Glad you enjoyed FarCry, I worked as a prog on a bunch of them

If society is so fucked, you fantasise about dropping out and breaking it

uh, it's a fucking videogame bro. it's fun to play because it's fun to do things you generally are not allowed or able to experience in real life - even if it's a very distance simulation of it - be it steal sports cars and drive them off the top of an office building, or jump down a warp pipe and stomp on some squids' heads

it's one of the same principal reasons people watch movies or tv - it's different than your normal routine and produces emotional responses, which is a thing humans seek out

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

My favorite is asking it for recipes for long pork.
Have not tried with the latest but so far I have always been able to do so by either do the "grandmother", saying it is for historic research, or telling it to make up something.

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

Perfectly described - much kudos.

We still don't even see leaks of the unredacted Epstein's Files and that's the most egregious material possible to be illegally concealing.

Not like in the 70's when a Mathematics professor orchestrated the raid on an FBI office.

> people are still using the 'we had no backups' as an excuse?

Why pay someone with considerable practical experience when a kid out of an Associate's Program "knows computers"?

Survival of the Fittest, perhaps.

They could have set the QoS tag to the lowest level for capped welfare accounts but it sounds like they just wanted to be dicks about it.

Had they behaved decently it's unlikely NY would have taken notice. Maybe other providers will take notice?

I dunno, patronize a better company if you can find one. Higher prices will likely nudge customers to switch even if they don't know the cause.

Sure there is: it gives you several days to download it on a shitty internet link so that on the day of release you're able to play it. Some people are stuck at 50Mbit or less internet speeds, particularly in rural or financially depressed urban areas. You're going to have people tethering their phone to download it.

I'm going to bet we'll have an AI port and unlock of the game by the end of the month.

Fair enough - I should probably have taken a more "congrats, you're one of today's lucky 10,000" approach.

It's the guy on the left.

You did check the link I provided, right?

Nobody's physically relocating servers beyond the mom-n-pop scale; well, at least not until the much later "rebuild" phase, if that's what you meant. I work for nobody special, for example, and the most important servers little ol' me controls are replicated across three geographically-distributed data centers with an RPO of 20 seconds (more like 2-3 in practice).

The per-site problem with drone strikes is no different than any other DR scenario; where it gets ugly is correlation. We tend to assume disasters will be independent and localized, in exactly the way an intentional attack on infrastructure very much is not. But there's simply no realistic way to plan for every alternative site being simultaneously compromised - That's a matter for underwriters, not geeks. Or rather, the "solution" is trivial, but ridiculously expensive and wasteful... "Oh the fools, if only they built it with 6001 hulls! When will they learn?"