Edit: The original explanation I had here was that a laser burns pits in the CD material but that was wrong, apparently only pressed discs use physical pits in the material. The laser used in a home CD burner changes the color of a photosensitive dye on a recordable CD. So I think actually “burning” is due to a misunderstanding (which I had until I just looked it up) of how a home CD writer works.

I use Youtube a lot. If I see a video from a creator I don’t know, or from one I don’t care that much about, and the thumbnail sets off my clickbait alarms, I just open the three dots menu and click “Don’t recommend channel.” I don’t think it’s a big problem, but it does annoy me and this significantly reduces the amount that I have to put up with it.

Sometimes if a thumbnail is borderline I’ll open it in a new tab so I can entertain it for a few minutes and see if they pay off. If they don’t, they get "don’t recommend"ed.

I’ve also done this for creators who put the “like and subscribe” ask before I’ve actually seen the content they’re asking me to subscribe to, if I’m in a particularly petty mood.

The machine seems to be called “Cashnado Alert” so I think you’re onto something about the touch screen mechanics.

I’m still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.

You think Bibi trusts Trump enough to tell him about an op like this beforehand? I think Trump’s relatively friendly relationship with Al Thani is exactly the reason he didn’t find out in time to warn Qatar. The plan was to kill Hamas’ negotiators and then present it as a fait accompli.

Apart from the fact that your brain ages too and it’s 100% irreplaceable, the main issue with turning yourself into the human Ship of Theseus is that you’re going to be on immunosuppressant drugs forever.

I guess if you were a monster you could raise clones of yourself to adulthood and then murder them for their body parts. This doesn’t solve the problem of some parts not being reasonably replaceable, but it could protect you from some organ failures.

I learned up through 12 x 12 in 2nd grade. Some of them were easier than others. I remember drilling with my grandfather for hours to memorize the ones I was having trouble with. The incentive was that if I learned them, he’d buy me a GameBoy game I wanted. I did in fact get the game when I managed to master multiplication—it was Mole Mania, a sokoban-style puzzle game with the gimmick that there is an underground layer you can move through that also has its own obstacles.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

You can only invite the vampire in if you’re inside the house. If the judge signed the warrant while inside the house for some reason, the vampire could enter. But in the usual case where they were anywhere else, it wouldn’t count.

I suspect that for people who spend a large amount of time in the house, the quality of “inside-ness” rubs off on them: you can probably text your vampire friend the location of your spare key and ask them to check on your cat, even if you’re not there. But someone who has never been inside can’t reasonably offer an “invitation.”

One guy tried and was told that he wasn’t owed any money, because the statute of limitations had expired… while he was being imprisoned without access to counsel.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/ice-detained-a-u-s-citizen-named-davino-watson-for-three-years.html

Last year [in 2016], a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing “regrettable failures of the government.” On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is “disturbing,” the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.

These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!

My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.

Tried to go to an event at my favorite bar last week and it was sold out, so I can’t confirm the issue.

I don’t think therapists should be turning in their clients, either. Criminals deserve effective therapy as much as anyone else.

And if everyone voted, his popular vote margin would have been larger. According to the latest analysis, non-voters leaned toward Trump.

When asked how they would have voted, people eligible to vote who did not do so were fairly evenly split in their preferences: 44% said they would have supported Trump, while 40% said they would have backed Harris.

I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

I feel SO free right now. :P

The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.

It sounds like they wanted to run someone but had trouble recruiting a candidate:

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

And later in the article:

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts.

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said.

I think she has to act through the Board of Police Commissioners, and I’m not sure she can fire them before their terms are up. She could definitely threaten to not re-appoint them, but I don’t know how much leverage that really buys her.

And those armored bulldozers sometimes destroyed humans along with the houses, such as the case of peace activist Rachel Corrie.