Oh it absolutely will be, but they would have found other justifications to pardon people anyways. This gives them a convenient talking point, but they could have drawn one out of the ether anyways.

Ah you’re right. I was thinking of Lozito v. The City of New York. Same ruling; different circumstances.

Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.

For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.

So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.

So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.

Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.

Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.

Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.

We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.

Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.

If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.

Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.

Nope. This is, at best, a misconception. At worst, it’s an intentional misinterpretation. They have a term that prohibits the sale of Steam keys cheaper elsewhere. Game publishers are welcome to put their game up for sale on other sites for cheaper; They just can’t sell Steam keys cheaper. Basically, Steam wants to protect their own product keys from being undercut.

Ubisoft has their own storefront, and their own launcher. If you buy games on the Ubisoft Store, you get access to them via Ubisoft’s launcher, called Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft is free to sell their games at whatever price they want on the Ubisoft Store, as long as they’re not granting access to the game as a Steam key. If you buy it on the Ubi Store and get access via Ubi Connect, then everything is fine. The only way it would be a breach of contract is if Ubi ran a sale on the Ubi Store, then gave players access via Steam. If you buy it cheaper than Steam on the Ubi Store, you won’t get a Steam key.

You can even sell DRM-free versions of your game for cheaper. As long as you’re not selling Steam keys, you’re fine.

Oh I enjoyed the gameplay. But the actual story of the second play through was a slog until about 75% of the way through.

Surprised I haven’t seen Undertale yet. The online fanbase is hilariously toxic, (seriously, don’t go looking for any extra details about the game after you finish it) but it’s a solid game that should be experienced 100% blind. All I’ll say is that it’s a game that is written to subvert expectations; If you go into it expecting to play it like a traditional RPG, you’ll be in for a big surprise.

It’s a game that relies on shifting the gameplay mechanics based on where you are and what you’re doing. There are certainly 2.5D and top-down sections, but it’s a small part of the game overall.

I would have to disagree about the second playthrough; I found it to be a very large slog. The third and subsequent playthroughs were amazing though.

Can you imagine a world where the most recognized cartoon characters have been in public domain for over 40 years?

To be clear, only the original versions would have been in public domain for over 40 years. Every time they change something about the character, it creates a new copyright for the new version.

Basically, Steamboat Willie Pete (released in 1928) would have been in the public domain decades ago, but Kingdom Hearts 2 Pete (released in late 2005/early 2006) would have only recently entered the public domain a few years ago.

There are even conspiracy theories that this is why Disney has been so focused on creating awful live action remakes of all of their old works; It resets the copyright timer on the new versions. Disney has historically used copyright as a cudgel to bully smaller content creators, because they took all of the old fairy tales (which were in the public domain) and slapped copyrights on them with their movies.

The conspiracy theory is that the awful live action remakes are simply a way to maintain copyright claims over those original fairy tales. They don’t care if the movies are successful; They just want to prevent anyone in the foreseeable future from ever making a Snow White/Sleeping Beauty/etc film based on the same fairy tales. Because even if a smaller content creator’s work is only based on the original fairy tale, Disney’s army of lawyers can claim that it is based on the Disney version. And the smaller content creators (who can’t afford a long drawn-out legal battle) will be bullied in court and forced to concede.

I’m sitting on the RetroAchievements collection over here. It is my single most seeded torrent, by leaps and bounds. I went with RA, because it means I can throw any of them at RetroArch and the RetroAchievements integration will work without having to fiddle with game versions. It also has a surprising number of ROM hacks and homebrew.

Oh, it had some bugs for sure. It was rushed out the door by the publisher. But again, if given time to actually work on it, it had potential to become a new trilogy. The story was clearly trying to do something, even if it was mired by bugs.

Mass Effect Andromeda. The hate was so intense it caused the publisher to disavow the series entirely.

The hate was because people were comparing Andromeda (the start of a new trilogy) with the entirety of the first trilogy. People were upset that Andromeda wasn’t grander in scale than all three former games combined. The gameplay was fine, and it was clear that they were trying to build the story up just like they had done with the original trilogy. There were several DLC chapters planned, and it was going to grow into an entire series of its own.

It’s like people forgot that the original trilogy spent an entire game just introducing the main villain. Like you didn’t even realize who the main villain for the trilogy was until the very end of the game. But when Andromeda did something similar, people got baby-mad about it.

It also applies to Europeans living outside of the EU. Rather than ask for verification that you’re living abroad, most companies will just assume it applies to you and agree to delete it.

Or just get a GLi.Net router, and get the OpenWRT firmware right out of the box without even needing to flash it manually.

As a bonus, if you ever have the need for one, they also have some badass travel routers that can use your phone as a modem, take a SIM card natively, or just connect to an Ethernet/public WiFi to create your own secure network. Super handy if you do a lot of traveling, because they can be used in hotels or cruise ships. Know how cruise ships sell internet access per device? Yeah, your travel router only counts as one device. Set that bad boy up, and now all of your devices have internet.

I’d argue that having them be 30 or 40 years would even be fine. An author who starts in their 20’s should reasonably expect to keep profiting off of their early work until they retire in their 50’s or 60’s. But the current state of copyright is just asinine, because it is basically written by and for corporations.

Supposedly this oven had a (broken) internal release. It also can’t swing closed on its own and needs to be pushed fairly hard to latch closed. And lastly, there is no way to turn it on from the inside; You need to activate it from outside after latching the door.

It was the combination of all three of these things that had people immediately suspecting foul play. Because there’s no way she could have turned it on while alone; Someone else had to have closed her in there and turned it on, and the broken internal release meant she couldn’t escape.

If their American citizenship is revoked and they’re not citizens anywhere else, then they would be stateless. There are international laws to help avoid people from becoming stateless, and special methods for stateless people to claim asylum. But clearly, Trump doesn’t care about international laws.

My favorite BG3 item is the bent wand of fireball. It allows you to cast Fireball, but only at melee range.