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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I was reinforcing your point about using a monitor and a Linux PC not being able to replace all the things a smart TV can do. You said streaming would work, but regular TV channels wouldn’t, and I pointed out that even streaming would be limited as the major streaming services don’t allow full quality via a browser, especially on Linux where HDCP can’t work.





  • Innocent until proven guilty is a mantra used when determining if the state can deploy violence and curtail your liberties, e.g. by physically confining you in a prison. It’s not a universally applicable rule, and isn’t what’s used in civil court, where judgements are made on balance of probabilities (i.e. if they think the evidence suggests it’s more likely that you’ve done something than that you haven’t) and isn’t what’s used in contexts other than the legal system, like when a duty of care exists - generally it wouldn’t be enough to say someone was safe to work with children if they were only probably not a paedophile.

    It’s my understanding that there isn’t enough knowledge available to the public to exhonorate Snoop Dogg, and without that, he’s left looking sketchier than he was before. One dropped allegation could be nothing, or the start of a pattern, and that’s different to there being no allegations at all.


  • You can’t really find out of you’ll get good enough to enjoy a soulslike without buying one and playing it for longer than the two hour refund period. For other products, you usually have something you can do about it or some way to try it first. You don’t need to buy a kayak to find out you don’t like kayaking as you can go for a kayaking lesson first and use the venue’s equipment. It’s understandable that people who hit a wall and can never get any enjoyment from a soulslike will be upset that it cost them just as much to find that out as it costs someone who’ll compete the game and have a great time.

    Maybe it’s enough to just do the refund window based on progression rather than time.



  • They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d’être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn’t tied to the store and did improve even though it’s barely used.


  • They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn’t happen until the time of day you’re least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you’re using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that’s not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don’t want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they’re doing from users who don’t so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.





  • The plan at the time was what the film explicitly said. They were devastatingly effective at taking the Tantive IV. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the sandcrawler (to the point that they couldn’t disguise it as having been attacked by sand people). They were devastatingly effective at nearly hitting the protagonists enough times that they believed they were being shot at for real, when actually they were just being herded onto a ship with a tracker on it so they’d reveal the location of the rebel base they’d spend the first half the film failing to threaten or torture out of Leia. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the rebel’s attack force against the Death Star, and were seconds away from destroying Yavin IV and the rebel base on it when someone used supposedly-extinct space magic to make what the film had previously described as an impossible shot against a tiny target.

    The only time they miss is when the film says they did so on purpose.


  • In A New Hope, the only time stormtroopers miss is when they do so intentionally, when they’re chasing the protagonists off the Death Star, and onto the Millenium Falcon, which has been fitted with a tracking device which they know will be taken straight to the rebel base. They easily overwhelm the guards on the Tantive IV at the beginning of the film even when only a few of them have made it through the breached airlock. The myth that stormtroopers miss comes from people not noticing the scene where Tarkin discusses intentionally letting the rebels escape so they can follow the tracking device back to their base.




  • It’s not a good tool if one party is likely, but not guaranteed, to win without your vote, but is much worse than the other. You should only spoil your ballot if your constituency is has a large enough majority that your vote won’t matter at all, or none of the parties are less bad than the others.

    If you’re voting on the single issue of Palestine in the US presidential elections (not the primaries), then no state has a large enough majority to justify as spoiled ballots, and one party wants to support a genocide while the other wants to discourage it (even if they’re doing a crap job of it), so there is a least bad option to vote for.


  • There are two things in conflict that apply to Dolphin, and in general to post-DRM console emulators:

    • It’s illegal to create or distribute a device which circumvents DRM.
    • It’s legal to ignore DMCA restrictions for the sole purpose of making things interoperable, like running software on machines it wasn’t originally created for when you’d be able to run it on the machine it was created for.

    The wording in the legislation is sufficiently vague that it’s not obvious whether it’s illegal to create or distribute a device that circumvents DRM for the sole purpose of interoperability. If a case goes to court, it could set a precedent that has to be applied in the future, or it could be settled out of court to avoid setting a precedent, and so far, there’s no case law setting a precedent.

    When Nintendo asked Valve not to allow Dolphin onto Steam, despite what some people were saying, the decryption key was known to be there, and the Dolphin team had legal advice that it was reasonable to expect that the interoperability exceptions had more power than the DRM circumvention restriction. The decryption key is a so-called illegal number, but these are probably not actually illegal, and you can see several examples on the Wikipedia page about them. Nintendo ended up taking no action against Dolphin, and it wouldn’t have been a good case to try and set a precedent with as there weren’t obvious damages now it’s been so long since the Wii stopped being sold, and because the Dolphin team have historically been so diligent about stamping out discussion of piracy in their official communities, making it hard to argue that it’s intended as a DRM circumvention device rather than an interoperability tool. Also, Dolphin’s never taken donations, easily covering all their costs with just basic ads on their site.

    Yuzu’s a bit of an easier target. For a start, it’s got a Patreon, and that makes it easier to paint its developers in a bad light as they’re getting money (as well as meaning there’s actual money to recover). They’ve also got data to back up the suggestion that lots and lots of Yuzu users are pirating games instead of just playing games they’ve already got a disk copy of. In a sensible world where laws are applied fairly, there’s an easy argument that hoops to jump through like requiring the user to provide Switch firmware show they’re not trying to make piracy easy, but it’s not like Yuzu will be able to muster up enough money for lawyers to match what Nintendo will be spending.

    The worst thing that could come out of this is a decision that interoperability isn’t an excuse for circumventing DRM under any circumstances, as that’ll have serious consequences for a bunch of other projects, and Nintendo are likely to want to push for this precedent to be set rather than accepting an out-of-court settlement. On the other hand, Nintendo could mess up and get the opposite precedent set, although if it looks like that’s going to happen, they’re likely to drop the suit.