So, once upon a time, the radio airwaves were free for anyone and everyone to use as they liked. There were incompatible protocols, congestion, crowding, and so on and so forth. One day, the Titanic sunk, and a major contributor of it was the fact that there were no standards for ships to be listening for distress signals on the radio.

So international regulations were established be treaty, the Radio Act if 1912 in The US, and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912. These laws and treaties not only established mandatory radio watch for ships at sea, but also sought to reduce crosstalk and bandwidth hogging by people— you’d need to get a radio license to transmit on a specific frequency for a region.

A public spectrum was established for anyone to use, and another spectrum was reserved for dedicated amateurs to advance radio technology (requiring a test to prove dedication— HAM radio), another spectrum was dedicated for government use (such as police), another for hospitals, and another segment for commercial usage.

If you violate the licensing requirements, you are a pirate radio station… and this is actually taken quite seriously. Regulators will actually take measures to track you down. One thing that the HAM radio community does is something called a “fox hunt”… it’s basically like a region-wide game of hide and seek, where the hider is repeatedly broadcasting a radio signal, and the seekers use whatever technology they can muster to track the hider down. The hiders also use sophisticated means to hide their location, such as bouncing signals off of water towers to hide the origin and other even sneakier tactics. Fox hunts are a lot of fun, but always end up with the fox getting caught.

Pirate radio tends to end up the same way.

Possible, but super tricky. Good luck trying to sell a producer on minimizing dialog!

You ever have an image of something like fire or mist or galaxies and stars or whatever taken with a black or white background, and you want to make it a transparent background instead? Color to alpha keeps the translucent elements intact at the appropriate translucency while removing the background color. Super useful for compositing images together.

GIMP isn’t quite as feature rich and useful as photoshop… except GIMP has the “Color to Alpha” function which I’ve still yet to learn how to imitate in photoshop, and I’m not sure it even can. And I use that function all the freaking time.

Live service means the content comes from the company’s servers, and likely changes rapidly. The quintessential example is Fortnite. Updates are expected, not merely necessary fixes. Duke Nukem 3D had all the content installed on your computer from day one, without expectation that it would change (unless you made your own maps, or downloaded maps other USERS made).

Interestingly enough, originally it WAS a Mario game, during initial development! Doki Doki Panic started as an engine test for a new Mario game with vertical scrolling in addition to horizontal scrolling. It was swapped to Fuji TV characters shortly after, mid development… and then ironically switched BACK to Mario for the US release!

Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

I find it weird that the article is written as if this is a bad thing. The ai is doing what it’s supposed to, what he asked, and he even admitted it was helpful to him. Why is this “dystopian”? The AI didn’t break up with him, cause him to be broken up with, say anything falsely, or do anything but present him a summary of what his real girlfriend actually wrote to him. What is wrong with that? I literally can’t see anything wrong with this. Is the mere fact that AI summarization exists dystopian? How so?

We’re still in the bad timeline where Biff went back in time with the sports almanac. That one doesn’t get flying cars.

I have fond memories of it too. Granted, those memories involved being utterly confused as to how to proceed, but also being utterly astonished by the graphics. I distinctly remember it being basically photorealistic to my 9 year old self— going back to play it with an emulator was a bit of a shock (and letdown) compared to my memories of it.

I did beat it as an adult. As a kid I may lot have been able to get anywhere, but it was magical all the same.

Feels like they took the best ideas from Mario Maker, polished it up to a glowing shine, mixed in some great movement, threw in a metric fuckton of whimsy and joy, and overall made a great game.

Rich people have always had the freedom to be who they are. You think wealthy gay men were beaten up in back alleys? Maybe they couldn’t announce it to the world but they pretty much got to live their lives in peace. When you don’t have to work to survive and when the world bends to your will it’s amazing how culture doesn’t seem to effect you so harshly anymore.

It’s not that culture isn’t important. It’s that the ability to live in peace for who you are tends to come automatically when you have your living taken care of.

I feel like I heard about this being in development from a quack book back in the later 90s (sound waves being used to destroy tumors, that is)… amazing to hear that it’s real, and works!

I don’t know that stealing is morally wrong no matter what. My rabbi taught that if a man steals to survive, the crime is not his, but of his community because they did not save him from poverty. That teaching really stuck with me. Yes, stealing indicates something is seriously wrong in the world, but there’s a big difference in where the evil lies— is it in the thief, or in the society?

Uhhh… you got this meme format literally backwards. Red delicious apples definitely did not draw 25 on this card, because they look great but are dead inside.

This is a statement I hear only from people who think “nazi” means “evil”, and don’t notice that their personal ideology is drifting closer to literal fascism, but since it’s their ideology, what they believe is right, that means it’s not evil. But nazi means evil, so nazi can’t possibly mean their new beliefs.

But I assure you, it can. And it’s not scope-creep, it’s you-drift.

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.

Long exposure shots can be awesome.

Found it! It was 3D Ultra Pinball, by Sierra. Here’s a YouTube video of someone playing it… https://youtu.be/6DX08v5orsY

Anyone remember a pinball game for windows that had three tables and I think the ball could swap between them during play, and the theme was building a space colony on mars or some other planet? Sorry my description is vague, but I was like 8 years old when I played it. I definitely remember that the tables were wider than they were tall, unusual for a pinball game, as it was designed for the computer screen not an arcade.