Atheist Discussion

(11-06-2025, 08:51 PM)Rizen Wrote: [ -> ]It's weird to think there are still cars with manual transmission. It seems like that should have been done away with a long time ago.

FREEDOM!!!!!

I learned to work a manual transmission at the intersection of Fifth and Harrison, Alexandria, In. 1967. The Y-donor signed for the car, my first with a stick, and drove off. The learning curve was steep.

Until my knees became too damaged to work a clutch all the time, I loved my various standard transmissions. Our Jeep Wrangler is still a manual. Heck, I learned to drive on a manual. I prefer driving my car to just aiming it down the road. And you can easily jumpstart a manual.

Neither system is 100% better than the other. When I go to Telluride I'm riding a stick. Automatics tend to make bad decisions and a 1,000 foot drop isn't that forgiving.

My Rogue allows me to set which gear I want by sliding the shift to the left. Then I can go up or down gears with a forward or back pull. It does allow me to decide which gear I want when I don’t agree with the automatic. It’s one of the few features I like on this vehicle. Mostly, I hate this SUV. It doesn’t do well in snow and ice, even with snow tires. Yes, I do know how to drive in those conditions and I know how to get unstuck…except this one.

I've been busy setting up a website and facebook page for when my book launches. Anyone else use wix? It's really cool what you can do and fairly easy. I'm learning as I go but I think it's looking good. I added a contact page where you can type in a comment and it goes strait to my author email.

Lately I've been finding YouTube videos very, very slow to
start loading, and to finish loading. The page starts to render
apparently okay, but then stops, and starts again from scratch.

I'm using its "dark" mode. Could that be an issue?

My connection (FTN) is running at 45 down and 12 up.
Win 11 Home 64 bit, Firefox 145.0.1, and a YouTube ad-blocker.

(11-24-2025, 10:04 AM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]Lately I've been finding YouTube videos very, very slow to
start loading, and to finish loading.  The page starts to render
apparently okay, but then stops, and starts again from scratch.

I'm using its "dark" mode.  Could that be an issue?

My connection (FTN) is running at 45 down and 12 up.
Win 11 Home 64 bit, Firefox 145.0.1, and a YouTube ad-blocker.

We've got all Mac hardware and one particular machine will hesitate like this for reasons I can't make sense of. I'm a software dev, not a sysadmin, so I'm planning to hire a good networking guy to evaluate the setup here. The only variable I can see is the machine is new-ish and has the latest WiFi hardware, but the hot spots here are based on an aging Google mesh network setup. So maybe there's a backward compatibility issue. IDK. It's above my pay grade really. I don't want to thrash around and spend several hundred bucks on new hardware only to find the situation unchanged (or worse).

It was a cat-astrophe!

Computer
Aided
Tomography

Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

Services that Australian eSafety considers will be age-restricted
social media platforms:

   Facebook
   Instagram

   Kick
   Reddit

   Snapchat
   Threads

   TikTok
   Twitch

   X   (formerly Twitter)
   YouTube

An Australian court can order civil penalties for platforms that
don’t take reasonable steps to prevent underage users from
having accounts on their platforms. This includes court-imposed
fines of up to AU$49.5 million.

And I'm betting school kids are passing along workarounds for all that.

Did they define or give examples of what would be considered "reasonable steps"? That's very ambiguous, my guess is no.

(12-01-2025, 12:34 PM)brewerb Wrote: [ -> ]Did they define or give examples of what would be considered "reasonable steps"? That's very ambiguous, my guess is no.

Yes, a very flexible term indeed.  I guess "steps" that the company is
actually capable of developing and maintaining in order to comply with
the as-yet unpublished Federal legislation.  I can't even guess what
defines a site as "unsuitable" for the under-16s to view?

Some are obvious; bestiality, incest, paedophilia, torture and snuff, illicit
drugs and alcohol sales, calls to anarchy, racism and sexism, neo-Nazism,
and all/any of the other stuff that should also be banned from adult sites.

I personally don't have any issue with PornHub or Chaturbate or the
WorldWatch, but then I absolutely wouldn't want my 12-year-old son
or 8-year-old daughter going anywhere near those sorts of sites.      

I used to work for State Farm, an auto insurance company, as a claims adjuster while I was in grad school. "Reasonable" meant "if it doesn't cause a problem." Deliberately ambiguous to allow wiggle room for enforcement people. Then it would go to the courts if "the Vigoro hit the Mixmaster".

(12-01-2025, 12:12 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts...

Today's followup story from the Guardian Australia:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...-moustache

An Instagram notification was sent to a test account with the age
set to 15, to see what would happen when the under-16s social
media ban came into effect. Instagram subsequently sent a
notification:

Quote:“You will not be able to use your Instagram account until you’ve
turned 16. This means you can’t use Instagram and your profile
won’t be visible to you or others until then.

“We’ll let you know when you can use Instagram again.”

(12-01-2025, 12:12 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

How much effect do you think this will have on the average Australian teen? It feels about as useful as legislating away teen sex. Proscription for proscription's sake and little else.

(12-01-2025, 03:15 PM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]

(12-01-2025, 12:12 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

How much effect do you think this will have on the average Australian teen? It feels about as useful as legislating away teen sex. Proscription for proscription's sake and little else.

Hard to say.  Teenagers are currently very IT literate in Australia,
and I'm sure they'll find ways to easily circumvent proving their
identity and real age details.  (Many Aussie parents simply don't
know and/or care what sort of sites their kids are accessing... sadly.)

I've read of people fooling some sites demanding identity by simply
holding up three colour A4 photos of their face; front, left and right
profiles—and moving them slightly.

I think a lot of it's gonna come back to parental control of tweenies'
mobile phones' access to specific overseas servers or IP addresses etc.

Maybe this?

   The Best Parental Control Apps for Your Phone.

I was talking to my cousin, who works in IT, and he told me the price of RAM is skyrocketing due to companies shifting to making a different kind of RAM for AIs and tariffs of course. Fuck Trump. I was thinking about upgrading my computer but not anymore.

(12-15-2025, 01:49 AM)Rizen Wrote: [ -> ]I was talking to my cousin, who works in IT, and he told me the price of RAM is skyrocketing due to companies shifting to making a different kind of RAM for AIs and tariffs of course. Fuck Trump. I was thinking about upgrading my computer but not anymore.

All computer storage is projected to face shortages in 2026 due to the demand from AI and data centers. Longtime consumer division of Micron, the memory and SSD seller Crucial, was shutdown by Micron as a result.

Time to buy more TSMC stocks.

So I have a website and got an email about it from: wixwebsite.crm.team@gmail.com
"Dear Merchant,

Thank you for confirming your ownership.

CRITICAL DOM-BASED MALWARE DETECTED – SITE COMPROMISED
Your domain has been flagged with active DOM-based malware, a high-severity exploit currently hijacking visitor traffic, stealing sensitive data, and triggering automatic blacklisting by Google, Bing, and major browsers.

48-HOUR ENFORCEMENT DEADLINE IN EFFECT
Failure to remediate will result in automatic suspension of your site under Wix Security Policy Article 7.2.

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED:
Contact our verified incident response specialist at info.miles.internet@gmail.com to initiate:

Full forensic malware scan

Malicious code eradication

Official remediation certificate


DO NOT DELAY — every minute increases the risk of permanent de-indexing and potential legal liability.

This is your final notice.

Hannah
Wix Security Enforcement Team"

__________________________________
I'm 95% sure this is a scam. That sounds like a scam doesn't it? I'm not going to respond and going to delete the email.

Forward it to the fraud department at Wix. They may want to find a way to thank those folks with the Gmail account. And yes, that's obviously a scam. Wix won't be pissing about with Gmail accounts.

Scammers. I got a spam email threatening exposure for surfing the web at a porn site with them claiming that they saw me "enjoying" myself on my computer's camera. 1. I don't go to porn sites, as I know the risks. 2. The lens on my computer's camera has had tape covering it since I bought it. That was awhile ago, with my old laptop. My new all-in-one has a sliding block that covers the lens. They wanted some amount of bitcoin, and warned me not to contact the police. Didn't pay, and forwarded the spam email to the police, after I visited them and told them the above. I realize that the bad actors are generally outside US jurisdiction, so not much can be done. 

(12-25-2025, 01:06 AM)Fireball Wrote: [ -> ]Scammers. I got a spam email threatening exposure for surfing the web at a porn site with them claiming that they saw me "enjoying" myself on my computer's camera. 1. I don't go to porn sites, as I know the risks. 2. The lens on my computer's camera has had tape covering it since I bought it. That was awhile ago, with my old laptop. My new all-in-one has a sliding block that covers the lens. They wanted some amount of bitcoin, and warned me not to contact the police. Didn't pay, and forwarded the spam email to the police, after I visited them and told them the above. I realize that the bad actors are generally outside US jurisdiction, so not much can be done. 

I've received a couple of those emails. Both times I told them to either go ahead or shut the fuck up. Never heard anything from either of them.