While the outer space treaty forbids claiming territory in space, it doesn’t forbid building a base and putting a “Keep Out” sign on the airlock.

Let is a heavily loaded term here. The most an individual can reasonably do is cast their single vote in an election year. I could attempt to bring a lawsuit against a politician, but it would almost certainly be thrown out due to a lack of standing. Activism is certainly an option, but that is really just an effort to convince others to cast their single vote differently. Outside of those options, one would have to break some laws.

Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.

I question how much influence such groups actually have, given that payment processors already dislike dealing with adult oriented businesses.

The percentage of chargebacks and disputes made for those transactions is significantly higher than any other category. Companies hate having to investigate such claims and issue new cards, even when it appears fairly obvious the purchase was made by the cardholder. It’s also tricky from a customer service standpoint, because the cardholder may likely be lying in order to hide an embarrassing purchase from a spouse or other family member.

It seems like payment processors just want to get rid of a hassle for themselves.

I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.

The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.

I detest newsletter modals.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.

What a defeatist attitude, I plan to live forever or die trying! /s

Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.

Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work. But I can’t help but think whatever life we introduce would be at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.

I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.

Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.

Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.

But then I realized… whenever I create fake people for unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation? And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?

So maybe we’re living in an edge case!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism