J/K Studios recently released "Go West!" It's a comedy about the Oregon Trail by a great sketch comedy group. The movie-format is clearly not their forte but check out their sketch comedy--it's awesome.

Reviving a long-dormant Slashdot account to post my cautionary tale. My parents both passed away in a car accident in May, on an extended trip out-of-state. Since then, I've struggled to get past passwords and 2FA to access online accounts for a variety of reasons from paying bills to accessing backed-up family photos.

Fortunately my dad had a reasonably recent backup of both my parents' laptops on an external drive with no password, which gave me access to a lot of documents like his journal and photos.

He also kept a list of passwords in an Excel spreadsheet which got me into several accounts and halfway into others that required 2FA. Even if that hadn't been on his backup SDD, he emailed a copy of it to me and one of my sisters before leaving on the trip they never returned from.

I guessed the pattern lock on my mom's phone which unlocked access to more photos, and my dad wrote down his phone/computer PIN on a scrap of paper somewhere in his belongings.

Long story short: make it easy on your executor/trustee(s). Put your master password in a letter in your files, preferably close to your will. Include your phone PIN/pattern/password, as well as backup 2FA codes to your main accounts in case the phone is lost (we were lucky their phones were functional after the accident--not everyone may be so fortunate).

Random thought: what we call "instinct" may be future knowledge retrotransmitted.

Tangential note: Utah has a high population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and the church has published official releases encouraging vaccination and mask-wearing. That might explain Utah's anomalous position. No idea about Rhode Island.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsroom.churchofjesus...

I'm assuming you meant "tolkien callbacks"? ;)

When I hear a proclamation like this from Anonymous, I can't help the following passage from Mowgli coming to mind...

They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own,
but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep,
and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are
without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and
pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the
jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all
is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not
drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do
not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die.

No, that's not what Mormons believe. Perhaps you're thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe that 144,000 will go to heaven?

That's a compelling counter-argument.

Let me give you the view of a Mormon.

God gave Adam and Eve two commandments. 1) Don't eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. 2) Multiply and replenish the Earth.

Unlike most other Christian religions (in my understanding), Mormons don't believe that Adam and Eve were able to have children in the Garden of Eden. It was a place of innocence, free from sin and pain, and that includes the pain of childbirth. However, without childbirth, the plan of God to populate a world with his children would be frustrated.

Enter the commandments above. God, being perfectly just, couldn't subject humanity to the pain of childbirth and mortality in general unless they "chose" it by breaking a commandment--eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve couldn't fulfill the second commandment, to have children, unless they broke the first commandment.

There's no conflict between the commandments--there was no time limit given on the second commandment, so Adam and Eve could have lived eternally in the Garden of Eden without having children, yet never breaking the commandment. Never fulfilling it as well, of course.

Eve made a choice. A fully conscious, deliberate, logical choice. She chose to break the first commandment, allowing a just God to subject her pain, to allow her to "fall" from her perfect, immortal state to a mortal state and fulfill the second commandment. Adam, being logical, chose to support her in that action.

There was no punishment, no jerkiness, just a perfect fulfilling of God's plan from all the parties involved.

My work (5D Robotics) decided to celebrate Christmas by dressing up our lawyer as Santa and driving a row of robots down the street: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7kSbmdLkik . Oh yeah, and there's an elf on a unicycle.

Just find your nearest Mormon neighbor and mooch off them.

Are the majority of us genuinely possessed of such remarkable self-control? Or might some of these self-reported stoics be exercising a bit of selective memory?

Just because the submitter has a temper and a foul mouth doesn't mean everyone does...

You're not the customer, the websites are. They have no reason to ask the visitors to the websites to opt in or out.

There's nothing worth "getting" at the Lagrange points, or geosynchronous orbit, or any number of places. That doesn't mean it's not worth going there.

By that logic, I hate to break it to you but all computers are already sentient. Ever take a hammer to a computer? That noise it makes is proof of its sentience.