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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but it can be used as a bludgeon to dissuade people from filing in the first place. Roku is totally allowed to lie and say “You can’t sue, you agreed to mandatory arbitration. // You can’t join the class action, you agreed not to. If you do either of these things, we’ll sue you.”

    This could easily dissuade quite a few people from litigating, limiting how much the company needs to pay out.




  • A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment

    That’s exactly what they’ve done.

    A “barren” planet still has stuff. In the 5 minutes or so that I did random exploration I found a colonist hut that was razed by pirates with a hidden chest with like 3k credits, and a random vendor who was going a little nuts for being alone so long. Nothing incredible, but enough to make the place not feel dead on a random frozen moon.



  • Copyright is not ownership. You can own something, but not hold the copyright to it.

    Personality rights are also not copyright and as the ruling was not about personality rights, it did not affect these rights (where they exist in the US). Disregarding both AI and the recent ruling, if someone takes a photograph of you, you do not hold the copyright to it, the photographer does. If the photographer then does something with that image that harms your reputation you may be able to sue.

    And no, it is unlikely that there is a distinction between one’s likeness and “AI generated likeness,” it usually doesn’t matter if you use a photograph or a drawing of an individual, it is the identity that is protected regardless of what tool was used.






  • From a (US) financial perspective, a phone charger takes about 5 watts of electricity. At $0.010/kWh that’s $0.0005/hr (or ¢0.05/hr) of charging. This is utterly negligible.

    For reference, a worker at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr would be paid that much after 0.25 seconds of working. It’s not even worth paying an employee to tell you to not plug in, which would probably take at least 15 seconds.

    Naturally, some businesses may want to discourage people from loitering, but more often than not, they probably want your business (library, grocery store, coffee shop &c) or understand that reality happens.


  • Repulsorlifts are magical. They levitate ships with no external outputs. They’re also perfectly well suited to explain how a fragment of a ship can crash from a high altitude without being destroyed. As an anti-gravity device, repulsorlifts can greatly reduce or eliminate the need for any orbital velocity, making re-entry much more viable. And in the same vein, they can reduce a ship’s effective gravitational mass enough that its terminal velocity is survivable.



  • Repulsorlifts are the technology that enables ships to hover and fly the way they do. There are typically many across a ship’s structure for redundancy and handling reasons.

    Not to mention that there were two Jedi on board, both of whom would probably be using the Force to pull the ship into a safer crash. We’ve seen Jedi use force powers strong enough to manipulate ships before, so this is not out of the question.







  • You can be ousted with a lot of popular support if you really piss off a small number of people. A leader has more wiggle room with high popular support and a strong military and police force, but if those institutions weaken, then the possibility of a violent overthrow increases.

    Russia’s population is ~143 million. If even 1 in 1000 people take up arms, that’s a 143,000 strong army. If 1% participate in a general revolt, that’s 1.4 million people, which could easily overwhelm institutions and bring an already weakened economy down.