So gender is a strict binary but dragons kinda-sorta exist, got it (＠_＠)

Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.

At least it’s not a reaction video. That those are such a widespread phenomenon both frightens and fascinates me.

Sometimes I think they are a mash-up of three things from older media

1. A laugh track

2. An inset with a sign language interpreter

3. An imaginary friendship with a low budget meta commentator, like Mystery Science Theater 3000

Doom scrolling. For people who get hooked it can be very very addictive.

I switch between Tahoe, fedora and pop_os on a daily basis. Tahoe in its complete design madness is still in a league of its own when it comes to basic UX IMHO. Just the fact that the keymappings for undo/redo are consistent between apps puts it’s way ahead of Linux when considering the whole ecosystem. Linux is a clear winner in tech and tooling thought, which is why I use both.

I’d guess that there’s at least one person at your company who has bragged about it.

My understanding is that it worked by doing read/write on a known bad sector to verify that the physical defect is there. Replicating that on normal discs sounds hard.

The problem with all these protection schemes is somewhere in the code they could usually be bypassed by turning a JNE to an unconditional jump.

So you had to add code to detect modifications which itself could be bypassed.

There's many ways to do it: JMP (absolute or relative), NOP if fall-through is acceptance, or less favorably: invert the JMPcc such that invalid input becomes valid.

If I were a paranoid DOS-compatible publisher of expensive software, I would add layers of checks:

- checksum the entire executable on disk, at different points

- checksum the entire program resident in memory, at different points

- use a serial number and activation verification system based on public key cryptography and hardware attributes, and spread those checks around critical functionality. Store the activation code in the end of the root directory as phantom deleted file entries.

Ultimately though, does the increase in hassles and decrease in goodwill create more sales than it pushes away? I'd argue that intentionally no-DRM/no-cp software (GOG style) encourages brand goodwill and loyalty and there's even a nonzero conversion funnel from warez to paying customers. Cp is, thus, mostly an exercise in the practice of footgunnery by performative restrictions that do not deter technically-inclined persons. But like a sign that says "restroom for customers only", it doesn't add positive value. If they had instead spent more engineering time on the software and making the software priced for normal humans, they would have had more customers and more profits.

>So you had to add code to detect modifications which itself could be bypassed.

Right, which is why DRM schemes aren't typically implemented in a straightforward way. Instead license checks are added to critical program logic so you can't easily skip it, anti-tamper/debug is added to thwart runtime analysis, and on top of all of this the code is obfuscated to thwart analysis even further. You might be eventually be able to figure it out, but it's designed to make it enough of a slog that nobody bothers to work through it all.

I Googles that exact string and I can't say that I see even enough cases to count on one hand. Do you have any concrete examples that you think are representative for the behavior that you are referencing?

I can’t really remember hearing a Swede complain about bank bailouts in relation to the 2008 crisis. The 90s crisis and related bailouts are however often referenced when complaining about the banks making huge profits these days. Whether that’s reasonable or not is another question.

The could if lawmakers wanted them to. Here in Sweden potato guns are actually illegal if the potato achieves 10+ joule.

That's effectively a complete ban as a thrown potato would have considerably more energy than that. A quick web search suggests professional baseball pitchers achieve ~130J, and a potato is roughly comparable to a baseball in mass.

Yep.

I'm not saying that I'm for it, just that writing a law that bans them isn't all that hard.