... on early versions of built-in SAT navs and ending up in harbor basins. At least as dangerous but arguably way more entertaining for onlookers. Especially if it was a BMW. 8-)

I was a hardcore GOG advocate, because they opposed DRM and offered native Linux runtimes of their games. However, their Linux support was pretty lackluster in recent years. Game versions meant to run on Ubuntu 16 and 18 and unusable on any recent version. About half a year ago, after many attempts to get things running on current Linuxes, I finally caved and moved from GOG to Steam, since they offer a hassle-free Linux experience with a curated central Linux-compliant runtime environment.

I presume GOG has noticed people giving up on GOG and now has decided to follow suit. I hope they can build a compelling experience, but they've lost me for now.

A day after I wrote the the post I actually was in Hamburg to meet up with old school friends. My buddy and I went to check out the site afterwards. Quite impressive. They had the street covered in sand and gravel covered with steel plates in order to spread the load more evenly. The bridge has since been moved into place but there are pics videos floating around on the Internet if you want some visual details.

"...do you discover who's been swimming naked."

AI mostly comes to us from California, the original land of "Fake it till you make it". AI fakes intelligent results, without "knowing" anything, with what Gary Marcus calls "a world model". A world model means you "know", that you "understand", that you "comprehend" that:

-- the cited-cases part of a legal filing should be only drawn from the list of existing cases that the thing was given
-- that laws mentioned should exist in documents called "Title Code" that the thing was given
-- that there are laws, these are supreme "orders" above others given
-- that one of them is "killing human beings is against supreme orders that supercede all other instructions" (sorry, not on topic: it's just HAL didn't "know" the 3 laws)
-- that human hands have just the five fingers.

They just fake it, producing documents that look like good ones. They can't make it. Not in them. No world model.

And the tide is going out.

https://www.tagesschau.de/inla...

This would be a good time to point out that every political argument has two sides and two points of view.

I've seen the arguments for both sides of this issue, and have come to the conclusion that there is merit for both. People should really look at the specific charges being made, with examples, before coming to any conclusion.

Every time someone tries to rein in the news media, it's received by shouts of first amendment, freedom of speech, chilling effects, and so on; and yet, this leads to insane situations. Google most egregious US media failures in the last 10 years for a list of incidents, and note how many of these affected major political events such as a presidential election or national policy.

Should a journalist be able to walk into a church during service and interrupt the proceedings, and not be held accountable because he's a journalist? Should a major news outlet be able to report something without at least a cursory check to see if it's accurate? Should an interview answer be swapped with the answer from a different question?

I've come to the conclusion that knee-jerk framing is on purpose, everyone wants to get "ahead" of an issue, and if an erroneous/misleading/false statement is made they will simply say "oops... I made a mistake" and there's no repurcussions... except that the lie went out to the audience and a small percentage got outraged in the right direction, regardless of whether the statement is true or not.

A "straw-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the most absurd terms and then attack the absurdity. A "strong-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the strongest possible terms and then try to attack it.

Choose the "strong-man" argument here. Find out what the administration is complaining about, and see if you can fault their logic.

https://www.eisenbahnbruecken-...

Had a look at the criminal complaint just to find out where the perpetrators had gone wrong.

Sending anonymous tweets and E-mails, they purchased pre-paid debit cards to send packages to their home, various harassment techniques such as ordering a pizza "pay on delivery" at 4:30 AM, and so on and so on... how on Earth did the NPD ever figure this out?

Turns out the perpetrators flew from California to Boston area (Natick) to put a GPS on the Steiners' car, which they couldn't do because it was kept in a locked garage, so they rented vehicles to surveil the Steiners, their license plates were noted and given to Natick Police Department (NPD), and the rental agency was contacted.

Once the eBay operatives were identified, they tried various misdirects and obfustication techniques, but NPD a) verified their statements, and so figured out they were lying, and b) contacted eBay directly, which had a security team respond in good faith, and the whole plan unravelled.

One, single mistake is all that stood between a long campaign of harassment and getting found out. One good local police department who took the trouble to look deeply into the problem and figure out the truth despite a torrent of misdirection and obfustication.

I wonder how many more campaigns of harassment are ongoing, led by people who know how to conduct vehicle-based surveillance, or encouraged by ineffective or lazy policing.

This is mostly just civil slander lawsuits ramping up. People are getting way to comfortable stepping on other peoples rights and slandering in what is basically a public forum.

... on the rise. Who would've thunk?

Love it. That Prof has every right to roast his students.

I have the "New Tab Override" extension installed, it allows me to load my own local .html file for the new tab page.

My personal page has a 4x3 grid of links to my most often needed pages, and I like this a lot.

I hope they haven't removed this functionality, it might be the last straw that pushes me away from Firefox. I'm really starting to hate their "do it our way and no other" mentality.

Somehow the links got borked. Likely during the copy-over from my orignial sub.

Here's the fix:

Heise article.

Video.

CorPower Website.

...with a couple more features you probably don't need, missing some cool stuff you'd rather have.

And hideously expensive and complicated to administer, instead of free.