palordrolap

If dealing with a small bunch of nutters was so easy, the Troubles wouldn’t have been quite so troubling, now, would they?

This would just be the same thing but with a different bunch of nutters.

I have to wonder if the potential for accidentally falling out of a window goes any way into affecting the way he approaches certain debts.

“Hurt me, daddy.”

“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”

“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”

Within reason.

You could try your luck and see how much you can get away with before someone notices, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Nah, they’ll just make life more difficult for any employees who take bathroom breaks, if not find some “clearly unrelated” excuse to outright fire them.

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.

“They’re back! In POG form!”

But seriously, with the way web search seems to be going these days, webrings coming back might actually be useful.

What does “lift” mean in this context? A web search turns up a Doris Day musical from 1951 which is kind of funny to think about but I’m guessing is not what you mean.

As for the general case of modifying the Sun - or any star - in some way, it’s all but certain to need a huge number of resources (or amount of energy, or both), and considering the Sun is on the order of a million times larger than Earth, far more than can be obtained from Earth alone.

I mean, I’d like to be proven wrong and there’s some exotic-physics way of causing the helium in the Sun to spontaneously turn back into hydrogen, but if that was easy, you’d expect that we’d see stars do that by themselves occasionally. We don’t, which implies there would still need to be some kind of energy input required to get it started.

Without exotic physics, we’d pretty much need on the order of the energy that the star had output from birth up to that point, and if we had that, we’d be better off using that energy in other ways.

We could get all Earth life off Earth and into a self-sustaining, space-faring habitat with a minuscule fraction of the resources. We might be better off aiming for something like that.

The gravitational collapse of a cloud of mostly hydrogen in the vacuum of space.

And anything falling together under gravity was given that kinetic energy from somewhere* and ultimately it can all be traced back to the Big Bang.

As for where that energy came from, it’s possible we’ll never know. Most organised religions (and no doubt a few disorganised ones) have their theories, of course. You may subscribe to one of these.

* This is the principle most commonly simplified as “what goes up, must come down”

Given that magic eye pictures are basically a certain convolution of a repetitive source image (or random noise) and a depth map, it ought to be possible for an AI, if not a standard procedural algorithm, to at least attempt to “factor out” the source and map from the result image.

Whether that even counts as seeing and whether this guy’s neural network could do this, or maybe “see” in some other way is open to question. But I’m guessing it’s a no.

Yeah, that’ll go great when the car is suddenly driving 14 miles down the driveway of the house I lived at as a child - a driveway that is walkable in less than a minute - before entering the garage which is a large house that slightly resembles a place I used to work and has a view over a clock tower that may or may not be larger when you look at it from a different angle and I think I’ll nap in this bed that’s here.

Now tell me: Where is the car relative to its position when that five-second-long dream sequence began, and will that pedestrian ever walk again?

Any web instance of K/Mbin that hasn’t entered protracted death throes or mysteriously vanished.

“But I did nothing wrong” – the boy who dared challenge Putin’s ideology.

Look, kid, if you speak out against things Poots says are OK, you’re going to prison, simple as.

Gotta be a mindless yes-man automaton, or suffer the consequences. Get any idea of independent thought out of your head and consider yourself lucky you weren’t standing near any windows.

If that’s what I think it is, we use “skid marks” as a euphemism in English too.

Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.

Any tool someone invents will be used to train an AI to circumvent that tool.

In fact that’s how a lot of AI training is done in the first place.

Because you touch y… wait no. That doesn’t work here.

Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine…

OK, yeah, you’ll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it “Son of sticky keys.”

There will be no other way to get to those settings.

That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there’s no chance they’ll implement it.

If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they’d do it.

There will be those - I suspect - who believe they are above speaking Russian, because they were “raised speaking the language of the greatest country on Earth”, and they will believe that the Russians will just accept that for the same reasons, because, obviously Russians know that Americans are better than them.

This mindset is very familiar to me. I’m British.

That won’t provide a future workforce for the rich and/or powerful in an nationalist society though.

Can’t be a shepherd if you don’t have sheep.