After Lem everything seems a bit too glamorous and toyish.

Liked the Expanse, yes.

But Swanwick’s “Vacuum flowers” are good too.

This is necroposting, but I really like to find a thread where Star Trek fans criticize Star Trek.

So, I was a Star Wars fan in my childhood.

Jedi there have “the Force” which is kinda magic, but involves “long-range telepathy”, “sensing” things far enough, and a bit of telekinesis.

Star Wars also has “blasters” which use cartridges, but seem to have a lot of power in those. Shield generators which create a mighty big thing. Hyperdrives which allow to move mass in some weird projection from normal space.

So-o. About energy.

A kinda strong Force user being killed or enraged might produce energy on the scale of, I dunno, small EMI. That happens in some SW plots.

A blaster cartridge getting a direct hit causes an explosion like a grenade, which makes sense.

A shield generator malfunctioning might kill the ship carrying it.

A hyperdrive malfunctioning is like a tactical nuke, which is why in SW plots they are very careful with hyperdrives. And this too makes sense.

And I’ve been, many times, told these things (including the existence of the Force) as arguments in favor of SW being tales about space wizards, as opposed to ST the sci-fi universe.

Yet in ST there are transporters, replicators and psychics everywhere, it’s all the same in the sense of magic and much worse in the sense of balance.

The exploding panels check out though. In SW stuff generally explodes, and also they “hotwire” spaceships and bunker doors like you’d do a 1970s car. And “slice” (hack) everything everywhere.

I have an idea - make this issue solved via direct popular vote. Ranked choice, variants range from “Apple owns your butts” to “Apple should be punished with its monthly margin for failing to deliver hourly orgasms with its devices” to “Apple open sources and PD’s everything or Apple leaves”.

They’ll be interested themselves in making the OS as convenient for normal usage as possible. Including the walled garden part. OK, just a thought experiment.

Nah, just a thorough reproduction of the consequences of that wrong.

Yeah, except their UI design was somehow very overloading. Very nice, especially for 90s, but nausea-inducing purely physically.

They at some point boasted that their stuff can be used without hoops and intentional impediments. In Hypercard and such times.

It seems crazy, but they even paid authors of kinda sci-fi or futuristic stories featuring their hardware.

They made it seem they are almost an anarchist company.

They also, which is even harder to believe now, aimed at advanced usage. As in - “works out of the box” and “even a child can use it” and “everything graphical”, but at the same time in that spirit, which Hotline and KDX and PureData still reminisce. A user-friendly application which is not dumb.

It’s actually useful to see, to understand that modern commercial claims of “user-friendly == dumb” are aimed at nothing else than centralized control and obscure shit under the hood.

And also the guy whose company, in the olden days of Hangouts and Google Wave, many people considered to be “the corporation of good”.

And compared to Facebook, Apple, of course MS, yadda-yadda that was easy to believe.

So - that’s the price of “cool and respectable”.

With all due respect

Buddy, nobody cares about your respect if you can’t make simple choices like this.

No it doesn’t. Sometimes it means Stalin.

This doesn’t have anything to do with Japan. And if I create an account called Marcus Aurelius, that doesn’t mean I have any connection to Rome.

Can you point to where Satoshi claimed to be Libertarian?

Why would I?

They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.

I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.

There are South African official crime stats. That’s an answer to “what stats”.

Neither did you provide any data, somehow in the Internet it’s always only the other side that should do it. That’s an answer to “you haven’t provided any stats”.

I might look up something later, no earlier than Saturday.

If lying does the job …

Fun fact, that’s not an existing person, just a pseudonym of someone using libertarian terms, writing in libertarian places and having designed (not “invented”, he didn’t stumble upon it one morning yelling “eureka”) a libertarian system - something that libertarians then would write a lot about.

Well, there are memories of witnesses … Of course, by “German Jews” I mean everyone who fit racial laws, many of those people wouldn’t be Jewish in normal sense.

Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.

Noticed the “bitcoin donations” line below and thought that, even if not conscious, right and left libertarian synthesis is already a normal thing and this is how it should be.

A lot of people think stupidity is a virtue.

That the world where being stupid is a disadvantage is intentionally created by someone woke\bad\immoral\treacherous. That them being stupid and loyal will work well in a special system for stupid and loyal people.

When the system around is not such, they are trying to break it to get to their heaven for loyal boors. They really think such exists. That it’s morally worth it.

German Jews sent to concentration camps were often patriotic national-socialists.

Nothing new. Conformance is the expected behavior. Being confident that the only way you suffer is if you don’t conform is there too.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.

Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).