heroin

Not harmful and psychosis inducing enough.

They’re more like PCP.

Idiots

Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?

can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children?

For 99% of what happens on the Internet? No. No, we can’t. That would be malicious fearmongering.

For the remaining 1% (or less)? Fine and impose sanctions on any companies that produce content intended to harm children (mostly Meta, and any company that makes games with lootboxes), and their CEOs and boards.

Educate parents so they can prevent their children from accessing that harmful 1%. Fine any that refuse, and take their children away as you would any other abusers’.

But this age tracking shit will do absolutely nothing to protect children, it will do absolutely nothing to educate parents, and worse of all will do absolutely nothing to stop the companies that intentionally harm children.

Its only purpose is to control access to the Internet, and to establish a foothold to justify a slippery slope of ever worsening spyware measures, that will harm not only children but the whole population.

Damn, blast from the past. I remember when this individual and his personal crusade against video games were constantly in the (specialised) news…

There’s no such thing as a tree.

Or plenty of unrelated stuff is “trees” to the point that any random plant can evolve into one (and probably has, at some point). Same difference.

Let this thing be a tree if it wants to. It has as much of a right to it as any other so called “tree”.

486, SVGA CRT, Sound Blaster. Twelve years old, on vacation, playing Wing Commander.

I did it Kim! I teleported!

While the characters are based on Charlton Comics characters DC had recently acquired (Dr. Manhattan ≈ Captain Atom, Rorschach ≈ The Question, Nite Owl ≈ Blue Beetle, Silk Spectre ≈ Nightshade, and possibly also Quality Comics’ Phantom Lady and DC’s own Black Canary, Ozymandias ≈ Thunderbolt, The Comedian ≈ Peacemaker), Moore’s story is mostly original, inasmuch as stories can be.

Two by two, hands of blue…

Where it’s always been, sitting on the Foundation trilogy’s shoulders, while in turn supporting the rest of the whole genre on its own shoulders.

your friends can paint all your faces the same

No they can’t!

That would be plagiarism!

One clown, one egg!

Scam. We’re being sold an autocomplete tool as a search engine.

Or fraud, since some of the same companies destroyed the functionality of their search engines in order to make the autocomplete look better in comparison.

Unless it’s another cat, or something they’re afraid of but can’t run away from.

Then it’s all spiky hair, and nails, and teeth, and swung back ears, and arched back, and hissing or, even worse, yowling like a banshee.

conveyor belt that has higher speed lanes

by Jasper Fforde

Asimov was writing about that kind of thing in The Caves of Steel a decade before Fforde was born, and almost fifty years before Fforde published his first novel.

Arthur C. Clarke used moving walkways in Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) in 1948.

Heinlein wrote The Roads Must Roll in 1940.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted moving walkways on film in 1927.

H.G. fucking Wells used them in 1887 and 1889 in A Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes.

But he didn’t invent them either. The first moving walkway was designed and built in 1893 by Joseph Lyman Silsbee.

Moving walkways have been in science fiction since the very beginning.

I’m frankly surprised Verne didn’t invent them in Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that’s probably more futurism than science fiction, so he wrote about asphalt, and cars, and gas stations, and high speed trains, and elevators, and fax machines, and something quite close to the Internet. In 1860. But, alas, no moving walkways.

And yet that doesn’t happen in the USA.

Colonizing: definitely. Warlord: 100%, if that’s what you’re into. 20 cats: only the one, I believe; and a dog, if they can get along. But there are mods. Perpetually horny: oh, yeah. Practically the name of the game. Unless you become impotent, of course, or live in Byzantium and get on your liege’s bad side. Getting your house on fire: metaphorically…? Sure, constantly. Literally? I don’t think there’s an event for that, but there’s that one with the basement full of manure…

Journalists need to bring back the good old art of monstering.

Do you have bite scars on your penis, Mr. President!?

Show us your penis, Mr. President!

To suspend the elections.

They already thought of that.

They got the leopard so obscenely obese on MAGAT faces that it died of heart failure.

Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.

They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.

In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge!

Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.

Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.

The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.”

Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.

“Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.”

“And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one …”

“No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.

'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.”

“And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?”

Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!”

Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.

— David Brin, Sundiver, 1980

Here’s an interesting discussion about the concept, with Brin himself explaining his reasoning.