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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Flexible enough that Access Software built a library called RealSound that could do 6-bit PCM audio over it. Which isn’t great but is dramatically better than you’d expect. A bit over a dozen or so games used it.

    I had one called Mean Streets that used it for things like voice. The game came with instructions for how to build a cable to connect your internal speaker to an RCA cable to run to a stereo or similar.






  • If they actually believe in that whole originalism thing they claim (basically that the text of the constitution means what it would have meant at the time it was written, and shifts in the definition of words don’t change that meaning) they still can’t allow it. There’s basically no way to interpret the Constitution that would result in mandating a specific religious affirmation be in public facilities isn’t “promoting an establishment of religion”.

    The best they could hope for without just ignoring the Constitution entirely and making something up (which all their conservatism.aside they generally haven’t done yet) would be arguing that this requires opening the door to any similar list of religious tenets by literally every faith on the planet.



  • No, it doesn’t. That’s what I’m getting at. Look at how they define a machine gun in the act. It requires that the gun fire more than once per operation of the trigger (this is also what it means for a firearm to be automatic). A bump stock facilitates operating the trigger again more quickly, but does not fire more then once per operation of the trigger.

    You’re not looking at the definition used in the law but deciding that anything that lets you shoot faster counts.


  • All they are a modification to turn a semiautomatic gun into a full automatic weapon.

    They don’t though. And I went into great detail as to what exactly they do and how it works to explain why they don’t do that.

    An automatic weapon fires more than once per operation of the trigger by definition. Any gun that fires once per operation of the trigger is not automatic by definition.

    A bump stock doesn’t change that, it makes it easier and more accurate to bump.fire, which is basically using the recoil to bounce your finger off the trigger and back onto it to pull it faster than you otherwise would.

    With practice you can bump fire with a regular stock, that doesn’t mean all semiautomatic weapons are actually automatic.

    Like the binary trigger thing - eventually that will be challenged in the courts and the argument won’t be over whether or not the words binary trigger are in the law, but whether or not lifting your finger off the trigger counts as a second operation of the trigger or as part of the previous one because that is what would determine if it fires one or two shots per operation of the trigger and thus whether or not it’s legally automatic and whether or not it is controlled as an automatic weapon.

    The law doesn’t say what you wish it said, and it isn’t exactly vague.




  • Personally I think it says everything that the Abrahamic version of the Theft of Fire leads to the idea that we should hate and denounce the thief rather than see him as responsible for us being raised above essentially being animals. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is analogous to Prometheus, Mātariśvan, Amirani, Pkharmat, Grandmother Spider, etc.

    I also find it interesting that the Theft of Fire is a nearly universal myth (as close as anything gets) - a divine or semi-divine being (often but not always a trickster-type) taking a symbol (often a fire, in the Torah a fruit) representing knowledge against the will of those in power and giving it to man, thus leading to the ability of man to be free to create civilization.



  • …and admitting that you know it exists is grounds for you not being allowed on a jury.

    But yeah, judges judge the law, juries judge the facts. so the judge can corral how the trial proceeds and explain to the jury what criteria they are supposed to be following and what evidence they are supposed to consider but the jury can decide what it wants and their decision cannot be challenged - which means if they decide that someone is guilty/not guilty for reasons wholly unrelated to what the law actually says then that’s what it is.

    It’s why I was surprised that Trump was found guilty on all counts in the NY trial - I was expecting a mistrial due to hung jury before the trial even started because I was expecting at least one hardcore supporter/opponent of Trump who was going to vote based on that regardless of the evidence making it impossible to have a unanimous agreement.


  • The solution seems simple. Don’t marry and don’t have kids.

    Am I allowed to be amused that a bunch of guys looking at the state of family courts deciding the same thing were mocked as a bunch of evil misogynistic incels, and have been for years? Apparently “don’t participate in the system you are worried is going to fuck you over” is not an acceptable choice.




  • A bump stock does not function by a single action of the trigger and does not meet the statutory definition as a result. The ATF rule banning them got struck down because Congress hadn’t authorized the ATF to regulate machine guns beyond that specific statutory definition.

    They had several cases along these lines involving several agencies, and I feel like people don’t understand the underlying legal idea - rule making power belongs to Congress. Federal agencies under the executive branch that have rule making powers receive those powers by Congress delegating it to them in a limited fashion through legislation. Those powers extend only so far as the passed legislation delegates them and no further. Even in cases where it seems like it would be useful, or the name of the agency suggests it would be something in their sphere of influence.


  • However this supreme court said that the magic words ‘bump stock’ wasn’t in the legalisation.

    A bump stock doesn’t make a gun automatic fire, therefore a prohibition on modifications to make a gun automatic fire does not include it. It’s a basic “the law says what it says, you don’t get to add things you don’t like and call them close enough” argument. It’s not about the words “bump stock”, but that the law prohibits modifications to make a gun automatic and a bump stock does not make a gun automatic, it merely makes a method for firing a semiautomatic gun faster easier to achieve.

    Bump firing is basically using the recoil from a shot to bounce your finger off the trigger and then pull the trigger again, which increases the rate of fire. It’s even less accurate than automatic fire (because of the way the gun has to literally bounce around), and not quite as fast (but pretty close). You can do it without a bump stock, but it’s easier to achieve, more accurate and more comfortable to do with one. The fact that when bump firing you only fire a single round for each function of the trigger makes it not automatic by definition.

    The binary triggers mentioned earlier in the thread are basically triggers that will fire both when the trigger is pulled and when it is released, which hypothetically doubles the firing rate of a semiautomatic weapon by not requiring you to release the trigger and pull it again to fire another round. Binary triggers basically come down to an argument of what counts as an “function of the trigger” and whether both pulling and releasing the trigger can count as separate functions of the trigger - if they can then it’s not automatic, if they cannot then it is.


  • Like the Golden Girls or Fresh Prince.

    You know an episode of Golden Girls was pulled from Hulu for blackface right? Or the jokes about Dorothy’s rape (there are several of those)?

    Or “Wham, Bam, Thank You Mammy” , Maurgerite in general or having the same actor play different characters with different ethnicities that are broadly the same general color (for example Mr. Tanaka and Dr. Chang played by the same actor so apparently the show can’t tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese people?), racist jokes about Chinese food, things Sophia had to say about Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Arabs, Rose in a Native American headdress, Rose pretending to be an exchange student, Blanche defending the Confederate flag… Yeah, there’s a lot problematic about Golden Girls and a lot of it was about race.

    I suspect I could spit out a similar list of examples for Fresh Prince if I dug down on it, though it probably would be less about race and more about sex or disability or weight or sexual orientation or some other demographic line that was a common well for comedy back then that is a problematic -ism or -phobia now.