Christian

I remember reading that the most significant impact DRM has is on security research. Individuals don’t care about bypassing DRM, but an organization is not going to fund anything involving it because of the legal concern. So if a researcher wants to look into a file format behind DRM, or the DRM mechanism itself, being used as an attack vector, that’s not going to get funding.

The defense that companies will make is that they’re happy to grant exceptions in these cases, but in practice the company will make the exceptions as narrow as possible to err on the side of maintaining as much control as possible, while a research organization will want to err on the side of avoiding potential grey areas, meaning the exceptions are inevitability too restrictive to allow much of anything to come of them.

Yes, I actually do interpret it that way even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never received it with that intent. Then I think “why am I like this?” and wonder if this is part of getting old. This is actually much less of a joke than it probably sounds like.

“The problem”, I explain, “is that the mods have no lives”, to conclude my essay on how using a forum introduces a risk that could potentially shave precious seconds off someone’s speedrun.

I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.

I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.

I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)

Maybe it’s possible that there are many people who are not on the fediverse today for reasons similar to why you weren’t two years ago. Not that much has changed since then (other than, possibly, your own understanding).

When did you begin using the fediverse? I didn’t stop being lazy until I joined diaspora in 2011.

I feel like “Once” is the album where filler tracks started creeping into Nightwish, but “Ghost Love Score” is the Nightwish song. It’s spectacular.

Man I thought Without Face was a band lost to time. I love the song “Weird Places”.

Sandra Nasić of the Guano Apes for her appearance on Apocalyptica’s Path Vol. 2.

This song came to mind for me too. Cult is Apocalyptica’s best album, but that song basically ruined my ability to enjoy it as it was made because putting it on straight-up I’m immediately disappointed by the lack of vocals in track 1.

There was another track from that album that they reworked to add a guest vocalist to, I think track 8, but that one didn’t hit me as an improvement over the original.

After my teenage years it’s been very rare for me to dig into a band deeply enough to learn anything about their members, so the easiest examples are all going to be women doing clean vocals, which is the one time you can (usually) explicitly tell the difference just by listening. Some of my favorite examples are Liv Kristine’s work in Theatre of Tragedy, Tarja-era Nightwish, the first Stolen Babies album, and Sirenia’s first two albums along with all of Tristania’s discography pre-Rubicon.

I have two examples that immediately come to mind outside clean vocals:

Samantha Escarbe is the guitarist for Virgin Black and my understanding is she essentially splits the songwriting load with Rowan London. The Requiem stuff I still need to give more listens, but I think the first two albums are absolutely spectacular music. In “Museum of Iscariot” she does one of my favorite guitar solos I’ve ever heard.

Angela Gossow’s vocals on Arch Enemy’s “Wages of Sin” album are some of the absolute best in metal. I live for that shit. I never really got into anything else Arch Enemy did though.

At some point about a decade ago I realized I’m much happier just paying the extra $8 every couple months when I go to get a haircut and otherwise just letting it grow out.

I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.

All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.

I love this.

Nobody ever talks about banking fraud, stocks fraud, even when done by the literal president.

They absolutely do talk about those things, maybe almost as much, under full understanding of which discussions will lead to actual action and which won’t.

Soda hits a spot that sugary drinks without the fizz don’t. It’s why sodas taste awful when they’ve gone flat. If I buy one of those prepackaged sweet teas I can’t handle it, the sweetness is somehow overpowering for me. Same goes for most juices.

For me, sugar really brings out the flavor in things though. The sugar in a soda works to enhance the flavor, while the carbonation offsets the strength of the sugar. If I water down a soda with seltzer it’s okay, but it’s much more bland, so much less enjoyable. It really is the combination of the two that works here.

With that said, I am pretty picky with my sodas (much like everything else I’m eating or drinking, unfortunately). Anything I don’t enjoy much more than water I’ll turn down. I like colas and birch beers and cream sodas, not so much orange/grape soda or sprite.

Vectorman had a ton of those. ABRACADABRA would restore your HP. BALL and BALD would both display coordinates in the screen corner, one of them had more precision than the other I think. That was more annoying that useful for someone just playing but I remember the codes anyway.

If you want to show there are infinitely many primes, one way is to first note that every integer greater than 1 has a prime factor. This is because if an integer n is prime, n is a prime factor of itself, and if n is not prime then it must have a smaller factor m other than 1, 1< m < n. If m is also not prime, it too must have a smaller factor other than 1, and you can keep playing this game but there are only so many integers between 1 and n so eventually you’ll get to a factor of n that has no smaller factors of its own other than 1, which means it is prime.

Let’s now suppose there is only a finite number of primes, we’ll try to show that this assumption leads to nonsense so can’t be possible.

We can multiply any finite number of integers together to get a new integer. Let’s multiply all of the primes together to get a new number M. Then M + 1 gives a remainder of 1 when you divide by any prime number. Since dividing by a factor will always give a remainder of 0, none of the prime numbers can be a factor of M + 1. So M + 1 is an integer bigger than 1 with no prime factors. This is impossible, so there must be a mistake somewhere in this argument.

The only thing we said that we’re not 100% sure is true was that there are a finite number of primes, so that has to be our mistake. So there must be infinitely many prime numbers.

There are only finitely many prime numbers and I will not hear otherwise.

I don’t remember where I read this quote originally and I can only paraphrase it, but observing people living in a capitalist society and concluding that human nature is self-centeredness and greed is equivalent to observing workers in a factory that is poisoning their lungs and concluding that human nature is to cough.

he has a list of things that will prop up his approval rating, because that is the only metric that actually matters to him

This almost feels overly forgiving to Trump, given what the remainder of our political body is. When judging US politicians by which metrics actually matter to them, “approval rating” puts someone way in the upper echelon.