Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Yeah, I think all of New England is down for this. Please.

Even more specifically, if we are talking a temporal teleport, then this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most mainstream fiction uses teleports for time travel, pop out of one time and into another without experiencing the time between. As opposed to the device Farnsworth made in The Late Philip J. Fry, where they actually just change speed through time instead of skipping through it. In the latter case, you shouldn’t have to worry about this issue at all. But with a teleport, any teleportation device is simultaneously a temporal and spatial teleport, due to causality and the nature of spacetime. So any teleport would need spacetime coordinates, not just spatial or temporal coordinates.

It wasn’t as unrelated as it might appear. Firstly, they used their D+ account to make their Disney account. Secondly, the whole point of that argument was that in the Disney account EULA, the relevant one, there is an arbitration clause. They only brought up the D+ account in passing because it has the same clause, emphasizing that they had to read and agree to the clause twice, and if they didn’t catch it it’s not Disney’s fault they lied about reading it. They basically said “look, this is an issue regarding the Disney account, and they said right here they read and understood the terms that include arbitration. And here, they read and agreed to the exact same terms a few months earlier on D+. This shouldn’t be any surprise if they were truthful when they claimed to have read it.”

Disclaimer, arbitration clauses are bullshit and need to be reworked/eliminated as they are generally very anticonsumer and I don’t think it’s good that they have that clause. But accepting that this exists, Disney didn’t really do anything particularly scummy.

To be a bit more precise, people did sometimes carry swords on their back, but generally not into battle. It was more comfortable for travel, but impossible to draw, so when they were expecting trouble they would move it to the hip.

Specifically skeletons are a big deal. Lots of games edit them out, WoW had alternate models for the Undead players, who generally have exposed bone joints and other bits of bone protrusions, to cover them all in flesh. I think it is sometimes OK to use skeletons as enemies, but never for player characters, IIRC.

Never mention it. They will often ask questions about how you think a juror should or can act. If you answer them in a way that shows you might know about nullification, you are out. If you then later admit you know about it, they will point to those questions and know you lied about them. Safest answer is to just never, ever use the term, ideally you should go through the motions in deliberation of putting the the rules together, like you are just realizing it’s a possibility then and there.

Did you see what he was wearing? Was basically asking for it really.

These are very region dependant. My state has no income or sales tax, but the property taxes are higher, my 1 acre with a mobile home is basically 3k. It’s almost certainly cheaper than renting, but you can’t just make sweeping statements like that.

The last thing the US wants is a civil war and mass instability in a nuclear nation. That has the capability to shatter MAD. At best, the US wants a regime change.

Well, like I said, there is still a chance of collateral damage, which is why there has been so much study to try and make sure that isn’t going to happen. We’ve been sitting on the ability to do this for a long time. As for chances of killing other species, I don’t think that is a risk from the method. They basically just breed mosquitoes of the targeted breed, and modify their genes so they can only have male offspring which can also only produce male offspring, etc.

The biggest reason it may be different this time is previously we were all like, “let’s exterminate dogs,” and it turns out dogs are important. This time is more like “let’s exterminate pitbulls.” There will still be plenty of mosquitos around if the plan is ever put into motion, we are only targeting a very small slice of them. That doesn’t mean there won’t be issues, it could well be just as big a mistake as all the previous times. But at least it is more likely to work out.

That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

The reason the image is different using the same text prompt is because it randomly generates a seed for each time it runs. Presumably the copyright would include all the settings, including the seed. All of that kept the same will produce the same image, every time.

I think the logical conclusion of copyrighted prompts would include not just the input prompt but the version number of the program, any settings, the seed, etc. Basically everything you would need to copy that exact image, because all of that together would produce an exact copy.

I suspect you’re right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.

Teet Stracos I think. Which might be one of Luke’s buddies on that island…