The alternative to communism is drift towards monarchy.

This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

Obvously Facebook- and Zuckerberg-mocking AI content must continue until morale improves.

The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).

In a company as blue-chip as Disney, the discontinuation of access and privileges and security clearance are indicators of imminent repositioning, likely firing if you’ve engaged in mischief (such as voicing your opinion or comparing salaries).

It’s why you give sweet Christmas presents to the awkward guy in HR and invite him to all your socials. Blow him if he’s into it. He’s your intel source regarding who is in danger of discharge, and if the boss doesn’t like you.

This disgruntled guy had to be lower rank than the mailroom if HR wasn’t given notice, and his access was super low priority. No-one cared.

(Yes, I’m bitter.)

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞

It’s a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.

It’s also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.

I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.

Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.

The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States since before I was a kid in the 1970s since they often interfered with efforts to round up nonwhites. But after the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT ACT, SCOTUS has been shredding both amendments with carve-out exceptions.

Then Law Enforcement uses tech without revealing it in court, often lying ( parallel reconstruction ) to conceal questionable use, and the courts give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sadly, I don’t know enough about it to give you advice. Every time I switched phones or services, I had to twaddle with the settings until I could get features (commonly MMS, or SMS with media) so that they worked properly. If AT&T is actually blocking you out for refusing to use an AT&T phone, the trick would be to get the phone to pretend it’s an AT&T phone, then way Firefox can pretend it’s Chrome when it needs to.

But I don’t know the specifics.

If you get phones from the manufacturer they’re not labeled compatible with AT&T so much as that they have access to specific radio ranges and are controlled either by soft-stored codes or by a SIM card, and I’d buy the sim card from the service, and then stick it in my phone. The Sony I had for a while was compatible with both the T-Mobile and AT&T ranges, and I used a third party service that was an el-cheapo front for T-Mobile.

T-Mobile wanted me to pay extra for hot-spot use, but I got around that with software, which is like hacking the subscription seat warmers on your BMW.

Curiously, Apple phones will lock themselves (or did for a while… is it better now?) based on what service you initially connected them to, and you have to (had to, I hope) get their permission and pay fees to unlock it again.

The telecommunication companies are an oligopoly, so like a legal cartel, so they pull a lot of bullshit that we end users have to suffer. But it means I feel not a jot of guilt when I hack the hell out of it to extract services I didn’t pay for, since it’s all a grift anyway.

Locked phones are what led me into the rabbit hole of purchasing phones from manufacturer, since the carriers not only lock phones but hobble the OS.

It did mean understanding what was necessary for a phone to qualify for given carriers, but I can tech when I need to, and I tech for my friends when they need it.

In 2024, T Mobile and AT&T (and Verizon) have all demonstrated they do not engage in good faith commerce, and so right now they’re being sniveling little shits (quote me please) because the FCC and DoC are escaping regulatory capture.

That is to say, the end users are tired of their shit. Apple and Google, too.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.

During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.

It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.

The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.

This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.

I’m reminded of a struggle I had with The Long Dark trying to do basic things (like find a bed in a cabin) in the pitch black dark. IRL, when in similar situations, I could feel around, and had no problem figuring out where up and down were, which is a problem without a field in first-person games.

I suggested a slight gradient in absolute black to indicate poles, or some other kind of artificial horizon, but they said no.

English is not allowed during posting, again.

This tells me they are less interested in the well being of the students as they are in intercepting the trajedy and drama that become symptoms of students in dysfunctional circumstances.

<Rant>

Windows 11 requires a TPM chip. On some phones, a TPM exchanges a small, memorable pin for a large key with which to unlock your phone, and only allows so many guesses (20 usually) before it locks up…allegedly.

They can be unlocked with an electron microscope, but that’s expensive enough that FBI is going to be resistant to do that to any but the most important devices.

However, apparently Microsoft and Intel are releasing TPMs they can access, not to block off outsiders for the users, but to keep the highest tiered access reserved for the OS controller. That being Microsoft. So your Windows 11 computer isn’t yours, rather you’re borrowing it from Big MS… and eventually any other state or institution that figures out how to hack it open.

It’s not like Microsoft hasn’t pulled this kind of stuff since the 1990s, trying to lock down control of every computer for its own profit.

</Rant>

To be fair, I may have stopped getting updates anyway? I suspect what happened is typical, that some Win10 update bugged the update process and I was supposed to either roll it back or get the next one by hand and just… didn’t.

It is my intention to start looking at linux distros and have one installed by Summer 25…assuming I haven’t immolated in a wildfire or been sent to a detention center by then.

A [Lego] minifig doesn’t hold a gun

A Star Wars lego minifig absolutely holds a gun. It may be a blaster, but it’s still a military weapon for killing people.

Disney also has gun wielding pirates and cowboys frontiersmen. Tron: Legacy showed Disney franchises can be about people killing people (without it being Star Wars ) so long as they can sneak it past the parents. And their Atlantis First Person Shooter didn’t show even a half ounce of creativity, and just promised it was not really shooting or killing.

They may only allow Mickey to do [brand-safe] things in official games, but in past Disney products they’ve just found ways to make violence family friendly, rather than making material that had promoted non-violence.

The fifth circuit believes regional monopolies should be exploited to control consumers.

With proper competition, banning someone for suspected misuse would only chase them to competitors.

The fifth circuit is incompetent.

Someone please tell me that if we stop Trump, Musk shouts NO IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN THIS WAY! and then spontaneously, melts, or shatters like glass, or gets swallowed up by a chasm, or eaten by hyenas.

And then every cybertruck, every tesla, every Spacex capsule and every Starlink satellite simultaneously turns into magic dust before evaporating into nothing.