I’m sure they know damn well, they’re just doing a limp wristed job of trying to shift the blame towards the latter.

I remember back in the Windows ME era or thereabouts when Microsoft was pushing hard at the notion that your computer will always be online and connected to the internet, and we were all treating them like they were full of shit. Sure, all of us geeks would love to be connected 24/7 but really nobody is going to be able to provide a connection with that kind of uptime, and even if they could we’d never be able to afford it.

Right?

Anyway, most of the tools I’m required to use to do my job are hosted on the Internet, so there’s no way I can’t be “online” as long as I’m at work. I’m offline when I’m on my motorcycle. And y’all motherfuckers will never find me.

You know why, you don’t care.

Remember that the majority of people just accept whatever is handed to them and won’t put forth any effort to circumvent any kind of adversity of even inconvenience. Other dipshits read a lot of Orwell and now they think they can shape thought by censoring or at least adding obstacles to the act of writing.

The annoying thing is, the latter are probably right.

Nobody really argues with me in my niche online community. I almost kind of feel ripped off.

The one on the bottom left has got to be in Boston.

The chaotic evil one is wrong. A chaotic evil yard sale sign is one for a sale that happened some time around last year but the miscreant responsible put approximately 1,857,963 signs up all over town, one on every other telephone pole perhaps, but never bothered to take them down.

Yes, that’s how it goes. But ammonium nitrate/ANFO (the fuel oil/diesel is mixed with it in order to sensitize it marginally, or rather to give a medium for the initiating shockwave to propagate through) has the extra special distinction of not being brisant enough to be self-propagating. Unlike dynamite, TNT, RDX/C4, etc., you need to have an initiator big enough to encapsulate your entire ammonium nitrate payload in a shockwave that’s powerful enough to set it off. That’s pretty tough for a home gamer to do.

Ammonium nitrate does a pretty credible job of preventing itself from being used as an explosive to begin with. It’s damn difficult to initiate, and anyone with the capability to do so would be able to trivially defeat pelletizing by, e.g., just grinding the stuff up first.

It’s not a matter of just sticking a fuse in it like Wile E. Coyote. You already have to have your hands on some pretty serious blasting caps or have the capability to manufacture your own, and at that rate you’re already pretty well versed in making things go boom.

McVeigh had to resort to using dynamite as a booster to initiate his truck full of ANFO and even then IIRC not all of it went off. But if you already have dynamite… you already have dynamite.

What pisses me off is that whole debacle made potassium nitrate hard to get your hands on in bulk because too many idiots in suits flunked high school chemistry. KNO₃ is significantly more useful for purposes other than stripping the facades off of government buildings.

Oh, and after the affair some dimwit from the ATF came to my hardware store and tried to grill me about chemical fertilizers in a circumspect and very strange way that was attempting to simultaneously serve as a threat while also not letting slip the knowledge of what ammonium nitrate could possibly be used for, in case the mere act of asking gave anyone any ideas. I lost count of how many ways I had to phrase “we only sell consumer grade blended products” at him until he finally went away. Demonstrating that I knew more about it than he did probably would not have been a great idea regardless of how satisfying it might be.

Concur. I’m still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000’s because I used it to buy a “high capacity magazine,” which PayPal declared was “illegal activity” with no appeal.

…An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that’s illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).

Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.

I await with interest the first serious accusation that I’m a bot. A very well armed bot, perhaps. I certainly type some strange things, but you guys have probably seen my hands too many times.

Unless my hands are also AI generated. Hmm.

I’ve already garnered the achievement of having several people on one of the Discord servers I hang around on of treating me as if I’m literally a penguin. Nobody’s yet come up with a credible explanation of how I’d be able to type. (Including, surprisingly, the obvious hunt and peck gag that presents itself.)

He was brought to (or rather, fired at) Earth as a baby. Arguably he should be first in line to be a DACA recipient.

He also spends his spare time literally fighting a billionaire, so there’s that…

It wasn’t a matter of typing too fast that was the issue, but rather commonly paired letters should be positioned such that their mechanical linkages would be less prone to collide with each other if they were pressed consecutively. Your only real limitation in typing speed on an oldschool mechanical typewriter is that you can’t have two keys pressed at the same time and you can’t have two hammers hit the page consecutively before the first hammer has fallen away. Commonly paired letters should be mechanically unlikely to collide, which does not necessarily follow that they wind up with an intuitive location on the keyboard itself in terms of what’s “far apart” and “close together.”

On the Sholes and Glidden typing machine from which the modern QWERTY layout was originally derived, the hammers did not have a return spring but were rather dropped back home via gravity. Later models quickly developed spring loaded returns for just that reason.

The Sholes and Glidden 'board was tweaked somewhat from its original quasi-mathematically determined collision mitigating layout largely for marketing purposes, and also for aesthetics. The primordial design actually had the period key in the middle of the field which probably looked just as goofy to people back in the day as it does now. The rights were eventually sold to Remington (yes, that Remington) who made the final adjustments to arrange the keys in the modern QWERTY layout, invented the shift key for both upper and lowercase letter capability for their Model 2 Standard typewriter which the Sholes and Glidden machine lacked, and the rest is history.

I’m pretty sure QWERTY telegraph keyboards post-date typewriters. Early examples of telegraph transcription machines literally used piano keyboards with letters inscribed on them, and the prototype Sholes and Glidden 'board inherited a similar two row layout before adopting the staggered four row one.

I have offers turned off on eBay for this reason. The only thing you ever get is low ball offers. Yes, I know you can set a lowerbound limit.

Since I have offers disabled (or if someone wants to try to underbid your setpoint out of optimism and/or stupidity) that prompts the lowballers message instead. Usually with an insulting poorly spelled paragraph attached, or some sob story. Or both. But since they messaged you, that means you now have their user handle and can block them. So, goodbye.

Edit: In fact, speak of the devil. I had to punk exactly such a rando right now. They came at me with a 50% offer on an item I already have listed at roughly 50% below its selling price with their excuse being, “Well, I’m taking a risk trusting you that it works.” Broheim, if it doesn’t work eBay will force me to take it back, no matter what… The beauty of this, by the way, is that this precludes such idiots from interacting with your listings anymore and, I think, even being able to view them. So you’ll never even see them again, unless they go out of their way to create another account. And they lose out on their chance to buy whatever your thing was at any price through their sheer greed and ineptitude.

I’m given to understand a sizable fraction of these dweebs try to make their living lowballing whoever they assume are desperate sellers of crap on eBay, and then turn around and list the same item right back for full price.

Some of this may depend on your client. If you do a triple dash by itself on its own line:

You get a horizontal rule in most clients, including the default web UI and all of the major browser based clients I’ve tried.

In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Including this very platform.

Lemmy will automatically render a double dash – as an en dash, and a triple dash — as an em dash.

I usually just type alt + 0151, though, because I’m a nerd.

Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked “at” him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.