Our global catastrophic risks are no longer insignificant, and we’re seeing in sharp bas relief the tragedy of the commons effect, that people with wealth and power (and control of industry) aren’t looking to mitigate the damage they cause, seeking instead to increase their own gains relentlessly.
Beethoven and Beatles and Michelangelo are all in jeopardy of being lost (assuming we don’t go extinct within the next few centuries), so I doubt that anything I do will have the same resilience.
There’s a point where I realized the human condition may define its own great filter. To get past the ones we’re facing now, we’ll have to change our polarized attitudes, and to do that, we’ll have to invent some sociological tricks we haven’t worked out yet. And damn soon.
Maybe the otters will evolve into the next intelligent social species, and maybe they’ll be super cute.
Funny, this is the problem with monarchy that drove western civilization to stop that nonsense. You can have the efforts of ten great (or at least mediocre) kings spoiled by one Joffrey or John of England.
It’s how nations established constitutional monarchies and eventually republics.
Except that before 2012 it was St. Stephen’s Tower. Big Ben was the largest bell in the tower.
If there’s some point that the tower was officially named Big Ben I haven’t found it. Granted that was the popular nickname of it during the 20th century.
The tower is the Elizabeth Tower, so Large Liz might be appropriate. It’s been this way since Lizzie’s Diamond Jubilee (it’s a Brit thing) in 2012.
Big Ben is the largest bell in LL which was often confused for the tower itself, with much media calling the tower Big Ben when it was actually St. Stephen’s Tower, or Sizeable Steve
You can call it whatever you want, but you’ll have to explain you mean Big Ben, the giant clock tower unless your friend is up on recent Westminster history.
In this case hypothetical, say, if they sold the working goggles as a novelty. Even for most relatively safe electronics there’s a long list of don’ts that often rule out normal use (let alone typical use). Infamously VR goggles sometimes cause epileptic seizures even in people susceptible to epileptic seizures.
Some judges recognize no one reads TOS or can understand the legal language. Others (such as SCOTUS) beieve the draconion terms in the TOS are enough to absolve the manufacturer of responsibility.
I figured if anyone was killed by this device it would cause a running mess of cascade lawsuits, even if it served as intended and killed the one who signed the TOS.
Then consider if the goggles glitched and activated on a false positive or if someone’s kid tried the goggles on for a game.
This is why piracy deterrent payloads only extend to humiliation or stern warnings (rather than destruction of data or hardware). We can’t restrict activations to perfectly just situations.
Something to think about as US law enforcement continues to kill Americans at four-plus a day.
I have a Samsung phone! But it’s one or two years before the smart-moon-photographing-software scandal, so I have to actually figure out how to use the advanced settings of the camera.
This Star Trek card game. It’s called Fleet And Federation and imagines what would happen if a setting like the original series was a well-edited reality show (which allowed me to mix in navy events and Hollywood development events into the mix). It’s a co-op game that tries to operate as a fast(er) action TTRPG, the end result of occasionally getting face time with my old gaming crew but not having time enough with them for a proper TTRPG campaign (or even a run)
I worked on it a long while before giving up for lack of local playtesters and venues. In retrospect (having since learned more design theory online), F&F would suffer a bit from quarterbacking, but otherwise was fairly viable a working game.
That said, I was quite proud of countless diegetic elements of the game and would sometime have to explain it to someone, but first explain what the hell F&F was so that they’d know what I was talking about, and by then their eyes were thoroughly glazed over.