Carl

Yeah, phones are fine for passing the time until your train goes into a tunnel. Then you’re just stuck with your own thoughts, trying to stave off the existential dread without anything to keep you distracted. One of the nicest parts about an ereader is that in an age where everything is always online, they still work when offline.

We don’t want them, and we elected officials to block them. If our elected officials ignore us, and accept the bribes to build them despite what we want, then we are perfectly within our rights as citizens to burn them to the ground.

Something something Four Boxes of Liberty.

For the unaware, the Four Boxes is a concept that describes the four ways the average person has to impact public policy. The first is the soap box. Use your voice. If that soap box is taken away, you move to the second box.

The second box is the ballot box. Even if you’ve been silenced (via things like shadowbanning, having your content suppressed, being prosecuted for talking about it in public, etc) then you can still vote to enact change. Ideally, your representative would represent you and push for the change you want.

The third box is the jury box. If someone is on trial for a crime that was morally justified, the jury can simply refuse to find them guilty. For instance, if someone is on trial for cutting down a Flock camera, the jury would be fully within their rights to find them innocent despite all evidence. Once enough people support a particular change, a jury can reliably grind the cogs of the legal system to a halt.

And the last box of liberty is the ammo box. If all else fails, they have removed jury trials, representatives don’t represent the people, people aren’t free to discuss change, etc, then the ammo box is the last resort.

With regards to this specific incident, we’re somewhere between the third and fourth boxes. An angry mob burning down a data center is solidly in the fourth box, and the third box will come into play once prosecutors start trying to charge individual people with crimes because of it. But it’s important to remember that the third and fourth boxes were only touched because the first and second boxes failed.

In this economy, we can’t afford to just burn perfectly good RAM. Angry mobs should always remember to pillage first, then burn.

They’ll still be available. They’ll just be prohibitively expensive for the average person, because their cost won’t be subsidized by the data collection.

Your TV example is actually great, because you can easily get a dumb TV… As long as you’re willing to pay 3x as much for it. Commercial displays are meant to be used for things like digital signage in lobbies, digital menus in restaurants, meeting room displays, hospital patient listings at nurse stations and patient TVs inside of each hospital room, etc… They’re truly dumb displays (sometimes they have things like wireless display mirroring and AirPlay ready to go, to make things like meetings easier), and they don’t have any data collection. But they’re more expensive, because the corporate clients are paying for reliability and consistency.

Because corporate clients are concerned with things like HIPAA violations at a nurse’s station, and corporate espionage. Imagine if patient info leaked because a smart TV was listening to nurses conversations and running OCR on the patient info displayed on the screen. Imagine if corporate secrets leaked because a meeting room TV was sending screenshots of a PowerPoint presentation back to the manufacturer.

So yes, dumb appliances are 100% still going to be available. They simply won’t be affordable, because individuals aren’t the target market. The target market is corporate clients. Dumb fridges will still be a thing in professional kitchens, because no restaurant manager wants to deal with a smart fridge. But that dumb fridge will be designed with professional kitchens in mind. It won’t fit in a standard house’s kitchen, because it’s not designed for that.

That’s the joke. Tech companies have started taking away basic functions, so they can then sell it back to you as a subscription. BMW’s heated seat subscription comes to mind. All BMWs are equipped with heated seats by default, but you can only turn the heater on if you pay a subscription for it.

I’m pretty sure my original Google account is over 18 years old. How is that not considered proof of age?

Nobody tell them the 360 and PS3 is considered retro now. The 360 only came out… Checks release date… ^{Over twenty years ago…}

Yeah, I always suggest MGS3 for people looking to get into the series. Being a prequel means you don’t need a bunch of prior knowledge about the series.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of the few games to truly take advantage of all of the PS2 controller’s functions. Did you know the controller buttons were pressure sensitive? I didn’t, until I played MGS3.

I found out when I was hiding inside of a locker. There is a peek button, to lean forward and peek out of the little grill on the locker door. I pressed it, and barely moved. But I realized that it was based on how hard I pressed the button. So then I mashed it hard, and heard a loud “thunk” as the character’s face slammed into the metal locker door.

The guard heard the thunk, and I was caught. The fact that they:

1. Thought to utilize the pressure sensitivity function to allow small/gradual actions possible
2. Thought to include a “you pressed too hard too fast, and ran into the thing you’re trying to peek out of” coding
3. Thought to make the enemies sensitive to that sound

It truly is peak gaming culture. I’m convinced Kojima makes games that he specifically wants to play, and the fact that other people also enjoy them is just a happy accident.