American 11/32 inch ammo will definitely need to be exchanged for 9mm

That would be a very satisfying ticket closure

Bat bat bo-at

Bonbaten-fana fo-fat

Fee-fi-fo-fat

Bat!

I wonder if Monster and Monster know about Monster

I switched to ebooks a long time ago, but had quite a collection prior to that, and was also the recipient of goodies from my mom’s massive science fiction book collection, including a first edition Dune (Chilton, 1965). My favorites are my signed Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams books, though.

None of them are going anywhere.

hisses protectively from atop a musty hoard of green USB to ps/2 adapters

Wizard: I’m too drunk to walk…or fly…

Bard: I’ve got it. Rubs a small jello cube with a cloth

DM: A slightly moist skateboard appears.

Party: What the hell is that?

DM: That’s what happens when you gleam the cube.

New Zealand Wizard: Yeah naw, you carked it, bro. That’s a sweet-as fish. Seen it plenty of times on the poster in my shid. Kī tōnu taku waka topaki i te tuna.

You may want to give it another shot. They’ve been working pretty hard to move away from config files - much more is done via the GUI these days to make things more user-friendly.

The devs have also really been focusing on voice this year as well - it’s been really interesting to see what they come up with. A few releases back, they released an update that allows you to give voice commands to HA via a landline phone hooked up to a $30 VoIP box. There is also support now for Espressif’s new “S3-Box” devices, which have small screens, a speaker and a few microphones for under $50 - this does require messing with yaml files at this point, but I should be able to finally ditch my Echos soon!

You can easily have a smart home without any data leaving your home network.

You need three things:

• Home Assistant software (free and open source)
• ZigBee (also free and open source) smart devices made by companies that comply with the ZigBee protocol
• Most importantly, a ZigBee controller.

There are several options available (Deconz Conbee II, etc), and this device gets plugged into the same machine Home Assistant is on, and it allows HA to control your ZigBee devices directly. No “hub” sending your data to a cloud server, everything is done on your local network. If the devices comply with the protocol, you don’t need their hub, even if they say it’s required.

I use Hue bulbs, but have no Hue hub. I use many Aqara devices, but don’t have an Aqara hub. It’s pretty great and works very well!

crushed by a herd of elephants

OG Hannibal style

For a long time, the US actually had something called the “Fairness Doctrine” which required broadcasters to present matters of public interest in a way that was fair. So if you had a guy on a show that said the president was a lizard person, that show also had to have someone on to refute that opinion, or the media company could lose their broadcasting license.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Reagan Administration in 1987, which immediately resulted in the rise of conservative talk radio, who could say whatever they wanted without having to present the opposing viewpoint, and they didn’t have to worry about losing their license.

The rise of conservative talk radio led to Fox News, which led to the election of Trump.

Interestingly, less than a year after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a conservative political nonprofit corporation was formed called Citizens United, led by a man named David Bossie. The goal of this organization was (and remains) the creation of media that supports their goals of restoring “traditional American values”, which consists entirely of right-wing documentaries and attack ads.

In 2008, Citizens United made a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie”, which was basically a movie-length attack on Hillary Clinton, who had announced in 2007 that she was going to run for president in 2008.

At the time, there was a law called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which essentially banned any attack ads that name a federal candidate from running within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days from a federal election, if the ad was funded with money from a corporation (including a nonprofit) or union.

The Citizens United nonprofit corporation knew this, and sued the Federal Election Commission, arguing that not being able to show their attack ad was a violation of their constitutional right to free speech, which, very importantly, had only ever been interpreted to apply to human individuals, not corporations.

The Supreme Court was dominated by conservatives in 2010 (and still is), and they ruled that corporations did in fact have free speech protection, that not allowing attack ads funded by corporations that were not required to disclose the source of their funding before elections was a violation of the constitutional rights of corporations, and subsequently nullified the part of the law that prevented Citizens United from showing their attack ad, while also removing almost all limits on the “speech” that corporations could engage in without repercussions and also happened to confer legal “personhood” to corporate entities.

Incidentally, David Bossie (President of Citizens United) resigned from Citizens United in 2016 to take a job as deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

That does sound like something an ethical AI would say

54% (130 million) Americans read BELOW the equivalent of a 6th grade level.

A lot of the reason for this is chronic underfunding of K-12 ESL programs in southern states and California.

It’s AI all the way down!

(at this fictive level)

Google bought the company Deja and got their software, which turned into Google groups, and also got their Usenet archive.

They didn’t buy Usenet itself (which would be like buying “email”), and it is still very much alive, but it has changed, and most people have moved their preferred place to have discussions elsewhere.

Note: I was going to say “would be like buying a cloud”, but Google Cloud is a thing, so…yeah.