idea of desktop Linux for several years.

The individuals at the company are the problem. The internet tends to comment like they don’t get this.

You make it sound like if you make and sell a thing, people are required to buy it. If you tried to sell me an AI bed that would not function without an active internet connection, I’d laugh at you.

The thing is this was the first of its kind election for this district, so where did those estimates even come from? If you give a number it’s got to be from somewhere right?

So, this board has never since it’s creation had to have an actual election? It’s always been someone running unopposed?

He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior,

Basically the same thing happened twenty years later with Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made a discovery that’s essential to figuring distances in space. She noticed something while working as a computer at Harvard College Observatory that eventually became known as Leavitt’s Law. Her Nobel nomination was halted because she passed away and the award is not given posthumously. Hubble’s work heavily relied on hers.

and they have also moved me to be more open minded about some things I thought I would never agree with.

Such as? I’m curious.

The fourth is catnip. Always the 'nip.

Once my mom asked me to clear out a planter box that had become overgrown because she wanted to plant tomatoes. I pulled up this 3ft tall stalk plant with little purplish flowers, and as soon as I shoved it in the trash bag, the cat came running from the other side of the house and dove face first in the bag. After a minute or so, it was backing out of the bag with the stalk between his teeth dragging it out of the bag and once it was out of the bag started nibbling on it and rolling around on the plant. Looked up what the plant was and apparently I had just pulled up his catnip grow operation. When he came down, he was mad at me for a few days.

I was skimming your comment and this part look exactly like some autogenerated SEO bullshit.

My assumption was they copied and pasted from a lyrics website without checking and got a mid page ad in the process.

If you really wanted to be security minded, you could go a step further - have the ballot printing machines keep a per-machine count of ballots they’ve done and print a ballot with human readable votes and a barcode detailing the same. Have a second machine scan those ballots and drop them into a locked box. None of them are connected to a network or have an accessible open port anywhere on them. There is however a locked access panel on the back of each machine where an SD card is inserted. As ballots are printed and scanned each machine’s SD card records what happens. The two types of machines are made by different manufacturers and validated by a third party.

At close of polls, all the machines are asked to report their results. If there is a discrepancy between what the ballot printers report and what the ballot scanners report, it’s time for a manual recount of that polling location. Then the SD cards are pulled from all the machines and shipped to the relevant election board to check the contents against the reports. Also manual recount 5% of polling locations (minimum one) selected at random. If discrepancies show up in more than a 1% of polling locations, manual recount the entire election. For all these manual recounts, the human readable portion of the paper ballot is the final authority.

I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn’t have any kind of plans if more showed up?

This is the kind of election where usually only people who specifically are invested in the thing bother, I wouldn’t be surprised if the last time one of these happened they literally did average about 20 votes per polling place, and their plan if more showed up was supplying 15x more ballots than they needed last time, just in case. Which wasn’t remotely enough.

Given the price and description, I was always assuming they were going to import a cheap Chinese android phone from a no-name manufacturer and then do the gold paint here and call it Made in the USA, like how other companies do one final assembly step here in order to make that claim.

Some of my favorite mods and packs are from the 1.7.10 era. I once put together a private server pack than included AE2, most of Reika’s mods (Rotarycraft, Reactorcraft, Electricraft and Chromaticraft), and assortment of magic mods and some lesser known or lesser used mods. Admittedly some of the latter were really buggy (for example Essentialcraft), but were usually weird or fun enough to keep despite that.

Once upon a time I played on a Harry Potter themed modded server ran by Megachunk. I started out with a little house in a field with a fenced in yard, the usual sort of thing. People kept finding ways to steal from me or grief me. So I kept improving security. By the end of the server, no one but me and three others could enter my inner sanctum without being slaughtered, and even if they could enter they couldn’t interact with anything. Everything was covered by overlapping Pneumaticraft Security Stations encased in Thaumcraft Warded Glass. The area was utterly covered in Witchery Sentinel fetishes loaded with spectres in the spirit world, and those in turn were protected by Security Stations and all of it encased in Warded Glass to keep those from getting messed with. If you entered my base, you died, GTFO. Turned out spectres could also kill players in creative mode, so that included staff.

I’ve handled plenty of account migrations throughout my time and they’re not rocket science.

…and all those account migration systems are kept running in perpetuity just in case someone with an account last used in June 2009 happens to try logging in sometime in 2030? That feels like a lot of legacy systems to maintain for very little benefit.

I didn’t really see it coming because I didn’t even realize there were Microsoft accounts until shortly before the migration.

Really? MS had consolidated their online services into one login/authentication system years beforehand. Hotmail, Outlook,com, XBOX Live, etc all use the same accounts. It’s why I expected they would do that, they’d done it with everything else they owned.

You have to mod everything to avoid telemetry nowadays. I’d be surprised if my dishwasher wasn’t quietly sending data to Samsung at this point.

As soon as MS bought it, I think everyone could see it moving to an MS account as an obvious next step. MS had been building themselves up as a gaming brand for years and running two separate authentication services is going to seem like an unnecessary cost to their bean counters.

Really? The total time period for migrating the account was something like 3 years, they sent emails reminding you about it, and mentioned it in the launcher. I don’t know what else they could have been expected to do?

They couldn’t just “migrate everyone’s accounts” because there’s no obvious way to do that. Simple example: Let’s say you bought Minecraft for yourself and your two kids so you could play together. These were little kids, and Mojang accounts aren’t uniquely tied to an email address so they all have the same email address. MS accounts use email address as username. Without asking the user, which of the three accounts gets tied to that email address, and what happens to the other two? What about cases where the Mojang account is for an email address that doesn’t have a Microsoft account? What if it already does, but the email address on the Mojang account is an older email they no longer use or even have access to and just never bothered to update because the email on your Mojang account was only really relevant to recover your password? Etc, etc, etc.

sold to Microsoft and they deleted my account

Yeah, there was a period where you had to join your Mojang account to a MS account, then they eventually shut down the Mojang auth entirely. If you didn’t change over during that time you’re SOL. It was announced it was coming over a year before they actually did it.

I go back and play Minecraft every now and then, usually heavily modded. Been playing through the Material Energy 5 modpack for the past little bit.

…and even newer methods make old math insanely complicated, but much more generalized. Like building definitions for things like numbers and basic arithmetic using set theory.