Schadrach

The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t fared as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.

See, that’s fine the first time it happens. But after a couple of iterations you should have enough experimental data to know the answer that means you don’t have to sleep on the couch.

You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?

Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don’t they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.

It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.

Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.

It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.

If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).

I assume that’s who they mean, since Barack has already had two terms and his kids aren’t old enough.

Apparently Brandon called Trump vice president Trump

When he was in his prime the VP would have been the presidential candidate from the other party, so the confusion makes sense.

And this has convinced me I am officially an old. I’m not sure what language about half of that is in and can’t even guess at what some of it means from context.

We really don’t do that here, because we skip the rehab part almost entirely because it’s bad for the profit margins of private prisons.

You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.

it would be nice if the democrats fucking tried.

They think they don’t have to, they just have to keep you scared enough of the GOP that you’ll vote for them out of terror. It’s how Biden won the first time, after all.

Now-now it’s Reddit - he might have posted on one of the subs that people monitor with bots and silently autoban you from other subs for having ever participated in the offending sub. So he might very well have been Perma banned from 7 other subs for the comment, whether it was up voted, downvoted or totally ignored.

That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.

It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.

Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.

By that logic what we really need is a modernization of Ada, where there are no compiler warnings and anything that would generate one in another language is instead a compiler error, everything is strongly typed, etc, etc.

If you aren’t familiar with Ada, just imagine Pascal went to military school.

Want to reduce the rushing and door kicking? Take your design cues from AD&D modules S1 and S6. Aka the Tomb of Horrors and the Labyrinth of Madness. Especially the Labyrinth of Madness.

I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?

Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.