cecilkorik

Yeah but it’s still of some value. He can’t redact history any more than he already has, as much as he might like to, and it prevents him from changing his story and redaction strategy in the future. This is how you start to back a liar like Trump into a corner he cannot escape from. Eventually his lies will catch up with him, efforts like this will make sure of it.

Just because the visible footer gets removed doesn’t mean there isn’t other unique tracking information hidden deep in the PDF that could still get the lawyers sicced on you. Depending on how valuable this information is to the company, and how litigious they are, you have to judge how far they might’ve gone and might yet go to protect it.

Unfortunately, that’s why this kind of copy protection can an actually be an effective tactic to prevent individuals from sharing their copies. While there might be ways to strip this kind of hidden data on simpler PDFs… even resorting to methods like screenshotting or printing and scanning, still cannot give you absolute confidence that there isn’t some subtle unique identifier invisibly hidden in the layout or through subtle inconspicuous variations, especially if you’re doing this regularly and they start targeting you and your account for identification. And on complex PDFs there are so many more ways they could hide this information digitally if they know where to look for it and you don’t. 99% of the time it’s going to be pretty obvious to strip out, but are you willing to take that risk even if you do find a technical method of removing the visible footers? If it’s a one-off, maybe you can get away with it, but in the long term this strategy is not viable and is a trap for rookies.

The only truly safe way to share digitally watermarked content like this is to buy it with a burner account and full opsec in the first place. Nobody to sic lawyers on if it’s a hacked paypal or a stolen/prepaid credit card or an untraceable email and IP, or in a jurisdiction with no enforcement. Smash and grab, get the data anonymously and get out. Don’t share stuff from your personal account that’s literally got your name and banking information attached to it unless you can confirm it’s bit-for-bit indistinguishable from other innocent copies with something like a checksum.

Bleak, maybe, or maybe it will finally be the tipping point that starts pushing people away from the “Big Two” phone OS/platforms in pursuit of something truly open and free that isn’t completely controlled by a privacy-invading tech giant.

Windows 11 has apparently finally triggered the seemingly never-to-be “Year of Linux on the Desktop” as people refuse to submit to Windows 11’s telemetry and other misfeatures and repurpose old (and new) machines with Linux instead of letting Microsoft decide they’re obsolete.

Maybe soon we’ll have the year of the Linux phone too. Or at least be able to promote AOSP into a first-class citizen with its own phone support and designs and features and future, instead of simply being relegated to the role of a stagnant fork of de-Googled Android. It’s time to go from soft fork to hard fork. Fuck Google, stop playing their games, and leave them behind.

In addition to what other people have pointed out, I’ll also add that most decent randomizers are very configurable – you can usually make things as random (or as not random?) as you want. And typically you can also get a “seed solution” which will tell you exactly how to complete it (or if you’ve configured it to allow impossible seeds, it can tell you if it is even possible to do so). And there are many more options to use besides that. If you only want certain aspects or elements or sections of the game randomized, or you only want them randomized in a certain way or according to certain rules you can usually do that too. And you can usually either search for or tell it to generate specific seeds that will give you certain things early to give prompt access to the whole world if you want. These are called “open” or “very open” seeds. For speedrunning they can even be a significant challenge, as there is little guidance on where you need to go to get the next item when the whole map is almost immediately unlocked. The opposite, so-called “linear” seeds, have a very direct a->b->c->d progression path (much like the original game probably did) where as soon as you get an item, you know exactly what your next goal must be because the particular combination of items you possess might only give you access to one new location each time. But you may only realize this once you become intimately familiar with the game mechanics (and sometimes the randomizer’s mechanics too).

Randomizers are really powerful tools for replaying a game you’ve otherwise mastered but they’re not intended to only be hard. Sometimes they’re actually very easy, especially if you tune them to be. And that’s part of what’s fun about them, the flexibility of being able to play some of your favourite games again in ways you always dreamed of doing, or ways that you never dreamed of doing. It’s not just a challenge it’s also a sandbox. It allows you to do new things that you never would’ve been able to do in the game without cheating, but it doesn’t necessarily remove all challenge the way cheating normally would.

It’s not the case for your toothbrush.

Isn’t it though? I didn’t make my toothbrush. It came from the toothbrush factory. In fact, it’s an electric toothbrush. Which presumably requires a lot of somewhat high tech inputs and resources to create. Would someone have developed this innovation without some economic pressure to do so? I’m not totally convinced. I think there is some role for capital in that sense. Maybe I’m wrong.

Thank you for taking my somewhat tongue in cheek comment so generously though. My humor is not always placed appropriately and doesn’t always come across well, but it sometimes provokes people to respond, and I’m simply trying to learn and keep an open mind, and I appreciate your time and effort in sharing your knowledge.

They are not logically incompatible, but we will have to make clear and specific decisions about where one ends and the other begins.

Unless you are asking me to live in a society where I must share my toothbrush with others because I am not allowed to keep any private property.

I do believe in private property: with modest, reasonable limits. Which we can and will discuss the details of over time, and I understand that will likely become a heated discussion at times, but I believe it is an inevitable and necessary one. Does that disqualify me from being a leftist? Does it make me a liberal too? Let me know.

I love it when people are surprised that for-profit businesses seek profit above all else. Like they assume there will be always be a set of strict laws to keep them in check and just assume they will strictly follow those laws because they’re laws.

Then they go ahead and vote for people who say that there are too many taxes and regulations. As if those taxes and regulations aren’t exactly the same laws they’re expecting to keep the for-profit businesses in check, which are often not even close to being sufficient in the first place.

The cognitive dissonance is wild. People are fucking brainwashed.

Absolutely. This is the kind of force that a united resistance won’t even flinch at. They will get worse. It should be your goal to get them to be worse. The more desperate and frantic they get to try to put you down, the more that tells you that you’re winning. Authoritarians will never choose to stop fighting, ever. The cruelty is the point. Authoritarians can only win when people stop fighting, and their viciousness is intended specifically to make you stop. Comply or resist. Those are your choices, as stark as they are.

If something’s got a rotten foundation, it won’t collapse until it’s really needed and pressure is put on it. That’s what’s happening to the NDP now. Nobody saw the rot that was happening for decades because the pressure wasn’t on. Now it is, and the party’s coming apart at the seams.

Some of it is sabotage. The powers that be have made a tremendous effort to capture the levers they need to control the two main national parties so they can guarantee their uninterrupted control of our government, and they don’t want a viable third party undoing all their illusion of choice by providing an actual choice, so they have arranged for nasty ideologues with conflicting ideologies to tear the NDP apart from within and make it unsupportable for the vast majority of people. And that’s worked great.

But it’s also a reflection of the wider destruction of labor movements in general. We are all routinely pitted against each other over trivial differences by social media and news organizations and convinced different groups among us are responsible for each other’s ills, when we need to be united and cooperative as a national and global working class with far more goals and interests in common than we have apart. We’ll now have to make tough choices and pick our battles, because we don’t have an army big enough to fight on every hill, and not every hill is worth dying on if the entire army is going to die there.

But at the same time we’re trying to be united and strategically minded, we still need to be able to detect and identify the rogue elements and ideas that are being used to sabotage and divide us. It’s a difficult position to be in, they’ve stacked a lot against us. Have they stacked enough against us? I don’t think so, but it’s still a lot stacked against us. The first step is to get everybody to even acknowledge that it’s happening and work towards consensus on the broad strokes of what we want to achieve. And I think we’re making some progress on that front. People are starting to see what’s going on for what it is, and people are starting to realize just how much the economy is not working for people anymore, and they’re starting to see why. The government’s empty promises ring more hollow, the billionaires’ attempts at manipulation grow stronger. People are simply waking up and opening their eyes, not being “woke”. And once their eyes are open, don’t waste more time showing them what they’re fighting against, they’ve already started to see it. Instead we need to take the opportunity to show them what we’re fighting for, to give them a big picture that makes sense, and be able to articulate the change that people are craving in a way they can relate to.

Close. The word you’re looking for is “evil”.

The culture wars and gender wars are intentional distractions. The class war is the one that matters. The billionaires figure they can solve the housing crisis, solve economics, end war, and save the environment by simply making the rest of us extinct. And in the most cruelly utilitarian way possible, there is even some truth to that. They do not value human creativity, human rights, or human life at all. They are extracting every last scrap of value we have, then they will end us. They consider themselves above the rest of humanity, transhumans, superhumans, better than obsolete humans, and they think the world will be an objectively better place with much fewer of us on it. When you start to see everything that’s going on in the world it all starts to make sense when you understand that is actually their goal. Their goal is to not need us any longer, and then to remove us. I am certain it will not be as easy as they think, but expect them to try.

Planet Centauri is a great game (also I don’t know why the link says “Alpha Centauri” it’s literally never been called that, that’s a different game)

Worth checking out, it’s very deep, but also a distinctly different flavor than Terraria despite the superficial similarities.

Hate has to be taught. That’s the difference between children and fascists. As children they usually haven’t been taught how to hate yet, once they get taught to hate they can become fascists. Or they can learn to think instead.

Hmm I wonder what version they’re playing. Mine didn’t have fascism and transphobia and political assassinations on the disaster list but yeah they need to switch it up a bit because it’s really exhausting. I’m ready for the alien UFO and Godzilla to lighten the mood a bit.

No idea if this is the guy to take back our country and give us a government for the people again, and I’m too jaded and angry to be a trustworthy judge of character anymore. But his slogan sounds good, not that it means anything since these fuckers can use money to psychologically hack our brains to make anything sound good without any intention of ever acting on it. Still, it would be hard to be a worse choice than the current set of assholes, so I’ll wish him luck until I find somebody better to support.

Prepare for war while we still can. If we’re incredibly lucky maybe we won’t need it, but if so, it will be because we did prepare and that made us an unpleasant and dangerous looking target. Bullies always target perceived vulnerability. We need to do everything we can to fix that perception. Even showing them this anti-American sentiment helps. They need to understand we will not be pushovers, no matter how badly we might seem to be poised to lose at least some territory and/or treasure if they tried to actually use force or severe coercion to take our lunch money, as bullies do.

If we look like too much trouble, they may think twice and try to go bully central America or something instead, I have no idea how this will all work out, but I do know we’re in big fucking danger, and we need to do everything we can to make sure they know we’re going to become a big fucking problem for them if they try it.

Horrified would also be acceptable. Maybe terrified.

Stock options don’t just magically appear out of thin air though. Someone has to provide them. At the end of the day, somebody is taking the unbounded risk, no matter how they’ve packaged it, and if that person or organization reaches their risk limit and says “nope, this is too risky even for me” then you’re out of luck. Yes, realistically there will always be someone willing to take that kind of bet on Tesla, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to find or that it will always be available through the usual channels.

My first thought was definitely to install Linux lol. I’ve switched my last computer over recently, no regrets. I do everything on Linux. Gaming, work, productivity, software development, and I have run into basically zero issues that I couldn’t quite quickly resolve, except for a single stubborn bluetooth controller that worked for a few weeks then stopped working ever again (could even be a hardware issue, IDK) but I just replaced it with a $10 usb from Amazon which has worked perfectly ever since.

Your username checks out. A Rare choice, one even might say.