If that were the case then the other statements within bullet 1 are completely irrelevant, and the relevant information has been omitted. That would be a far greater assumption than taking the statements at face value and connecting the information we have into coherent logic

TBH that’s a logic fail on your part.

In bullet point (1) we have two important statements

Statement A: “I can’t make the food”

Followed immediately by the explanation…

Statement B: “I am dealing with an illness that makes me unable to eat solid foods and extremely sensitive to smells”

The only way Statements A and B can be related is via the smell. Being unable to EAT solid foods wouldn’t prevent OP from MAKING the food. The only possible explanation is that the sensitivity to smell is what makes them unable.

That’s, like, really basic reading comprehension skills. 🤷

Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

What about trademark?

Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

What you do with this information is up to you.

I’m an effort to get you an answer that isn’t dismissive:

1. Youth indoctrination, social conformity, and cultural isolation. If your parents, friends, and most of your community tells you something is true, you are unlikely to challenge it for a variety of reasons including trust (most of what they’ve taught you works for your daily life), tribal identity, etc

2. People naturally fear death, and one coping strategy for the existential fear of death is to convince yourself that the death of your body is not the end of your existence. Science does not provide a pathway to this coping strategy so people will accept or create belief systems that quell that fear, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Relieving the pressure of that fear is a strong motivator.

3. Release of responsibility. When there is no higher power to dictate moral absolutes, we are left feeling responsible for the complex decisions around what is or isn’t the appropriate course of action. And that shit is complicated and often anxiety inducing. Many people find comfort in offloading that work to a third party.

That it would be viewed as awkward and unwelcome by the other participants. Consent is key, yo

I go for the hug when I see friends I haven’t seen in a long time, or when I’m parting ways with someone I know I won’t see for a while. But it’s definitely not a regular occurrence

No, it’s not socially acceptable. Yes, I wish it were. I don’t know if I’d go for full on snuggling but I come from a physically affectionate family and in general wish people were more comfortable with that kind of thing

I will always read this meme in the voice of George Carlin narrating Thomas the Tank Engine, and then immediately post this exact reply with a link to this video: https://youtu.be/2a_gW1KvuFk?si=hR834siCZlYvOei1

I didn’t either until a few years ago! I was shook

Fun fact: the number of laughs the count does is always equal to the number he’s counting. So here are the missing 31 AHs for everyone’s enjoyment!

AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH

Yeah, hasn’t that person seen the incredibly accurate journalistic masterpiece documentary “Weird: The Al Yankovich Story”?

I don’t think he’s seen the 100% true film using only authentic footage from his life “Weird: The Al Yankovich Story” 😮

I think it’s the same appeal as The Onion. It’s satire. The best part of The Onion is reading the headline before the URL. I don’t take stuff like this as a sincere attempt to make the alleged author look good. It’s too far-fetched for that.

The common thread of all comedy is the unexpected. In this case, it’s the “haha if only this were real, that would be great” element that makes it funny

ENORMOUS +1 for Sunshine + Moonlight. I’d play just about anything shy of a twitch shooter on it, if your network is nice and stable

Except we know what the lifecycle of physical storage is, it’s rate of performance decay (virtually none for solid state until failure), and that the computers performing the operations have consistent performance for the same operations over time. And again, while for a car such a small amount can’t be reasonably extrapolated, for a computer processing an extremely simple format like JSON, when it is designed to handle FAR more difficult tasks on the GPU involving billions of floating point operations, it is absolutely, without a doubt enough.

You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want but I’m very confident in my understanding of JSON’s complexity relative to typical GPU workloads, computational analysis, computer hardware durability lifecycles, and software testing principles and best practices. 🤷

Imagine you have a car powered by a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to last 100 years and a stable output of energy. Then you put it on a 5 mile road that is comprised of the same 250 small segments in various configurations, but you know for a fact that starts and ends at the same elevation. You also know that this car gains exactly as much performance going downhill as it loses going uphill.

You set the car driving and determine that, it takes 15 minutes to travel 5 miles. You reconfigure the road, same rules, and do it again. Same result, 15 minutes. You do this again and again and again and always get 15 minutes.

Do you need to test the car on a 20 mile road of the same configuration to know that it goes 20mph?

JSON is a text-based, uncompressed format. It has very strict rules and a limited number of data types and structures. Further, it cannot contain computational logic on it’s own. The contents can interpreted after being read to extract logic, but the JSON itself cannot change it’s own computational complexity. As such, it’s simple to express every possible form and complexity a JSON object can take within just 0.6 MB of data. And once they know they can process that file in however-the-fuck-many microseconds, they can extrapolate to Gbps from there

Let em figure it out. Wasting their time is a core strategy in reducing their impact and will to continue cheating

I certainly didn’t share it myself but it’s possible my old boss did!

TBH, in my very personal opinion the third party anti-cheat apps are like 50% placebo. Just makes people feel better. They are very protective of their “secret sauce” but I can say none of them are anywhere close to perfect. The thing they’re best at is taking the easy stuff off our plates so we can focus on the more difficult problems of hardening the game itself and analyzing telemetry.

And that is the patriarchy in a nutshell: a system that is advantageous to men, and then teaches men to consider any critique of that system as a whole, rather than of individuals, a threat or insult to be stamped out with vehemence. The people who do this shit genuinely believe that it’s unfair to be treated this way, never realizing that their attitude provides the infrastructure that allows thereally bad people to continue doing what they do.

It’s like ACAB; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every cop will abuse a minority given the chance, but that nearly every cop actively participates in a system that enables and protects the abuse of minorities, and that it is impossible to distinguish who the select few truly “good” cops are.

For the same of checking uniqueness it’s probably fine to just ignore them. Yeah, it sucks if johndoe@obscure.domain and john.doe@obscure.domain can’t sign the same petition but outside of the big email services I imagine that kind of collision is pretty rare

Right I’m saying I always thought that was an optional feature, determined by the person who created the petition. I don’t think it’s a universal requirement for all change.org petitions

My understanding is that signing a petition and creating an account aren’t necessarily linked, and it’s up to the person who created the petition whether verification is required.