Oh that’s nasty.

As memey as the whole theory is, I like to mention that George Lucas was influenced by a lot of classic scifi. He was almost certainly aware of the famous Foundation novels. In the second book, the comedy relief character turned out to be the secret villain leading the evil empire and who had mind control powers.

Of books I’ve finished, The Da Vinci Code. It’s been a long time since I read it, so I can’t recall specifics but I do remember the moment to moments of the plot being contrived and stupid, and the writing to be bland and simplistic.

The only reason I read it was I was stuck somewhere without a book and I found a copy of The Da Vinci code that had fallen behind a shelf. I figured it was super popular so there must be something to it as I slogged through.

A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right.

Yes. Remember when Netflix put a stop to password sharing and the internet went aflame with people declaring that Netflix had shot itself in the foot? Netflix subscriber counts went up.

The average person will put up with so much more of this nonsense than techie people will.

It gets me thinking. Tech literate people are the types to install blockers, and would be the same type of people both motivated and knowledgeable about how to switch browsers. On the line of thinking it seems like it is just going to drive them away from Chrome. Tech illiterate people remain unaffected since they are getting ads anyway.

But then on the other hand, if someone is tech literate then why are they even still using Chrome? Does such a person value whatever advantage Chrome theoretically provides over their ad-blocking?

[Untranslated Wookiee speech]

According to the chart, here are a few other countries where the average is “dumber than the average human”:

Australia

Belgium

Belize

Brazil

Canada

Chile

Czech Republic

Denmark

France

Finland

Germany

India

Israel

Italy

Mexico

I suppose dunking on those stupid Belgians isn’t as eye catching of a headline as good, old fashioned America Bad bait.

I’ve been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that’s still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.

Obnoxious late 90s-early 2000s over the top stuff like Limp Bizkit. I don’t know what happened. I always hated it until last year and then it just clicked. Please stay back.

They have been known to stop rifle bullets, but aren’t rated to do it. Essentially, they can, sometimes, but the manufacturer doesn’t promise it.

There are a lot of variables. He told me he could feel the tip poking at his forehead with his steps as he walked back.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

I once saw a guy wearing a helmet get shot. The bullet embedded into the helmet with the point touching his skin but not harm to him.

I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.

Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.

It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about “switching” to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.

Precisely. There are games where random factors like a particular loot drop, or doing well in an early battle thanks to random critical hits, or a good randomly generated starting point all determine if the game is reasonably beatable, or if you end up softlocked.

There are other games with certain, let’s says pranks, played on players with one hit kills that can only be avoided with foreknowledge. In modern games, at least these pranks are made shortly alter save points or there is a Dark Souls like way to regain equipment/progress. In a lot of older games, the player is forced to restart a big chunk of the game. At that point it becomes a test of patience rather than skill to replay the same level over and over.

It is an RPG that has blurred the line into FPS with its mechanics to the point where it has so much of both that trying to put it into a single category is pointless.

Microsoft was always cold blooded, you probably just weren’t aware of it. Microsoft lost an anti-trust case and was almost broken up in 1998 for its practices, but appealed and came to an agreement with the government.

yea

I will download YouTube videos and manually snip the ads out myself if it comes to it.