the filibuster bound Senate will never convict.

The filibuster doesn’t really enter into it. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution requires a 2/3 majority to convict:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

The only positive fact about Thomas’s tenure is that the guy is 76 years old. The actuary tables look worse and worse for him every year.

As with most things, it gets easier with practice. After enough practice, you’ll find many of the actions and reactions of driving will become habits you do automatically. Which is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to practice good habits now, as practice makes permanent. Take your time, and try to be predictable to other drivers (use your signals, don’t make radical maneuvers). And don’t let the assholes who think the horn is an “I’m annoyed at you” button get to you. Fuck them and the camel that came on them. Take your time and make sure you are driving your car in a way you can control.

As for learning on a manual, yes that increases the difficulty. Depending on the specific vehicle, it can make it easier or harder. Some clutches will let you get away with murder, others will murder you for being less than perfect. Many years ago, my brother owned a car with a clutch that was just brutal. It would go from “not engaging” to “fully engaged” within the slightest movement. My truck, on the other hand, the clutch was so forgiving, you damn near couldn’t stall it. Thankfully, I learned to drive a stick on my truck and when I tried my brother’s car, it took a lot less time to get used to it. As above, take your time and it will come to you with practice.

That’s a common indication that the CMOS battery is dead.
If you open up the system and look around the motherboard, there should be a coin cell battery in a holder somewhere on the board. That battery keeps the BIOS powered and prevents it from losing it settings when the system is powered off. Test and replace that battery if it’s dead.

While I hate the idea of people losing their jobs, stepping back for a moment and looking at what they are claiming, its not terribly surprising:

Spencer said the roles affect mostly corporate and support functions

When companies merge, this is kinda needed. You don’t need two fully functional HR departments. While the HR staff from the buying company will likely need to expand, it won’t be by the same amount as the HR department of the company being bought. As network functions are merged, you probably don’t need all of the IT staff which came with the merger. A lot of management functions likely end up merged, meaning redundancies. And this sort of thing is going to move through a lot of the non-project work functions of the company.

Yes it sucks. But, it’s to be expected in a merger. Now, whether or not we want this level of consolidation, that’s a different ball of wax entirely. The last thing we need is more studios falling under the sway of these massive companies. That’s the thing which should be drawing our ire.

Been using the beta for a while and I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome. I just hope they have the purchasing as sorted as they claim. I’ve had so many issues in the past letting my kids purchase games.

I would assume they have some basic stuff running 24x7. I can’t imagine a network which doesn’t have Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) running 24x7 these days. There’s also things like firewall logs, which are almost certainly being captured (or at least netflow). Stuff like screen recording and mouse monitoring is probably saved for extreme cases. That said, my own experience has been pretty close to:

We’re not going to look over your shoulder while you watch YouTube videos but if we notice you’re watching a lot of or you start visiting porn sites, we’re going to start monitoring you.

Quite frankly, no one’s got time for that shit. I work at an organization with a bit north of 25,000 employees, and we have less than a dozen security analysts. While I could run a search against our firewall logs and see evidence of folks dicking around. I have much better things to do, like running down abnormal processes and writing up reports on users who got their systems infected while dicking around. And that’s really the way it comes to our attention, most of the time. Someone is out trying to download movies or software on their work laptop (you’d think people would know better…) and they pickup malware. We get an alert and start investigating. While trying to determine the source, we pull browser history and see the user out on “SketchyMovieSite[.]xyz”. And then their dicking around becomes our problem, mostly because the site had a malicious redirect, which is where the infection came from.

So ya, they may not be looking, but I’d always bet they are recording. Logging isn’t useful if it isn’t recording at the time of the compromise.

Remote work and pay. I was already interested in getting a remote gig when COVID hit. We went to a hybrid schedule and I realized that I really liked working from home. Also that my job was pretty much built for it. While many of the folks I used to work with are still hybrid, fully remote was never an option. I worked with Classified systems and I could never convince them to put a SIPR drop in my home. I guess you need to get elected President for that.

As the world was opening back up, many companies saw remote work as a carrot to offer cybersecurity folks and I started to see a lot more job postings with it as an option. So, I put my LinkedIn profile to “looking for work” and started getting recruiters messaging me on a regular basis. One hit me up with “REMOTE WORK OPPORTUNITY” (yes, all in caps) as the lead for an offer. What followed that sounded interesting and I started talking with him. A few week later, I put in my notice and started working in the private sector. Got a pay bump in the move as well.

My time in the FedGov space was overall a positive thing. I learned a lot and got to see systems locked down in a way that actually mattered (I never thought I would miss STIGs). At the same time, I don’t see myself ever going back. The bureaucratic nature of everything is soul crushing. And sitting in an OSS all day long sucks. It especially sucks when you’re the only one in the container and need to go out and take a piss. Clear the room, arm the alarm, spin the lock, sign the sheet, go piss. Open the lock, sign the sheet, disarm the alarm, get back to wishing for the sweet, sweet embrace of death.

When I worked as a US FedGov contractor, I was greeted with a long warning banner every time I logged into my computer. The tl;dr version of it is “fuck your privacy”. Being that I was part of cybersecurity for the site I was working at, I was one of the people doing the fucking. While we didn’t read everything from everyone all the time, we were logging it and could pull it up, if we were performing an investigation. We also had some automated stuff scanning for patterns and keywords on a regular basis, which could trigger an investigation.

While I’m no longer in the FedGov space (thank the gods), I still assume that everything I do on my work system or with work accounts is being logged. Also, I’m still working in cybersecurity and am often still the one doing the privacy fucking. Yes, everything is being logged. We may not look at it today, we may not look at it tomorrow. But, when HR and Legal ask us about a user’s activity, we can usually be pretty detailed. Act accordingly.

It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.

Playtron’s CEO, Kirt McMaster, added, “We are thrilled to join forces with such a legendary games publisher as Square Enix. The PC we know is morphing into new forms that require a purpose built OS for gaming that meets the demands of powerful new gaming hardware such as handhelds and new players who have grown up in a mobile 1st world with much more sophisticated UX sensibilities. This investment will accelerate the development and deployment of GameOS and create new experiences for players around the globe.”

Huh, so Playton’s CEO is an early example of an AI being used to replace people.

But, the coupon says, “half off”!

Welcome to AI:

LA will be “car-free” for the Olympics. For definitions of “car-free” which include crippling car traffic everywhere except tiny islands around a few select locations. Said locations being strategically placed to make the crippling traffic worse everywhere else. And once it’s all over, everything which was built out will be allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. As is the Olympic Tradition. But, at least, a bunch of large companies will make a lot of money, with all of the expenses covered by California and LA tax payers. Again, in the best Olympic Tradition.

I also find a lot of hikers seem to want to move at mach speed on trails. Gods forbid that you actually take the time to look around and enjoy the nature you are passing through.

On the NES, I always enjoyed Base Wars. It was baseball, except not boring. Instead of a player being “out” when you got the ball to the base ahead of him, you fought for the base.

Yes, but that is also going to require a ton of extra effort to track and assumes the nozzles themselves wear consistently. There would probably also need to be modifiers based on materials used, and even brands. For a professional print farm or a business trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the operation, this might be worth it. For a hobby where we expect a lot of waste? Eh, fuck it, just replace it when prints start going south.

Re-read what I wrote, but hop down off your high horse first, it’s obvious you weren’t able to read it clearly from up there. I’m neither promoting nor defending piracy. Quite the contrary, I’m praising the legitimate services (and Steam in particular) for understanding that competition with piracy isn’t all about money, it’s often about the quality of service. Funny enough, your own comments are actually a point in favor of this:

You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.

Yet somehow, with a lot of time, money and effort put into shutting down piracy, the pirates were able to provide a better service. Seriously, step back from the whole “napster bad” for a moment and think about the dissonance of the situation. Large companies, pulling in millions of dollars a year, with no need to worry about law enforcement or monied interests coming after them, somehow failed to create anything resembling a functional digital marketplace. They were stuck in the physical distribution paradigm and fought tooth and nail to avoid digital distribution. At the same time, a few kids, with little money, and law enforcement trying to shut them down created a pretty good user experience. Sure, some of that is not having to worry about licensing. But, a large part of it is understanding what the users want and giving it to them.

It wasn’t until Apple came along and basically created “Napster, but legitimate” that music piracy really fell off. Netflix pulled off something similar with video (though that is rebuilding some rough edges at the moment) and Steam did it for games. Sure, piracy still exists, and it will always be a problem. But, a lot of piracy can be tamped down by having a good service available.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

Ok, good luck with that! Can’t wait for this guy to start whining that he can’t find employees.

I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China’s entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn’t have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It’s unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing “comparative advantage” and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– Barack Obama, 2008