I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.

I disagree with your assessment. To an average user, whatever winds up saved in their browser cache is there mostly unintentionally. Yes, it’s saving info from sites they choose to visit, but after that initial choice, the user is out of the loop. The browser saves what it needs to without user notification or input. I might even wager that most users are unaware of their browser cache, or don’t know what’s in it or how to access it. Therefore, I believe your metaphor perhaps confers too active a decision-making process on something that most people are completely unconscious of.

To be clear, the strawman average user I’m using here is me. I know I have a browser cache, I know vaguely what is stored in it and why, and I know how to clear it if I’m having certain issues. That’s about it. I sure as heck don’t treat it as an archive.

Hmm, so, last month I began to have issues with my Chromecast for the first time. I have an old 3rd gen Chromecast attached to my bedroom television (not a smart tv) for the purpose of casting obnoxiously long video essays to fall asleep to. After like a decade of essentially hassle free operation, it suddenly stopped being able to maintain a connection to my phone. I cast a video, and after approximately 10 minutes, the cast disconnects and I get a message on my phone saying “this video cannot be played in the background”. I’ve tried ever troubleshooting technique I can think of.

I know I shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by other causes, but boy, seeing this news today sure makes me think about things like planned obsolescence.

I think you’re implying Andre aged the worst, considering his present situation, but, hell, out of the three I think he might have “aged” the best. In the foot notes of history, Andre will be remembered for being a pretty avuncular fella. Those other two? Not so much.

While it’s possible that a different reviewer applied that hypothetical headcanon to the Burnout series, I believe you’re actually thinking of Ross’ Game Dungeon. Specifically the Trackmania Canyon video, not Burnout.

Wow, today I learned! Thanks for the info. It turns out a half remembered episode of Schoolhouse Rock seen 30 years ago is not the authoritative source on the legislative info.

Unfortunately, that is not stopping me for hearing, “I’m just a bill, sitting on Capitol Hill” ad nauseum in my head lol

Bills start in the House before they are passed to the Senate. My guess would be that she championed it through the House, and then passed it off to the Senators mentioned to continue shepherding the legislation to the President’s desk.

OP described something which conflicted with my direct, personal experience with that thing. I offered up my perspective. You responded with your perspective, based on your own anecdotal evidence. Yes, I could have run off to Google to fact check you and learn of all of the types of BFA that are out there. I chose not to. Why? Because we’re in the comment section of an article that has NOTHING to do with blank firing adapters. I assumed, and I guess you’re just going to have to forgive me for not researching in advance enough to not make this assumption, that, in responding to my post, you might be interested in further expounding upon the statements you made and answering questions I had about how your devices worked since they were clearly of a different design than what I had experienced. On the topic of assumptions, I was very clear that I was making an assumption so as to make it painstakingly obvious that I wasn’t trying to say you were WRONG ON THE INTERNET, but just that I wasn’t clear on how the device you were describing could be functional, given my previously stated understanding. I even attempted to reinforce that I wasn’t trying to invalidate your assertions by stating I was certain that wood tipped blanks were a real thing, I just had no personal experience with them.

So, I dunno what to tell you man. I tried really hard to be as non-confrontational as possible in my comments. I’m tempted to say that I clearly failed in my ambition there, but no, I don’t think I will. You responded like a dick, and I think you ought to ask yourself what you’re doing in a discussion forum if your first response to a comment asking for you to clarify some of your statements is “fuck you, Google it.”

I’m a little confused by your response. Everything in my post was written from the perspective of firing the type of blank I described (no bullet, balsa wood or real) with the BFA attached. While I have had that type of blank cycle the weapon without a BFA attached, it’s the exception to the rule.

Furthermore, would you clarify the use of these balsa wood bullets for me? Because, given my understanding of BFAs and what you described, I don’t see how those two concepts would work together. As you said, the principle behind BFAs is plugging the barrel so more gas is directed to the action, rather than our of the system. If you had a BFA fitted to a weapon that was firing blanks which were tipped with wood or some other fake projectile, my assumption would be the debris would collect in the end of the barrel behind the BFA post. Hell, that’s why we always hated training with blanks, it was always a nightmare to clean out the carbon buildup in the weapon after since none of it was expelled in the firing process like it would be in normal operation. Compacting a shit load of debris in the barrel of your weapon does not seem like it would be the intended outcome of a training event, but dumber shit has happened.

I am sure that there are blanks (especially in the context of a Hollywood armory) which are designed in such away to more closely resemble real ammunition, I’ve just never worked with something of that ilk, and it doesn’t jive with my (limited) understanding of how firearms work.

You might be getting confused with the circumstances around Brandon Lee’s death on the set of the Crow, which makes sense since that has been a hot topic when discussing the situation on Rust’s set. As I understand it, in the case of Lee’s death, they had taken live rounds and “converted” them to dummy rounds by removing the bullets, dumping out the gunpowder from the cartridge, and then reinstalling the bullets. However, they did not remove the primer from the cartridges, because they wanted the bottom of the cases to look pristine for shots where the revolver was loaded.

At some point, one of these “dummy” (but still very much not inert, thanks to the primer) rounds was accidentally fired. Because they had removed the propellent, only the primer detonated. This provided enough force to dislodge the bullet from the case, but not enough to expel it out the barrel. No one checked the barrel before a blank was loaded into weapon for the scene where Lee’s character was shot. Blank detonated, dummy bullet is dislodged, Lee is killed.

So, while both productions are staggering examples of safety protocol failures on film sets, the circumstances are differ in the details.

That’s not really what BFAs do, at least not the models I’ve used. You seem to imply that weapons with BFAs fitted are still firing real rounds, which are rendered safe by hitting the adapter. That’s not true. They are firing blanks, which are cartridges with the bullet and some of the powder removed. Pull the trigger, you get a pop, a flash, and some smoke. Yay!

Pull the trigger again though, and you’re very likely to have a misfire because the next round failed to feed from the magazine to the chamber. This is because most semi or fully automatic weapons use some of the energy of a fired round to cycle the action which expels the spent cartridge and feeds a fresh round into the firing chamber. When you fire a real bullet, it actually acts as something of a plug in the barrel for the very brief period of time it travels through it. This allows the pressure to overcome the resistance of the weapon’s action, and thus operate.

When you fire a blank, there’s no bullet. No bullet means no plug, which means that all of the gas from the explosion just rushes right out the end of the barrel and is not enough to cycle the gun. This, you have to manually run the action, turning your scary big black assault rifle into a quaint bolt action rifle.

So, how do you solve this problem? You make your own plug and stick it on the end of the barrel to redirect all of the energy through the weapon system rather than expelling it. That’s a all a BFA is, a metal post matched to the diameter of the barrel that screws into place to plug it. This has the additional positive of preventing anything from exiting the barrel accidentally while firing blanks, which is useful in the training contexts that you often see these devices, because you’re often “firing” on other people.

If you were to use a BFA in the manner you describe, i.e. with a real bullet, you’re certainly going to damage the shit out of your weapon, and possibly wind up in the Emergency Room because you caught some metal splinters in the face when the end of your weapon exploded.

Depends on your bunny rabbit stance, I reckon.

Bro, maybe the Wally world clientele is different in your neck of the woods but seeing someone with makeup on, or their hair did (leaving aside the question of quality for the time being…) is the exception to the rule.

I’m looking to reenter the dating pool in the near future and this has been on my mind, especially in light of Roe and my location in middle America. Would you be willing to share your personal experience with the procedure? Everyone says it’s very easy, but I gotta be honest, it makes me nervous.

Blackgate.com - the remnants of Black Gate magazine, which was published from 2000-2011 and then continued in digital form since. It focuses primarily on vintage literary fantasy, though occasionally the an article will be published in films or new fiction. Of particular note to nerds is the Cinema of Swords column by Lawrence Ellsworth, who fantasy fans may be familiar with as the Principal Narrative Designer for Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m not so immersed in the fantasy world that I understand most of what is discussed on the blog, but it is a nice taste of the old Internet, one which might resonate with other fediverse users.

This is a factually accurate statement, but it reads like you’re encouraging someone to get into smoking cigarettes, which is (I thought) a myth invented by DARE types. Hey OP, speaking as someone with a 15 year off and on addiction to nicotine, steady on your course, bud.

I don’t understand diddly about the specifics of this article (I’m a member of the normie minority on this site who is neither working in IT, nor interested in the field), but I gotta say, I loved how it was structured and written. In a sea of AI generated crap, or simply parroting talking heads and calling it news, I found the way they laid out the article in two parts ("this is what happened, followed by “this is our subjective opinion on those events based on the wider context”) to be very refreshing.

You deserve the hose for this, because now I can’t stop thinking about it.

I’m no legal scholar, but my read on Thomas is that he is, at the end of the day, a constitutional originalist. He is also a scumbag, but the opinions of his that I’ve read tend towards similar things: i.e. what does the Constitution/Founding Fathers say about this issue? Of course, most of the time, that ends up generating some wacko opinions because he’s generally unwilling to deviate from at 1700s era mindset. In fact, he seems to immerse himself in that mindset in order to form his opinions.

For example, if you read the majority opinion he wrote, Thomas defines the case very narrowly on Constitutional grounds. Basically, the payday loans companies argue that the consumer protection agency is in violation of the Constitution because, unlike most other federal agencies, its director is imbued (by Congress, mind you) with the power to withdraw up to a stuatory cap of funds from the Federal Reserve every year “as [they] determine fit to meet the agencies operating expenses”. The loan companies say that this is in violation with the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, which states, " no money shall be drawn from the Treasury except in consequence of Appropriations made by Law".

So, Thomas’s approach to this disagreement is to determine what an “Appropriation” is, as it might have been defined by the people who wrote the clause. To do so, he, I shit you not, consults a dictionary from the period, like the intro to a lazy term paper ("Merriam-Webster defines appropriation as…). He also gets into the historical case law of Britain, rather extensively, as he believes (probably accurately, frankly) that that’s the best way to understand what the authors of the constitutional had conceived as they wrote the document.

After all of this, he winds up with several examples of executive agencies which do/did not fund themselves via the standard appropriations bill process (Customs Offices and Post Offices being the primary examples used). So, he concludes that it’s clear that the Founding Fathers had a broader view of how to find the government than ONLY annual appropriations bills, even if the literal text seems to indicate otherwise.

Also, he points out that the whole thing kinda falls apart in the sense that the creation of this agency was an act of Congress, with stuatory funding regulations drawn up by Congress, which was then signed by Obama into law. So, Congress made a law that said this particular agency is allowed to bypass the appropriations clause in x y z ways. Thomas has a stack of historical records which show that this was something the founders not only were aware of, but actively sanctioned via how the Post Office and Customs offices were set up at their establishment. So, he has no choice but to conclude that this agency is in line with what Jefferson et al had in mind. Thus, tough shit payday loans, bribe a congressman to change the law because ain’t shit can be done from a judicial perspective. Which, I imagine is probably what Thomas told these companies’ bag men when they showed up to secure his opinion.

Thank you for your service