Randall has somehow weaponized my love for the Blue Ball Machine. He is a threat to us all.

As much as I really want another Chao Garden, I know the monkey’s paw would love to grant my wish. Imagine:

Chao garden. You get 2 chao to start out with. Want to access another garden? $2.99 each. Want more chao? $4.99 per egg. You could feed them the fruit that grows natively in your garden, which raises their stamina slowly, or buy more fruit at $0.99 each. Or buy a fruit tree seed for $9.99, what a steal! Need a pack of tiny animals? 20 for $8.99!

While I doubt SEGA would stoop this low… it’s not completely off the table.

return to your roots: use notepad

As a world leader in cybersecurity, recipient of a nobel prize, liquid billionaire, and hobbiest musician making #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, I agree.

I have no idea why, but convention. And not a thing where nerds like me gather to dork out about something, but a scientific standard. Whenever I’m explaining something, and someone asks why it operates that way, I’m always like, “it’s that way by… uh… y’know, it’s always been that way.” No clue why I always blank on that word specifically.

Naive, perhaps, but if a company advertises a service, they better fucking deliver on that service. Sure, I wouldn’t store all of my important documents solely on a cloud service either, but let’s not victim blame the guy here who paid for a service and was not given that service. Google’s Enterprise plan promised unlimited data; whether that’s 10 GB or 200 TB, that’s not for us nor Google to judge. Unlimited means unlimited. And in an article linked in the OP, even customer service seemed to assure them that it was indeed unlimited, with no cap. And then pulled the rug.

And on top of that, according to the article, Google emailed them saying their account would be in “read-only” mode, as in, they could download the files but not upload any. Which is fine enough-- until Google contacted them saying they were using too much space and their files would all be deleted. Space that, again, was originally unlimited.

Judge the guy all you want, but don’t blame him. Fuck Google, full stop.

Can’t believe they actually got Jerry Seinfeld for that episode.

Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have a source for that?

Unfortunately, you’ll never come close to the Scarecrow.

i like to roleplay as a lobster

It’s correct, just a bit confusing to parse at first. Like a garden path sentence, but with commas.

Just curious. Matt talks about this exact forum argument in the book while on the topic of off-by-one errors. Super hilarious book, highly recommend.

By chance, have you read Matt Parker’s “Humble Pi”?

Sure, but if you’re using the IVT as a proof that there was a point where there was indeed a “first chicken egg”, you still haven’t answered whether the first chicken egg came before the first chicken. Clearly there was a first egg and there was a first chicken, IVT proves this, but which came first? This depends on those definitions. We’d need to find exactly where it “passes over”, which could depend on who you ask.

If you define a chicken as hatching from a chicken egg (“every chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg”), then the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken (“all chicken eggs must have been laid by chickens”), then the chicken came first. And notice how these definitions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, leading to this whole philosophical issue in the first place.

If, in a much more extremely broad sense, we’re asking which came first, chickens or eggs in general, then I think we could agree that eggs came first, as I believe creatures were laying eggs long before the first “chicken” emerged, for most definitions of “chicken”.

I don’t think you can use the Intermediate Value Theorem to answer this. If taxonomists can entirely agree on one single path at each and every stage of evolution, the singular point of where an egg is now defined as a chicken egg where the egg that the creature which laid it hatched from is not a chicken egg–or vice versa, where a creature which is now defined as a chicken where its parents are not chickens–cannot be objectively determined. They’re human-defined lines, which makes this entirely a human philosophy problem in the first place.

(EDIT: messed up the formatting of this image) I like this analogy here:

It’s not completely relevant to this discussion, but it has some good points here. We can all agree that, at some point, it stopped being one color and started being another, but any method we use to draw that line would be arbitrary anyway. Maybe you take the hex code and find the point where the blue value is greater than the red value, but where is the text purple? Does purple even exist under this definition? Or maybe the text is red when, say, the hex for red is 80+% the total color value, blue for the opposite case, and purple for the in-between cases? But then, why 80% and not 90%? This is starting to sound really pretentious, but my point here is that in agreement to your last point, there’s no correct scientific answer to this problem.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course it does.

This is the crux of the issue. An overwhelming majority of people support not changing the clocks anymore. But we can’t reach a consensus on which to stick with. Personally, I think Arizona did it right.

8==D O:

I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.

If I were to guess, OP was a part of a different plan before and is switching to a new one. I think family plans are cheaper overall if you max out the number of people and everyone contributes, so families or groups of friends all link their accounts and pay fair shares? (EG: Nintendo online is $20/yr, but $40/yr for a family plan up to 8 accounts. If you get 8 friends together, that’s $5 per person, significantly cheaper than $20.)

So if I’m understanding the plan and reading the error correctly, I believe OP was on one family plan and wanted to change their family to a different set of accounts, and Google said no. Which is indeed shitty, but it’s likely buried in their fine print somewhere (which doesn’t make it any less shitty).

Or maybe OP wasn’t even a part of a family plan to begin with. OP, feel free to correct me.

As a little nitpick, “extreme pressure” is partially true. We do need “extreme” pressure; not extremely high pressure, but extremely low pressure. We have these series of pumps that are able to remove more and more particles at each step. We have your standard pumps that get rid of most gases, then we have turbomolecular pumps that blow away a lot of the matter that remains, and then we have things like ion pumps, which electrocutes molecules in a vacuum and sucks them out using electric fields. This way, we’re able to create better vacuums here on Earth better than Space itself.

And honestly, that’s pretty much wizardry to me.