paper_clip @ paper_clip @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Cryptographic signatures are too hard for people to understand.

Unless you cut the word down to size and just call it "crypto". Then everyone gets it. Like, it means stuff happens on a computer and magic money appears.

But how do you keep the ice cream cake from melting over that time?

This is a state-level case, so it would be Georgia's criminal code that would apply, not Federal

IIRC, the Soviets placed their primary artillery school and tank factories in Ukraine. As a percentage of the USSR's military base, the Ukrainians were well above average.

On the other hand, the Simpsons did a not-so-funny-now with this:

https://youtu.be/z77JFw2D6f8

Remember that the USSR included not just Russians but Ukrainians.

Anakin: Self-driving cars will orbit the street's so there will always be one nearby if someone requests a ride.

Padme: But they'll regularly come back to a central hub for cleaning, right?

Anakin:

Padme: But they'll regularly come back to a central hub for cleaning, right?!

I find this hypothetical posed by this social media user to be poorly phrased, somewhat irksome and deficient in interpersonal empathy. I will use my considerably greater mental resources to consider why this user felt obliged too ask this hypothetical, and provide a suitable answer.

The Expanse is an interesting case of book-to-TV adaptation. The authors for the books were fairly involved with the TV series, and, in some ways, it's their retelling of the main story with some changes that streamlined things for the visual medium. The main things have to do with the consolidation of several characters (e.g., most prominently TV Drummer is an amalgam of three or four different people from the books), and the early introduction of some other ones (e.g., Avasarala and Draper) (though, on the flip side, because of the way actors contracts work, these characters were given make-work arcs in some seasons because they don't appear during the corresponding books). These changes generally made sense and were pretty well done.

Anyway, the books are excellent. The TV series is excellent.

Note that the last three books were not adapted for TV, though there was some set up that will eventually lead into those books. One logistical trick is that the last three take places some 30 years after the first six, so there's a matter of the actors' ages. But the TV series ended very well. You want more, but the main plot lines dominating the first six books were tied up.

Where would you put, say, the Culture, where biological beings are perfectly happy with machines running the place, while the Minds engage in some light imperialism on the side, when, uh, special circumstances called for it, in the Minds' view. We can call it the "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints" level.

One other thought is to use Google Voice.

At least in that case, everything runs through a Google server, rather than through some possibly janky connection between your desktop and phone.

The drawback is that, if you have an existing phone number, you'd have to port it over to Google Voice (or maybe Google Fi can port that number to an actual cell phone; not sure if it can).

Why not both? (IIRC, there's some sort of technological uplift going on that takes a civilization from wooden ships to metal ships).

If you're OK with "ships on water, not in space", there's the Destroyermen series, which involves multiverse displaced WW2 ships finding themselves in a timeline where the asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs. It gets a little too sprawling towards the last few books (much like the Honor Harrington books got a bit too sprawling, what with Talbot Sector, etc.), but was satisfyingly action packed, albeit the tech uplift is WW2 tech.

Less exotically, there's the "1632" series, at least the first half dozen or so books. Time-displaced American small town, into Thirty Years War Germany (basically, at the beginning of what we'd call the Modern Era). With that series, the sprawl gets out of control and sort of kills any momentum, but the first books are excellent fun.

The drawback of non-AirTags is that they depend on people consciously opting in to the network (by, say, buying Tiles themselves and running the app). The AirTag network just exists because every iPhone is part of the network, whether or not people have bought AirTags themselves. The AirTag network is orders of magnitude larger and denser than, say, the Tile network.

This vast difference between coverage networks will also push Tiles to extinction, as the Tile network is now far, far worse than the AirTag one, and there's not much point in buying one. If you're serious about tracking your stuff, it's quite possibly worth buying a used iPad just for this purpose.

Frodo does goatse.cx on Sauron.

For you young folks, here's the Wikipedia

https://imgur.com/mQrQR2v.png

To note, President Comacho was far, far kinder, wiser and more humble than any MAGA politician.

There actually is a Dinosaur BBQ originating in upstate New York. Sadly, the only actual dinosaur they have on the menu is the chicken.

Florida actually has a state sponsored home owners insurance.

https://www.citizensfla.com/who-we-are

This was after private insurers started bailing out in the early 2000s when it became clear how ridiculously expensive it would be to provide hurricane insurance there.

"Fine, fine. You do that. We've upped the risk of kaiju attacked along the Florida coast. Water and wind kaiju, not the radioactive fire breathing ones."

"That makes no sense!"

"Neither does what you're proposing!"

And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.