I am predicting at some point Windows itself will become a business only product and cease to be marketed to consumers, and the home user platform will be some kind of live service bullshit probably served in a browser. Basically the Chromebook idea, but Microsoft.

Our cities are fine, they’re just governed by shitheads. It’s the spaces in between that are the hurdle.

They already do. You can also get Heelys in adult sizes, in case anyone was wondering.

Allow me to introduce you all to Angle Grinder Man.

Pocketknives.

Oh, one other point of order on that as well: Obviously even if it’s not all bullshit (spoiler: it’s all bullshit), Revelation is supposed to be a prophecy of the end of times which obviously hasn’t happened yet. I’m pretty sure we would have noticed if it did, what with the sounding of the seven trumpets, the worldwide earthquake, the 200 million horsemen slaying a third of mankind, etc.

So even if it’s all somehow inerrantly true, the Devil hasn’t killed anyone yet.

If we believe that the various Satans (in the original Hebrew, literally “adversary,” and rendered without the definite article so there are probably multiples of them) are in fact one and the same with the Devil (singular), this link-up doesn’t even occur until the Book of Revelation which is firmly a new testament thing and wholly unsupported by any of the old testament or ancient Hebrew sources from which it’s derived. Making all the assumptions required on basis that this is so, then whoever he was killed a lot of people in Revelation. But not until then.

In old Hebrew tradition, the Satans are sort of the prosecuting attorneys for god. They work for him in order to tempt the faith and righteousness of various people. Several mortal people are also given the moniker of “Satans” when they’re working against the interests of god or various other individuals.

Meanwhile, the notion that Lucifer is also one and the same with the Devil or any kind of Satan is a much later interpolation made when the church(es) of the era wanted to insert a bogeyman into their religion and they needed a justification for it, some time in the AD 200s. Lucifer is identified as the king of Babylon, a mortal, when he has attracted god’s ire in his sole appearance in Isaiah 14. The situation has become so warped that his name was finally removed in the New International Version of the bible and he’s simply referred to as the “morning star, son of the dawn.” (Isaiah 14:12, if you want to go have a look.)

Modern pontificates will also insist that the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 is also somehow the Devil, which is dubious. Even if he were, and god were speaking allegorically for precisely half of his rant as we are thus demanded to believe, god smokes him at the end of the passage anyway so it’s a moot point.

Many folks don’t realize because the common usage doesn’t work that way, and to muddy the waters further the laws are written in many jurisdictions such that “assault” is used as a legal term of art which requires some manner of physical contact between the perpetrator and victim. DC specifically treats assault and threats of bodily harm separately, (source) but the penalties are the same and in fact refer to the same paragraph anyhow, so the net difference in this case is kind of moot.

In some jurisdictions there is no such thing as “battery,” and assault is the attack while threatening is the threat. This may or may not have something to do with dumbing down the wording at some point for the layman. I’m not a lawyer despite the occasional insinuation to the contrary, so I’m not qualified to speak on that possibility.

Consider the IoT Enterprise LTSC builds. These come premade from Microsoft with less bloat (or none, in the case of the Win10 IoT version), and don’t shove the consumer features down your throat on every update because they’re designed for mission critical embedded applications.

I have 10 IoT LTSC running on most of our machines at work because a significant chunk of our hardware is not Windows 11 “ready” and we use many vendor-specific things that don’t work in Linux or Wine, and I use 11 IoT LTSC at home (locked to 23H2 so my Mixed Reality VR headset remains working!) without incident.

http://massgrave.dev/

Without either of the above restrictions if I were you I would shop for a new mouse.

Hey. Hey you. As your attorney I advise you to buy a pocketknife. Preferably a really strange one.

if you can watermark QR codes.

Apropos of nothing, yes. You can insert a logo into them in a predefined space, but you can also just straight up watermark one normally. As long as sufficient contrast is still there for the device reading it to differentiate between the white and black areas, it’ll still work.

It seems like a pretty solved problem to me, being the owner of a Reverb G2 myself. There’s also the Vive Focus models, Pimax, Pico, and probably tons of others I can’t think of offhand.

Even so. $1900. No base stations in the box. Come on.

I’m not asking it to be, but for a “high end” rig how come it’s not even complete out of the box? Even the dinky old WMR setups managed to come with controllers, and had inside-out tracking as well.

If it exists in the consumer VR space, it’s competing with the Quest whether we like it or not.

But the Quest is a fully self contained device in the sense that you can take it out of the box and use it as-is, without requiring the purchase of any external bullshit, and you can use it anywhere without having to string said external bullshit all the place to make your play space permanent. Those are the two big important factors.

Never mind the delta in price between a thoroughly entry level versus a high end VR rig. I don’t think many of us (i.e. nerds) would care too much if a really good PCVR solution cost north of $1000 provided it did everything it said it did without a hassle attached. But for fuck’s sake, at this price point they could at least deign to include a basic set of lighthouses and a pair of OG Vive controllers in the box or something.

Still requires tracking towers/lighthouses, costs $1900, and doesn’t even come with them.

I think somehow people still haven’t figured out the two important things that make the Meta Quest so popular despite its many, many inherent drawbacks.

Edit: Oh, and also:

• The product is scheduled to ship in late December, 2025.

• Please note that orders cannot be cancelled, returned or refunded once confirmed.

Yeah, that’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

All you need is a Vespa that’s been hastily reassembled into a tri-ream to explore it with!

As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.

Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.

Yes. And using Rufus to create your install media, you can even configure it to create a local account for you so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole yourself.

Actually, I wonder if that still works with an image of the new current Win11 releases where the local account functionality has been “removed.” I haven’t tried it. Someone will probably chime in.

Destiny Hope’s similarly fictitious last name for her “out of character” persona in the Hannah Montana show, which was in fact in character anyway. They’re all stage names.

https://massgrave.dev/

How about seven instead, and for free?