CarbonIceDragon

In what sense is this semantics or bad faith? I meant this sincerely.

As I understand it, "real communism" is supposed to be some kind of stateless society. As the GDR was, well, a state, it clearly did not achieve that. Nor would it ever have been likely to, as actually doing what was ideologically promised would have required those with power within that system to relinquish that power, which is incredibly rare as it conflicts with human nature.

Not sure why nobody would expect an italian inquisition of food, they literally have a unit in one of their law enforcement agencies trained to do things like find fake extra-virgin olive oil. Ive seen people jokingly call it "the italian food police" even. If anybody was going to run a food inquisition, itd be the italians

Admittedly not, no. I was making the assumption, possibly a naive one, that a computer should be capable of understanding the physics behind bullet trajectories well enough to shoot accurately even if the target is mobile.

I didn't really think human operated, I was imagining something pretty much exactly like phalanx, but with a much smaller caliber and turret size owing to the small size of drones. Like a phalanx type software controller mounted to a small turret with a small caliber machinegun or automatic shotgun type weapon.

If you can target them with a laser though, why would a gun be much different? I know there's dramatically more travel time, but bullets are still extremely fast, and even if one shot misses, something like a machinegun with a computerized control system seems like it ought to hit the thing before too long? Maybe the risk of missed shots causing harm might be too high for populated areas?

Is it just me, or does that discussion of the various ways to counter drones, kinda miss the obvious of just shooting them with a conventional gun?

Stargate is the best "star-" franchise imho.

This reminds me of something I sometimes wonder about lotr: does the ring make you more evil, or does it just make you more like Sauron? If you're already even more evil than Sauron and you put on the ring, does it slowly turn you ever so slightly more good, to align with Sauron better?

Doesn't the fediverse userbase trend towards being made up of millennials? I'm on the older end of gen Z myself and grew up with CDs and DVDs, so I imagine most people here are familiar with the technology.

honestly, I feel like something like Pico is more of a competitor to facebook/meta in the VR market, considering apple's vr seems to be aimed at an entirely different part of the market, whereas pico makes hardware that is very similar in capability, use case and price to what meta puts out.

Doubtful, while facebook does have a huge segment of the VR market, they're not the only relevant player, so dont have the ability to entirely control it, and while I'll certainly not be buying any headset of theirs given their extreme lack of trustworthiness even for a tech company, they have played a pretty big role in improving the tech and bringing the costs down a bit. I think some people just expected the tech to go from "blurry 3-d monitor strapped to your face" to "indistinguishable from reality the way its shown in fiction" in short order and have taken the gradual refinement of the tech instead of rapid leap as a sign that the technology has failed or something.