Alex Jones was a CIA plant, to make conspiracy theorists look crazy… And it worked really really well.

The government was nervous because there were some conspiracy theories that were a little too close to reality. Shit like MK ULTRA and the Harvard mind control experiment sound fake, but we have the declassified docs. We know they happened. And there were lots of conspiracy theories that were likely hitting just a little too close for comfort. But outright disputing the conspiracy theories would just add credibility to them, in a “methinks the lady doth protest too much” sort of way.

So instead, they set out to discredit the people making the claims. They wanted to poison the well. So they found a dude named Alex Jones who had potential. He’s easily manipulated, so they can basically feed him wild conspiracies and he’ll eat them up. And all they had to do was boost his message. Jones never even needed to knew he was a plant, (and in fact, it would work better if he remained clueless.)

They gave conspiracy theorists a face. Before Alex Jones, conspiracy theories were something the average person jokingly threw around while drunk at the bar. But suddenly, conspiracy theorists were up front and center. And here’s the important part: the theories didn’t have a good spokesman. Suddenly, the average person’s view of conspiracy theories shifted. They weren’t funny anymore; They had your crazy uncle ranting about dead kids being fake.

By giving conspiracy theories a face, then having that face spew the most insane bullshit alongside the true (or nearly true) theories, the government was able to discredit the true theories. They were able to poison the well, because the main person ranting about the conspiracy also thinks Sandy Hook was a hoax.

Yeah, N64 speedrunners even went as far as replacing their aging analog sticks with machined steel sticks. Because as the console ages, so do the controllers. And stick drift became a major problem for speed runners who used genuine consoles. There was even a case where an aging controller led to the discovery of a new glitch, when a speedrunner’s NES controller had gotten so old that it allowed him to press button combos that wouldn’t have been possible with a new controller. And that button combo allowed him to perform glitches that would have been otherwise impossible on a console.

The larger issue is accessibility. If speed running requires a genuine console, it severely limits the number of people who can afford to participate. There would be a big financial barrier just to buy the console and game(s), and since no new consoles are being made it will inevitably lead to the death of speedruns as consoles die out and nobody can continue playing.

One of the original goals of emulation was data preservation, since it quickly became evident that game companies wouldn’t bother preserving their own games. And as consoles age, that will only become more and more important. I personally have backups of all of my legitimately purchased Nintendo games. But that’s only because I enjoy data hoarding and have a NAS that can actually store all of it. Not everyone has that luxury, and it means that (again) there will be a big financial barrier to anyone wanting to be able to play the games that they legally purchased and have the right to play.

They’re probably talking about the BMG rootkit from the early 2000’s. Basically, when you inserted a Sony CD into your computer, it would automatically and silently install a rootkit on your PC, which introduced a backdoor on your PC that was being actively exploited. It was also notoriously difficult to remove, as it would reinstall itself even if you deleted every visible trace of it (and improperly installing it could disable access to your CD drive entirely.)

Then when shit hit the fan and Sony was making headlines for it, they released a “fix” for it. The fix didn’t actually remove the rootkit, and simply hid files with specific names (the rootkit files) from the users. This only introduced another vulnerability, where hackers could just name any virus the same as the rootkit, and it would automatically be hidden.

It led to several very large lawsuits and state investigations. Sony was raked over the coals by multiple state attorneys general, and the FTC even published warnings urging consumers not to buy Sony CDs.

All in the name of DRM. The rootkit was initially meant to stop you from ripping and copying the CD. Oh, and the rootkit contained sections of improperly credited open source code. So Sony stole from OSS programmers while claiming that they were trying to prevent IP theft.

Nah, Yuzu is still working fine on mine. Basically, if you had the emulator installed prior to the takedown, EmuDeck will continue to use it.

Which is honestly a pretty good argument for just installing every single emulator (even if you never think you’ll use them!) because they don’t really take up that much space, and you could potentially lose access to them if you never bothered before a takedown.

Cold water and dish soap is the way to go. Hot water runs the risk of delaminating the coating layer, and hand soap tends to have moisturizers that will stick to the lens. Microfibers are too abrasive, and don’t adequately lift debris away from the lens. Just lather a drop of soap to cut the oils, then rinse. If your oleophobic coating is still good and water slicks off the lens, you can even turn the faucet low and just run a trickle across the lens to dry them. So you literally never need to touch the lens with a towel or microfiber cloth.

If you only ever use soap and cold water, your oleophobic coating will last for literal years. I’ve had my current pair for almost two years now, with no scratches and my oleophobic coating is still just fine. Lens cleaners, glass cleaners, etc all strip that coating away. And microfibers are bad about causing tiny scratches that build up over time, since they drag dust and debris across the lens as you wipe them. In contrast, water gently carries dust and debris away without scratching, then the soap removes the oily fingerprints and smudges without damaging the coating.

Yeah, it’s a statement that is spoken from a position of extreme privilege. Being able to “not care” about politics means politics has never directly impacted your day to day life, your health, your wellbeing…

Nah, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. “I smelled weed” has been used for decades to skirt probable cause requirements. Because it’s transient evidence that can’t be saved or replicated, and you can’t prove that they’re lying. You can be 100% clean, but a cop claims he smelled weed and now your car’s interior paneling is getting ripped out on the side of the highway.

The cop lied to get the search approved. No more, no less.

Job postings like yours are extremely common when the applicant has been pre-selected but the company still requires an external posting. Your applicant likes off-grid hiking, is a hobbyist drone pilot, and enjoys grilling?

Now the job posting for a IT position requires an applicant who is capable of accurate pathfinding using a paper map and compass, two years of drone pilot experience, and four years of culinary experience.

If you’re referring to the wavy pattern along the cutting edge, that’s not from the folding process. The hamon is added to the blade during the quenching process, by adding clay to the steel. The clay causes the covered steel to heat differently than the uncovered steel. That differential heating is what is visible as the hamon.

It’s largely decorative, but does have function as it determines what part of the blade can be sharpened to an edge.

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

Bathroom attendants are there to discourage drug use and bathroom sex. That’s literally their primary purpose. The fact that they have towels and mints is secondary to the fact that they’re just a walking overdose deterrent.

That’s why they’re commonly seen in clubs and bars where people would be inclined to do drugs or have bathroom sex.

To reiterate how bad public transit is, even in populated areas: I’m also in DFW. This is my daily commute…

It’s ~9.6km. Note that the bus/train option is entirely greyed out, because there is no public transit which runs from my house to my job. If I were to walk, the only option would be on the side of a highway. I would have cars passing me at ~70 MPH without even a curb for protection.

To walk to the nearest grocery store, it’s ~4km, with a large part of it along the shoulder of that same highway. Same with a major chain.

Nearest bus stop is ~6.9km, but that only takes me in a direction I wouldn’t need to go; There are no local bus or train stops that land me near where I work or live.

Honestly, it would probably be easier to just build a *arr program specifically for downloading YouTube videos directly. Tie it into the rest of the *arr suite, with naming conventions for Plex/Jellyfin.

For those who don’t get the joke. During the Cold War, China had a habit of issuing “final warnings” which didn’t have any teeth. Since the propaganda was regularly aired over the radio in Russia, Russians began joking about “oh this is china’s third final warning this week, I bet people are scared now” type of stuff.

Cats do pant, but they’re also just better adapted to heat than dogs are.

Smaller frame means less body heat to disperse; As size increases, the volume:surface area ratio heavily skews towards volume. More volume means more trapped heat. By minimizing volume and maximizing surface area (skin) cats are able to effectively stay cool passively.

Cats also have a higher basal metabolism, which means their body temperature is naturally higher. And creatures don’t feel heat in an absolute sense. Temperature is felt relative to your own body temperature. That’s why a warm shower after swimming feels downright scalding, (because you’re cooled down from swimming, then hopped into a warm shower,) or why the regular room temperature bedroom feels chilly when you have a fever (because you’re warmed up from the fever, so the room feels colder than it normally would.) You’re feeling those things relative to your own body temperature. Since cats have a higher base body temperature, they feel warm environments less than we do. This is also why they spend so much time lazing around in patches of sunlight, or snuggled up next to the radiator; Room temperature is comfortable for us, but slightly chilly to them.

Third, they are originally adapted from the desert. This means they also have some quirks, like tolerating high temperatures better, and having a high tolerance for thirst, (the latter often leads to kidney issues later in life, since cats don’t tend to drink enough water even when it’s readily available.)

This looks like it was a timing analysis attack. Basically, they’re trying to figure out which user did something specific. They match the timing of the event with the traffic from the user, and now they know which user did the thing.

It can be fuzzed by streaming something at the same time, because now your traffic is way harder to time analyze when you have a semi-constant stream of data running. But streaming something over Tor is an exercise in patience, (and it’s not something the typical user will just always have running in the background) so timing analysis attacks are gaining popularity.

That’s more on the OS than the text protocol. The protocol doesn’t just hold a text in the ether until it’s time for delivery. A scheduled text is you telling the phone “hey, wait to send this message until it’s time.” Then your phone sends it at the proper time.

iOS still doesn’t have built in text scheduling. There are workarounds, (like using the Shortcuts app to build a “send this text” automation that runs at a specific time), but that’s not the same thing as native support.

It’s more about the lack of iMessage features. Things like editing, unsend, text effects, etc are absent in regular texts. If everyone is on iMessage, everyone can use those enhanced features. They’re apparently pretty popular in group chats, but even a single android user will drag the entire conversation into regular text messages instead. So lots of iPhone users (especially the younger gen Z and alpha) started complaining whenever someone had an android, or even outright bullying them for it.

And for android users, texting with an iPhone user is a horrible experience; Images are horribly compressed, videos are severely limited in file size and compressed, group texts need to be opened as an attachment to be read, etc… All because iOS refused to use the more modern RCS texting protocols.

MGSV got much better once I figured out how CQC and holdups worked. CQC lets you drop someone without using ammo. You can move them while they’re unconscious, and then wake them up with a kick. Once they’re awake, you can hold them up while they’re on the ground. If they’re held up, they’ll stay on the ground permanently (unless another guard finds them and gets them up). So you can capture an entire base without using ammo, simply by finding a quiet corner to stash your guards in; You don’t need to worry about them waking up from a knockout, cuz the holdup keeps them down.

358/2 was good, but different. I personally enjoyed the equipment/skill system, but I understand why lots of people didn’t; If you didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing your abilities and gear, it would quickly feel like a burden.