Seems a bit like emailing the CEO about your vacation time in a medium sized company. Pretty sure he would have fallen under Riker’s umbrella, and might have had LaForge, Data, or maybe Wesley between him and Riker.

And this is one of the ways to filter random scams. If a legitimate business or public entity is reaching out to contact you about an issue you need to deal with, they will know some identifying information about you. Especially the ones claiming that there’s a warrant (or will be). If that was the case, they would definitely know your name and other specific details.

That said, there are targeted scams, too, so don’t assume that if someone can tell you your name that they are legit. Ask them for a callback number (don’t call it, ask because they might be dumb enough to give you a number linked to them that you could pass on to investigators), then hang up and call the number you looked up online.

I couldn’t stand the character. It feels like another level of evil to be able to read minds but still trample the fuck over everyone’s boundaries.

I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.

I see it as an anti feature, like a website’s ability to create a pop up without any user interaction or navigate without the user clicking such that the back button doesn’t go to the previous url but instead to some point you scrolled to in the site.

Just like when a news website pops up a request to send notifications. Um fuck no? I’m not sitting around waiting for new propaganda to drop such that I want to know immediately when something comes out.

It’s also a tactic of bullshitters to say a whole bunch of stuff in series, just put something out there and quickly move on to the next thing, making it sound like they have a lot of substance but hoping the quick change doesn’t give anyone much of a chance to pull on any of the threads of what they said or look close enough to realize that there is little to no substance behind any of it.

Ancient Aliens and Alex Jones both also use that.

And it’s a pain in the ass to unravel because people who don’t want to look more closely and just want to believe think there’s a list of things that need to be disproven if you wait and let the speaker finish or don’t question him about it directly because the believers don’t feel like they have the expertise to rebut counterpoints (so shelve them instead of discarding) and instead just want to go down the list. Which is fair, though it would be nice if they applied that same skepticism to that list of points in the first place.

But this seems like an effective counter for that strategy. Just pick an item on the list that doesn’t sound right and keep pulling on that thread with the person that said it on the first place rather than the disciples blindly following. Then they’ll see it’s not just their lack of expertise getting in the way of arguing back against counterpoints, it’s the whole thing lacking any real substance at all.

I consider the razors pseudo logic.

Uh which war was that?

Regardless of what they are asking, you should have that conversation for your own sake, not just theirs. Though I’d also argue that if you are going to get married, you should want to do it for their sake, too. And if you resent them for not speaking their mind, don’t marry them.

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”

Go around crossing all lowercase Ls into Ts. Or add serif and turn them into uppercase i.

“As soon as their shields get low enough to do a 10% accurate transport, transport as much of their warp core from engineering to the bridge as you can. Then when shields fail entirely, get the rest.”

Though maybe the core shielding would also block transports, or else you’d figure “eject warp core” would involve the transporter. Or maybe they could even just use “stick the warp core in the transporter buffer until, uh, we delete it? Or use a simulated copy to figure out what transformations we could apply to fix it?”

Or: “Just run the transporter over their ship and move random molecules around.”

Or, depending on exactly how transporters work: “Convert as much of their warp core shielding into plutonium as you can, such that we can still warp away from the blast in time.”

If you could just transform matter, it could be possible to use a transporter and a pattern to have a shuttle sneak into an area and build a fleet of warships. Or to build one if attacked. I think been the replicator and transporter, Star Trek has the tech covered, it’s just a question of energy, but I have a feeling that the amount of energy needed to create Starships (minus warp capability) is trivial compared to the amount of energy required to create and sustain a high factor warp field.

I wonder how much these results would also apply to making random connections between sensors or actuator signals and our brains. Like if we hooked up a microphone, to the brain, would we hear through it similarly to how we hear through our ears? If the microphone was stationarity, would our awareness expand to always include audio awareness of the location the mic is in, or would it just confuse audio processing from our ears? Would it go through the same audio processing “circuitry” as our ears, or would the brain develop a new channel?

And then the same question but this time a camera instead of a mic. And maybe that camera can see a wider spectrum than our eyes can, if we could see through that camera, would we see new colours or would our existing colours just get remapped?

“Commander Riker made it clear that he would only attend if you were on duty for the duration of the party, to limit the odds that you will randomly drop in and discover the party despite not being invited. However lieutenant LaForge said that would not be necessary because he could create a lockout on that deck for your bio signature.”

“But my quarters are on that deck.”

“That is unfortunate. Perhaps you could recreate the party on the holodeck. For accuracy, your programming should take account for commander Riker’s suggestion to lieutenant Worf to act like an ‘angry drunk klingon wanting to pick a fight’ if you did show up.”

“Pick a fight with me!?”

“Commander Riker did not specify that parameter. Please standby for one moment. Chief O’Brian, Commander Riker has requested I inform you that they were merely joking with Worf. He also liked the holographic party idea. Please program the transporter to automatically transport you from the door to my quarters to the same place in holodeck 2, where lieutenant LaForge is programming a realistic version of the party. Data out.”

Infinite more speed than the empty drive bays I’m using for CDs and DVDs.

Though I’ve been considering getting an external drive. Mainly to check if my old CD and DVD backups/data dumps are just junk now or are still readable (to probably rip the iso and then burn a new copy that will likely sit unused for another decade or two).

When I first heard of the MS feature, my first thought was that there’s gotta be a more efficient way to do this than taking screen shots and analyzing the image. The window manager has all of that information plus more context (like knowing that these pixels are part of a non-standard window that uses transparency to act like a non-rectangular shape, while this thing that looks like a window is actually an image because the user was looking at someone else’s screenshot).

Even better would be integration with the applications themselves; they have even more contextual information than the window manager has.

For a while Amazon would estimate a time range and the delivery guy would never show up during that window. But sometimes it would do something like this: original estimate was 11am - 4pm, 4pm would pass with no delivery, then at 6pm, it would update to like 2pm - 5pm. Then it would show up at like 8pm.

They seem to have gotten better lately though.

I wish more businesses would use Canada Post to deliver in Canada. They’ve got these great community mailboxes with larger ones for secure package delivery. They just drop the key to the big one in your smaller mailbox that works similarly to locked apartment complex mailboxes. It’s way better than worrying if someone will grab the box in front of my door or if the delivery guy will even drop it at the right door.

I put off watching that for a long time because I didn’t really like the Harley Quinn character and her obsession with Joker and that whole abusive relationship they had, compounded by all the people who treated Harley and Joker like it was a relationship goal.

But I was very pleasantly surprised when I did eventually give it a shot. Yeah, it does include some Harley and J stuff, but they kinda had to because of how ingrained that relationship was into Harley’s pop culture identity. But it is done well. The series is one of my favorite in the Batman mythos.

It’s also kinda interesting how Ivy seems to be holding up better morally than Batman himself does. She’s an environmental warrior while he’s a status quo warrior, and that billionaire side of him holds up less and less well as it becomes more and more apparent that even billionaire philanthropists are really just taking credit for giving away wealth they shouldn’t have had in the first place.