Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.

Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.

Hm, I’m going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It’s a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you’re over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

When you go to the porn site, they check if you’re from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site’s API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying “Yep! This is a valid key!” and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it’s you! If you don’t have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

As a result, you can both prove that you’re over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn’t get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record “Oh this key was used to verify on this site”, they’d have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he’s ever sold to.

So… Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

Well then, time to start fining them under GDPR.

Just once I want to see Republicans help the poor out of sheer hatred. Like “I hate the poor so go damn much! I hate how they’re always complaining about ‘Wahhh my grandma is dying of canceerrrr’ or ‘Wahhhh I have to walk 20 miles to get to school because I can’t afford a carrr!’ . Infact I hate them so much that I’m going to educate them, I’m going to pay them more, I’m going to give them cheap public transport, and I’m going to ensure they’re never poor again! That’ll show the bastards!”

Just absolute venom towards those less fortunate, with a side-order of high quality public services and high living standards, as opposed to pretending to care about the poor and then never actually doing anything useful.

In the case of The Boys, the show is objectively better than the comic book.

Demons are meant to be tempting!

I feel like a sloth demon would take it a step further. You’d be enticed to napping, until one day you wake up from a nap, your face is wrinkled, every one of your friends has forgotten you, you’re alone with only the sloth demon. Your life has been wasted away lying in bed.

Remember that time you said you were gonna travel? You were gonna go to Japan, you said. Too late now. You’re too tired, you don’t have any money. All you have is the Sloth Demon.

One day, your girlfriend calls you for your third nap of the day, and little do you know, you won’t be awakening from that nap.

Your funeral has no attendees, at most you’re a minor headline on a social media post about mental health. Your girlfriend? Gone, gone to find her next victim. Sloth Demons may not go through as many victims as their lustful cousins, but they get every last morsel out of them.

‘Shut the fuck up!’

Could have just traded in the non-working Nubian ship and bought a junker. It’ll get you to Coruscant just fine.

So if he was already so popular he was outshining Clinton and Trump, why didn’t people vote for him? Could it maybe be because he’s only popular in highly populous cities that have relatively few electoral votes when compared to the rural areas where he’s not as popular, and so nationwide polling isn’t indicative of actual electoral success?

Also, as we all know now, presence on major TV news networks doesn’t align with electoral success either. Trump basically cornered the podcast market and he won the election. People don’t watch TV news anymore.

Did Bernie get more or fewer votes than Clinton?

Rigged how, exactly? Were all the voters that didn’t vote for Bernie in on the conspiracy?

Bernie lost, he wasn’t popular enough. Get over it.

Sanders couldn’t even win the Democratic primary. What makes you think he stood a chance at winning the election?

You’ve got some weird teachers. My teachers were all pretty keen to nurture curiosity. When we’d just learned about combustion and how fire needs oxygen, I asked my teacher after the lesson about the sun and how it could be burning without oxygen, and she just explained nuclear fusion and what the sun actually was, and that the words “burning ball of gas” is a bit of a misnomer because that’s not what’s happening.

If you can reliably predict what’s going to be in your field, it’s only a matter of time before you work out a machine for harvesting it.

I wonder how much of it is mismanagement on behalf of Microsoft itself, and how much of it is small-time devs suddenly getting more budget than they’ve ever seen before and deciding to get super ambitious with their next project and then having to scale it back when they can’t actually handle the project?

It’s what happened with EA and Anthem. Bioware suddenly got a shitload of money, couldn’t hack it, had to scale back the project, and it all fell apart.

I 100% guarantee the people who wrote that statement don’t know or care how much effort it would take to build the infrastructure to run their server-side components.

I’m fairly confident that any AAA production uses Infrastructure As Code to spin up infrastructure in their dev and qa environments, so it’s literally just a matter of handing over the Terraform or BICEP and some binaries for any custom code they need to use. I also highly, HIGHLY doubt that the vast majority of game servers are hosted on-prem. They’re most likely either using Azure or AWS.

Unless it’s Ancient Greece! There, if you had a massive dong they’d call you a stupid barbarian.

When I was growing up I knew exactly one goth, and he stank because he never showered. There were no goth girls, there were only grebs.

I just wanna be one of those old timey blacksmiths hitting things on an anvil and getting paid for it. Nowadays though it’s all like “Throw the glowy thing into the bang bang thing and it does all the work for you!”. What if I wanna hit things with a hammer, huh?! What if I like the catharsis that comes with hitting something?!