dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is "column" the rig

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They even made us memorize this one in grade school:

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that this says nothing about having to be a citizen for this to apply to you, either. And while we're at it, see also this.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It's broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it's familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Bull. I don't even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.

Okay, but I would totally wield the forkchaku.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft's lunch.

It's too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform -- Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera -- all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It's only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

In light of the above, then, I hereby propose that squirrels get renamed to "treegulls."

The original Legend of Zelda. I still have it on cartridge and every once in a while I'll just steamroll the entire game and whoop Ganon's ass. I can usually do it in about 4 hours.

I don't use any glitches or speedrun optimizations, I just know where everything is and what order to do things in.

Goose!

One of the things I learned as a wee waddler on my path to being a fully-fledged computer nerd (that was two bird puns in one sentence, I don't know if you noticed) was that keeping a spare power supply or two around is always a good idea.

A blown power supply can bring your day's Unreal Tournament matches productivity to a halt instantly, and inevitably on a Sunday when all the stores are closed, too. To make matters more interesting, a partially failed power supply can cause all manner of strange and otherwise undiagnosable mystery issues. E.g. you're telling me two of your hard drives, your RAM, and your video card all started acting flaky at once? More likely is your PSU's +12v rail is wonky, or something. Swap in a known good one and see. A power supply is also the first in line of all your PC components that can be killed by external forces, e.g. dirty power or nearby lightning strikes, or maybe your dad just deciding to plug his 1970s vintage arc welder into the same circuit in the house, etc.

To this day I have a generic 750w PSU sealed in its shrink wrap on the parts shelf in my basement, because you never know when it'll get you or someone you know out of a jam. And eventually it probably will.

That's remotely possible, and I would be inclined to agree if the circumstances around this weren't so fishy to begin with.

E.g. why is the police report heavily redacted? Why has the suspect not been named? This is highly unusual, and suggests there's something more going on. I'd doubt very highly the grand jury were given the full picture.

It's pretty much a done deal that we'll never know more. Someone is making an effort to bury this.

Highly unlikely. Even in bumpus old corners of Texas, the state is absolutely obsessed with doing anything to take away any citizen's gun rights and will do so by nailing them with some kind of felony, and a negligent discharge scenario that results in somebody getting killed in normal circumstances would definitely qualify.

People in Texas may love their guns, but the cops in Texas are the same as cops everywhere and if they had their way nobody would have the guns except them.

This points to me that someone involved in law enforcement, someone involved with the government, or someone with very high level connections and/or a lot of money was the one responsible for this and that's why it was swept under the carpet. If it were just a regular Joe there's no way.

Before anyone gets too excited, this still requires sintering to finish your part, i.e. it has to be baked to a metal-fusing temperature in a special purpose kiln that is so expensive that it'll require a mortgage to buy one, or you'll have to send all of your parts away to get processed and wait for them to get sent back.

The headline here is that this stuff requires less postprocessing in that regard, but it is still absolutely not for hobbyists or home printers.

That decent percent is in fact roughly 60%, in my industry. At least according to what my vendor reps tell me.

Only 4 in 10 people even bother to attempt to do their rebates. The manufacturers love that, because it allows them to put a giant "$2000 OFF!!!! ^{viamailinrebate}" on their marketing literature and that gets eyeballs on the ad and feet in the door, but they know damn well they won't actually have to pay out on the majority of those promos and in fact they don't even budget with the expectation that they will.

Amazon stuff sometimes arrives. For instance, it's going on 7 months by now I think and they still haven't found my camera.

This is the sad reality of every company everywhere trying to turn their delivery operation into a "gig" position. Amazon does it, too. Their delivery contractors-who-are-totally-not-employees steal valuable items from deliveries all the time.

Anyway, you are certain to win your chargeback. Banks side with their cardholders more often than not, and Best Buy is going to have to provide proof positive that you received your item. "We handed it off to Doordash and then washed our hands of it" is not going to cut the mustard, there.

(We have to deal with chargebacks in my business, too. Defending ourselves is a pain in the ass because we have to provide indisputable documentation that the client's order was fulfilled. The issuing bank always starts from the default position of their cardholder being a saint and all retail businesses automatically being scammers. A small subset of people will fraudulently dispute a charge for a big ticket purchase just because they feel this is a way to weasel out of paying for it, and usually they've been emboldened by the fact that they've tried it before and gotten away with it.)

That sure is a chart.

This chart, boss?

She's not even a furry...

I tend to upvote any display of anyone's creative pursuit if I happen to scroll by it. Even if it's not something I'm into. The marker-on-photo-paper guy whose name escapes me, people's photographs in any of the photography related communities, any of the ink doodles, hand made stuff, or comics posted by their original creators.

We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. The average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

I'm calling this now: It'll be even worse than you think, because "investigating" everyone this way would require a completely unrealistic amount of effort, because you'd have to review possibly decades worth of social media activity right then and there when the prospective entrant is standing at the customs desk. Nobody could possibly do that.

So these idiots will just use AI to do it for them, and as we all know full well the AI will return Earth-shatteringly wrong results pretty much all the time.

There was a specific version of the AOL installer back in the late '90s that would still let you install it and sign on even if you declined the EULA. It's doubtful that anyone noticed or cared, but a friend of mine noticed it and I've pathologically tried clicking "no" on every EULA prompt ever since just to see if whatever piece of software will let me in anyway. Every once in a while I find one that does, but it's pretty rare.

I imagine in this case somebody fucked up and just copy-pasted the "yes" button on the form without bothering to change its action in addition to its text. Who knows how that would stand up in court, and probably nobody's ever had the opportunity to find out anyway.