Lol, someone loves the taste of boots

If you are sleeping so heavily that you sleep through your alarm every time, you probably aren’t getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier.

If you were to walk this route along the surface of the earth, you would walk in perfectly straight lines apart from the three turns.

Moose do actually cow. They are incredibly scary and imposing.

The Anno games are notoriously hard to run on Linux. Protip: always check Protondb for Linux compatibility.

Also, if you find yourself missing Anno on Linux, check out Tropico or any number of city builders by Hooded Horse. There are lots of great resource production chain city builders out there that don’t force you to use Uplay

A lot of jobs are bullshit. Generative AI is good at generating bullshit. This led to a perception that AI could be used in place of humans. But unfortunately, curating that bullshit enough to produce any value for a company still requires a person, so the AI doesn’t add much value. The bullshit AI generates needs some kind of oversight.

I’m pretty sure there was in Firefly

The Klingon restaurant on DS9 was more of a sit-down restaurant IIRC

It’s more like it has to exist as a logical consequence of the technologies used, particularly the way that stock exchanges are implemented. Exchanges are built on the premise of fast and scalable technology, just like most other kinds of network service. There have been some attempts to build a new kind of exchange that does not have the inherent problems that allow for the possibility of HFT.

I highly recommend the book Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short and Moneyball) if you want to learn more about this subject. It tells the story of the creation of Trader’s Exchange, which is an exchange that tries to defeat HFT by introducing delays. It’s a surprisingly fun read for a story about financial markets (I feel like that sentence could be used to describe all of Lewis’s work)

You should look up trepanning. It is the earliest form of surgery we have archaeological evidence for (like back in caveman times). Basically, intracranial pressure would be relieved by drilling small holes into the skull using flint. Something like 5% of all skulls archaeologists find have evidence of trepanning, and it’s clearly deliberate, not a war wound.

None of this is a likely threat, but is any of it completely outside the realm of feasibility?

Yes. It’s well beyond being worth considering. You’re describing a massive conspiracy where hundreds of people from multiple countries’ governments as well as private corporations would all need to work together without any information leakage. All this to entrap some Canadian programmer who tried to torrent season 2 of a TV show aired in 1990. If any of this was worth doing, it would have been done by now, yet we hear of nothing like this ever happening.

I’ve gone my entire adult life downloading copyrighted material without using a VPN and it’s never caused me any problem. My contract with my ISP confers me a level of trust that I’m perfectly comfortable with. I’m familiar with the Canadian law around this stuff, and how it’s been interpreted by the courts in the past. I am under no threat of financial damages being pursued against me. My ISP has no incentive to log my online activity or report it to foreign authorities. And even if they did, the Canadian courts limit the pursuable damages to four figures; barely enough to pay for the lawyer that would file the suit.

That level of paranoia is a waste of energy. I know that what I’m doing works just fine. Why would some Hollywood studio plant CSAM in a torrent? That would implicate them as well. It makes zero sense. They have better things to do than entrap some nobody in a country whose laws don’t favour them seeking any damages. It would cost them far more in legal fees to come after me than to just leave it alone. The notices they send out are entirely automated and exist primarily as a scare tactic.

If you’re willing to be curious and open minded about things beyond your limited perception and experience, rather than be a know-it-all, I’d be happy to share with you an example email that I recieved recently. I think the language they use is quite interesting.

The law in Canada limits the ISP’s risk exposure and the pursuable damages of the rightsholder. Also it definitely would cost them if they told me “we have not responded to this notice from the rightsholder” and then turned around and did exactly that. That would be a flat out lie to their client. I’d have grounds to sue in a situation like that.

Also, I’ve been doing this for almost a decade and never had any problems. Maybe you shouldn’t assume that your situation is everyone’s situation.

Your ISP has the same access to your data, but they also have a payment account linked to you, and they regularly cooperate with rights holders and law enforcement.

This varies widely by ISP and jurisdiction. I never use a VPN and my ISP doesn’t give a fuck what I download. They forward me the scary letters from the rights holders but they always preface it with “don’t worry, we ain’t no snitch”

Make it a client side option

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to berate you. Just trying to illustrate the underlying assumption of your question

This question is basically the same as asking “Are 2d6 capable of rolling a 9?”

I wasn’t there, but my understanding is that Reagan was much more of a populist while Carter tried to be more evidence-based and treat the electorate like rational adults (which is generally a terrible idea for a politician)

Jimmy Carter lost by like 10x Reagan’s electoral college votes, and more than 10x the number of states; I’d say he had it worse.

Your body isn’t a closed system. You are constantly radiating heat away, and you are constantly burning calories to maintain your body’s core temperature. So the bladder is a tank full of mostly water inside that is draining those valuable calories and then will just be pissed away.