Most people don’t remember this, or weren’t alive at the time, but the whole Colin Powell event at the UN was intended to stop the weapons inspectors.
France (remember the Freedom Fries?) wanted to allow the weapons inspectors to keep looking until they could find true evidence of WMDs. The US freaked out because France said it wasn’t going to support an invasion of Iraq, at least not yet, because the inspectors hadn’t found anything. That meant that the security council wasn’t going to approve the resolution, which meant that it was an unauthorized action, and arguably illegal. In fact, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said it was illegal.
Following the passage of Resolution 1441, on 8 November 2002, weapons inspectors of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission returned to Iraq for the first time since being withdrawn by the United Nations. Whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction or not was being investigated by Hans Blix, head of the commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors remained in the country until they withdrew after being notified of the imminent invasion by the United States, Britain, and two other countries.
On February 5, 2003, the Secretary of State of the United States Colin Powell gave a PowerPoint presentation[1][2] to the United Nations Security Council. He explained the rationale for the Iraq War which would start on March 19, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.
The whole point of Colin Powell burning all the credibility he’d built up over his entire career was to say “we don’t care that the UN weapons inspectors haven’t found anything, trust me, the WMDs are there, so we’re invading”. Whether or not he (or anybody else) truly thought there were WMDs is a bit of a non-issue. What matters was they were a useful pretext for the invasion. Initially, the US probably hoped that the weapons inspectors were going to find some, and that that would make it easy to justify the invasion. The fact that none had been found was a real problem.
In the end, we don’t know if it was a lie that the US expected to find WMDs in Iraq. Most of the evidence suggests that they actually thought there were WMDs there. But, the evidence also suggests that they were planning to invade regardless of whether or not there were WMDs.
I bet a real asshole could easily quadruple their money with this.
Just negotiate with the owners of the 6.1 houses to buy all or some of the strip. Tell Bob that if he doesn’t pay $10k for the strip behind his house, that Catherine is willing to buy it, and then her back yard will wrap around his.
In a friendly world where every neighbour trusted each-other, they could split the $25k and each pay a few thousand for a very slightly larger back yard. But, home-owners being the assholes they are, you could probably get them to try to out-bid each other to cause or avoid petty squabbles.
There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.
That looks quiet and positively spacious compared to the last open office environment I did time in.
Imagine that same space but 4 people between the column and the window instead of just 2. Then make the space 3x as long. Then reduce the space between the backs of the chairs by 50%.
Even though everyone in the space was doing individual programming / sysadmin work, the space was extremely loud just from a few spontaneous conversations between people working on the same thing together. Everyone wore headphones nearly all the time, only taking them off if they needed to talk / shout to the people near them about something. Often, if you needed to talk with someone sitting 4 desks away, the easiest way to do it was over IM.
Nope, just a massively overcrowded office building. The ventilation system could barely keep up. But, management made it clear to us that the reason for the open office layout was to encourage collaboration and foster creativity!
The world got essentially all classical music, the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, etc. without the need for copyright. Shakespeare’s work wasn’t protected by copyrights either. So, it’s not like amazing works of art require copyright. They’ll happen regardless. It’s more about how artists are incentivized to create and who profits.
With a 28 year copyright term (14 years, renewable for another 14), the way it was in the early 1700s, Forrest Gump would just be entering the public domain.
That seems about right. They’ve made their money. It cost them $55m to make, they’ve made $650m on it so far. And anything that’s going to come in in the future is going to be a trickle compared to the first few decades of the movie. It also seems about right because Forrest Gump has become part of the culture. People quote lines from it. It’s used in memes. It has its own life that lives on outside of the IP owned by Paramount.
But, because of the warped copyright system, it won’t be in the public domain for nearly another century.
The purpose of copyright is that it’s a balance. It incentivizes artists to make things, and in exchange those things enter the public domain a short time later. Without copyright, the theory goes that artists won’t create as much art, so fewer things will enter the public domain.
But, can anybody argue, with a straight face, that unless copyright terms are 120 years, Disney and friends just aren’t going to bother? Do they really need more than a century as an incentive, and as a way to recoup their costs? Of course not.
The worst thing is that other countries used to have slightly more sane copyright systems, but the US imposed the ridiculous US system on most of the world by strong-arming every other country into agreeing to copyright treaties, that force these other countries to essentially adopt the US system.
Rumour that’s based on something that actually happened, but the facts have been distorted
Rumour that makes the player look good, but is false
Rumour that makes the player look bad, and is false
If there are only 2-3 other players, each one gets 1 or 2 rumours. If there are a lot of players, you might duplicate some of them. You could ask the player to pick the rumour that’s most popular about them, and some extra copies of that one get handed out.
So, about half the rumours are true, or based on something true. Half are false or distortions. There’s one that the character might want people to continue to believe, even if it’s false. Another one that is a lie that the player can’t seem to shake. Another one where it’s a true story, but maybe the character is just tired of having to re-tell. On the other hand, maybe it’s a tale of heroism that they love to tell people about.
IMO having one that makes the player look good, but is false, and one where the facts have been distorted are the most interesting ones. A paladin-type character would probably want to clear up the rumours even if they made that paladin look good. A rogue might want people to believe all the rumours even the ones that make them look bad, just so that nobody really learns the truth about them. A bard might want to string people along, building more rumours and making even the true stories into fanciful tales.
The first 3 are really interesting. They make me want to know more about your character. I especially like the shutter shades one, because it draws you in and makes you want to know more about how they work, why he has migraines, etc.
I have a suggestion for one though: “I heard he made a deal with Tiamat, giving up his limbs to gain secret knowledge.” I like the idea of people thinking the limbs getting blown off wasn’t an accident, but was a deliberate trade. You can imagine how that kind of rumour would spread, especially among people who don’t trust artificers because they’re scared of “technology”.
What about scar tissue? Does it get cleaned up? People who have been in a lot of fights tend to have a big build-up of scar tissue. Also, what about calluses? Does the warrior suddenly have baby-soft skin, losing the calluses he/she built up over years of training with the sword?
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on their internalization of the obscure patterns of English pronunciation, informed by the most similar word: “gift” which uses a hard g. Everyone I know of started saying it with a hard g because that’s what made sense based on the spelling, long before hearing the weird thing about constituent words.
Nobody pronounced LASER as Lah-seer, which you’d have to do if you used “A as in Amplification” an “E as in Emission”.
There are, there are just exceptions. For example, an e at the end of the word is silent. I’m certain you can give me a word where it’s not, but there are at least six in this paragraph alone where it is.
One of the most common words with a final “e” in that paragraph is “the” which not only has a final “e” sound, but has two different final “e” sounds depending on the context: “the end” uses a /ði/ pronunciation but “the word” uses a /ðə/ pronunciation. English is very stupid.
But, I agree with your assessment. English has rules, or at least patterns. “G” is most often hard, not soft, because “J” is available for the soft version, but there’s no alternative for the hard version. English tends to follow patterns, and “gift” has a hard g, and it (and words based on it) are the only ones that start with “gif”, so every “gif” word is hard. Because “t” (unlike “e”) can’t change the sounds before it, the pattern says that “gif” should have a hard “g”.
If it were “gir”, then there would be more debate. The word “giraffe” has a soft “g” but “girl” has a hard one, so the pattern is more muddy.
Also, people who coin words don’t get to decide how they’ll be pronounced. They can certainly try, but they’ll often lose. There are plenty of words in English borrowed from other languages that not only sound nothing like the original language, but that sound nothing like they’d sound if they were English words. For example, “lingerie”. It’s a French word, but the English pronunciation sounds nothing like a French word. In fact, if someone just sounded out the word as if it were an English word, they’d probably get much closer to the French pronunciation than the awful “lawn-je-ray” which is the current accepted English pronunciation (though, they’d probably assume a hard “g” sound).
In this case, it’s too bad that Steve Wilhite didn’t have a background in linguistics or he would have realized that people would see “gif” and assume a hard “g”. It was a losing fight from the start because he either didn’t understand the assumptions people would have when they saw those letters, or he thought that somehow he could successfully fight the tide all by himself.
Looking at how a word is spelled always takes second place to where it comes from.
Where it comes from matters less than historic pronunciations.
“Lawn-jer-ay” is how most of the English word pronounces “lingerie” even though that’s nothing like how it’s pronounced in French, nor is it anything like what you’d pronounce if you sounded out those letters assuming it was an English word.
“Lieutenant” is pronounced completely differently in the UK vs the US. It’s etymology is also French, but neither English pronunciation is at all close to the French. Somehow the British get an “f” sound in there, which can’t be explained by spelling or etymology, and somehow the American pronunciation turns “ieu” into an “oo” sound.
As for “gif”, the “aol and compuserve” thing shows the problem: text based forums. The first time people encountered the word was by reading it. As an unfamiliar word, they mostly went with the common English rule of finding similar words. In this case, the only other words with “gif” are “gift” and words based on “gift”. Since that has a hard G, from the very start people have been using the hard “G” sound.
English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words
English doesn’t preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.
“Neat, what’s it called?” and they said “it’s called a gif”
Yeah, and then we all assumed it was pronounced “gif” not “jif” because the only other word with the letters “gif” was “gift” and that had a hard g. Later on, someone claimed it was supposed to be pronounced “jif”, but we all laughed at that idea and kept using the correct pronunciation.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name
Neither did we, it was a hard g. There was no debate. Sure, some people claimed it was supposed to be a soft g, but we all laughed at that idea because it was ridiculous.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don’t ask a person you just met “Shouldn’t ‘Bob’ be pronounced with a long ‘o’ like the very similar name ‘Job’?
I’m guessing you’re not multilingual then, because I am, and it’s extremely common to change how someone’s name is pronounced. People with the name “David” who are French are used to the French pronunciation of their name being “Dah-veed” but in English “Day-vid”. French people pronounce “Bob” as “Bub”. It’s good to allow people to slightly change how your name is pronounced because it flows better in their language. If they have to pause every time your name comes up to adapt how it’s said, it just makes things more difficult.
As for “gif”, if someone pronounced it as “jif”, we giggled a bit, but that’s it. It was only if someone was really insistent that it had to be a soft g that we really laughed. Some people tried to claim that the creator of the format had wanted a certain pronunciation, but we knew that didn’t matter.
Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge
Exactly, and part of good communication is good pronunciation, because if you mispronounce things it makes it harder for people to understand you. If you insist on using a nonsensical pronunciation then you’re just trying to make it hard to communicate with you.
There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
the guy who created it
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling
Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that
Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
are pronounced wildly phonemically differently
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.
I haven’t played, but does BG3 have the curse of inventory tetris?
As a D&D game, it really shouldn’t have inventory issues. At low levels the only issue should be the weight of the bag. At high levels players should have access to bags of holding so that they can essentially keep anything they come across and not worry about the weight. Also, as D&D, your items should just be in a list.
As in… the Zombies are all Scottish? Do they wear kilts? Are they more thicker and more stubborn than the average Zombie? Do their intestines wheeze like bagpipes? Do they preferentially try to kill the English?
I’d imagine a sniper is probably one of the most effective ways to suppress a group. They probably don’t know where the shots are coming from, and don’t know when it’s safe to move again.
Having said that, I would imagine there are situations where traditional suppression is better. A hail of bullets against the side of an APC is probably terrifying even if none of them are getting through. It’s going to be tough to get someone to open the hatch as the bullets are flying in. But, with designated marksmen only, you’d have to wait until the enemy tries to get out of the APC and then make a tough shot to hit them as they do.
644 and 755 are the two most useful octal codes to remember because they make up the majority of files on your system. 644 is user read/write but read-only for everyone else. 755 adds execute to that, useful for scripts and directories.
Other than that, the most common other things are setting access for group and others to zero, so your ~/.ssh directory is 700 (rwx for you, no access for anyone else) and the private keys in it are 600, rw for you, no access for anyone else).
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
They don’t have a 100% monopoly, but they have enough control over the digital video space that they have real competitors.
In a real competitive landscape, YouTube would be scared to do many of the user-unfriendly things they’ve been doing because it would seriously hurt their market share. As it is, they might go from 97.64% of online user-generated video to 96%. That’s not really going to worry them.
It seems like yet another example of Google making bad business decisions.
Sometimes, those bad decisions can be traced back to people wanting to “show impact” so that they can get promoted. That’s often why they do something ridiculous like launch yet another chat app, which they end up killing a few years later.
In this case, it could be something like that (like someone has an objective to reduce the number of people using ad blockers from X% to Y% and will hit that target no matter how much it fucks things up). Or, it could just be that Google has some kind of weird strategic goal in mind that they’re willing to burn many bridges to hit.
What’s interesting to me is the role antitrust is playing in this. I’m guessing that a lot of the things they’d like to do are things they feel they can’t do because it will get the attention of antitrust regulators. Like, they could just start perma-banning people based on cookies and IP addresses, but people might raise a real stink about that. So, instead, they’re going with just trying to annoy people enough that they give up and turn off their ad blockers.
I don’t understand why it matters how you say the date vs. how it’s written with slashes.
If someone asks you the time, and you look at your watch and it says 11:45, you could just answer “eleven forty five”, but depending on the context you might just say “It’s noon” or “It’s almost noon” or “It’s a quarter to noon”. 11:45 is how you get the information into your brain. How you process that information and how you pass it on depends on the context.
The best date format is clearly ISO-8601, YYYY-MM-DD. In that format, US independence day is 1776-07-04. But, you don’t need to say it as “seventeen seventy six, seventh month, fourth day”. You can say “July 4th, 1776” or “The 4th of July, 1776”.
What’s especially bad is things that are meant for an international audience. Like the 2023 Miami Formula 1 race was held the weekend of the 5th to the 7th of May. But, say you didn’t know that and you see that the date is specified as: 05/07/2023. Is that a race in May or July? It’s Formula 1 so the audience is probably mostly European so the European order makes sense. But, it’s a race in the USA so the US order makes sense.
It really sucks when to decode a date and time you have to first figure out who the target audience for the information is, then use that to help decode the information.
It’s not that they forget. You’re giving them too much credit. The reality is that being against many of the actions of a country is normal. People like Americans, like American movies, but are against many of the actions taken by the US military, the NSA, etc. People like Indians, but are against the actions of the Modi government. If you advocate against the policies of other governments you can get results. Your country can scale down its cooperation with them, or pressure them, or whatever. There’s always going to be some hatred of the country, hatred of the people of that country, hatred of the religion of the people of that country mixed in when the policies of any country are criticized. But, a reasonable person can focus on the main message.
By playing the “antisemitism” card, the Israelis who use it hope to insulate Israel from these normal kinds of criticisms. It’s really the only country that gets to play that kind of card, because it’s the only country founded in the immediate aftermath of a genocide, by the survivors of that genocide, and is the only place where Jews are a majority. They also get to pretend that any decision other than supporting Israel in everything it does is supporting the next genocide against Jews. The reality is that many of Israel’s actions are likely to encourage the next attempted genocide against Jews.
On the one hand, it’s surprising that Amazon has a games division. On the other hand, if it’s surprising that Amazon has a games division, it really can’t be a surprise that they’re laying people off.
Most people don’t remember that The Escapist was originally a PDF games magazine. It was excellent back then. Great articles, and amazing graphic design.
Soon after it became a website, the only thing I went there for was Yahtzee Croshaw, and honestly I haven’t listened to Zero Punctuation for maybe 10 years.
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy....
That makes some sense, but it seems like a backward explanation for the bad worldbuilding.
Like, the lack of computer-aimed turrets. You might not want a completely AI powered ship, but this is more the difference between “cruise control” and manually controlling the vehicle. Not using computer-assist is basically risking your life. As we see in the movies, humans are pretty shit at using the turrets. Computer-assisted aim would mean the ship is much more likely to survive. And, if someone did manage to hack your turret, you could turn off the computer-assist like you’d turn off a malfunctioning cruise-control.
Also, if computer systems are hacked trivially by droids, why do they have hackable ports all over the star destroyer? Wouldn’t they only put them next to human-guarded posts?
In addition, airgapped systems are a simple way to deal with this sort of thing. Like, your refrigerator or dishwasher probably has microprocessors, but they’re not on the network, nor do they have a port you can plug into. Maybe there is one buried under a panel somewhere, but you don’t have to worry about them being hacked.
And yes, droids are treated like slaves in some ways, but in other ways they’re trusted to be bounty hunters, military troops, etc. If you trust / allow a droid to pilot a ship, why wouldn’t you trust a turret to be equipped with computer-assisted aiming?
Ok, but droids have those manipulator arms that go out that let them hack other systems. So, it doesn’t help much if your air-gapped system interacts with other networks.
But yeah, nothing really holds up to scrutiny if you dig too deep. Having said that, I think Star Trek (at least the modern version) does a bit better at it than Star Wars. Star Wars suffers from it being a 1977 movie where George Lucas just went with the “rule of cool” instead of worldbuilding. Star Trek (at least the modern version) seemed to think at least a bit beyond what they showed on screen.
I’m not too interested in most of the new Star Wars stuff, but it’s still good special effects so I watch it while doing other things. But, I did really like Andor. It was a real departure from the typical Star Wars fare which is low on plot but loaded in special effects. For most of the new Star Wars stuff, you can tune it out and only pay attention when there’s a battle or something. But, Andor actually had a real plot with some actual twists… and good special effects.
Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real (www.404media.co)
“This unique parcel stretches behind six homes” (mander.xyz)
Official history of the world (web.archive.org)
Centaurse rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
I sure hope I can keep up! (startrek.website)
Whats your such opinion (discuss.tchncs.de)
God. Damned. Genius. (startrek.website)
Unpierces your ears (startrek.website)
JPEG (lemmy.world)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/167225794620221228after.png
Baldur’s Gate 3 players demand major “quality of life” changes for inventory management (www.charlieintel.com)
Rockstar Was Once Working on a Scottish Zombie Survival Game (insider-gaming.com)
Lasers won’t make noise and aren’t moving a physical mass that would create sound as it passes by. (sh.itjust.works)
You can't cd or ls in a folder if you have no +x permissions on it. That is all. I wasted 3 hours of my life.
YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
measuring rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Yeh seriously (fanaticus.social)
Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees In Its Games Division (aftermath.site)
Yes. We're better than you. (startrek.website)
Yahtzee Croshaw: Today, I formally resigned from The Escapist and Gamurs. I don't have the rights to Zero Punctuation, but whatever happens you'll be hearing my voice again soon, in a new place. (twitter.com)
Bored ape NFT event attendees get their faces burned by event lighting (www.theverge.com)
Who’d have thought BoredApe NFTs would be such an actual eyesore?
Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like. (news.yahoo.com)
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy....
My favorite Enterprise vs Star Wars ship that I've seen (startrek.website)