SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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1,084

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm assuming you know something effective to do about it? Let's go do it! Right now!

Just a couple more minutes to beat Storm Thurmond's record!

There's the Sonoff ZBMINIR2 device. You install it between a physical switch and the wiring, and then tuck it into the electrical box. It has three different modes:

1. As a relay, so that you can control the light either with the physical switch or by ZigBee. Works just like normal when the server is down.
2. Detached mode, so toggling the physical switch sends a ZigBee message to trigger an action on the server, and the server controls the light.
3. Like 2, but the light socket is always powered so it supports a smart bulb.

I have a couple, and they're great. They just don't support dimming.

If you can't explain it, then it's not all that simple. Maybe don't denigrate millions of men as "too afraid of rejection," eh?

So which is it? Pay attention to social cues, or ignore them and take a shot anyway?

This doesn't make any sense. So we should ignore the cues that they're not interested and take our shot anyway, even though men ignoring signs of disinterest is annoying, and they love getting attention from men who pay heed to their boundaries when the boundary is not wanting our attention? Or should we take no for an answer and handle rejection gracefully by not hitting on them when they're not interested, because that's the proper way to hit on women?

Or is it because we've been told that women are sick of being hit on all the time?

As others have said, it's important to distinguish different types of intellectual property laws. A patent is protection for a process or mechanism, which doesn't apply to the shape of the bar. I doubt that there would have been a patent, because mold-making is an ancient art, and pretty straightforward. It wouldn't be an innovation to make an oval mold.

A copyright is protection for a tangible recording of an expressive work; writing, music, film, et cetera. It doesn't apply to goods. It would apply to a designer's drawing of the shape of the bar, but not the shape, nor the bar itself.

What might apply is a trademark, which is protection for the use of some distinguishing feature to identify a product or brand in the marketplace. Trademarks are supposedly about preventing consumer confusion about whom they are buying from. They arise from customary use, meaning that a product or service has to be sold with that mark for them to exist. Courts have recognized all sorts of things as trademarks: in addition to logos and names, also color schemes, shapes, even scents.

Thing is, a trademark doesn't have to be registered with the USPTO to offer protection. Registration just means that the Office has accepted it as a trademark, so that use of it by others is presumptively an infringement. Without registering it, an entity would have to sue to get a court to issue a finding of infringement.

So hypothetically, the shape of a Dove beauty bar could be a trademark, even if it's not currently registered with the USPTO. However, the prospects aren't that great, IMO, because oval is a pretty common shape, and Dove distinguishes itself with the prominent bird-shaped logo more than the shape of the bar.

As long as all of the complex, industrial supply chains that keep cars fueled and maintained somehow survived the apocalypse. Even keeping air in the tires is going to be a major challenge pretty quickly, much less replacing a flat.

One that Linux should've had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they're backwards-compatible with, so new versions don't necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren't present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn't need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

Believe as you wish, but if a person works for a boss that they know to be a sex trafficker, doing things sex-trafficking-adjacent, or at least illegal, for him, that's good enough for me to declare that person a sex-trafficking POS.

Also, I don't think for a microsecond that goons given this kind of power and impunity over detainees are going to refrain from sexual assault. We just haven't heard about it yet (this time).

But, well, pick your lane.

It's the same principle as what you call 9 people at a table with a Nazi. These agents deserve no nuance.

Well, President Musk has been accused of helping Epstein's trafficking, we know for sure that his Oval Office puppet was involved.

Well, you did out yourself.

Assuming they're federal agents, then yes.

We got a Nazi here.

In about 2018, I think, a team of researchers put together a mathematical model of how markets work. What they found is that wealth just naturally accumulates to a few people. It's inherent to how markets work, and it's more or less at random; in their simulation runs, every person started out in an equal position.

It's all luck. It doesn't even take being in the right place at the right time, although that helps. Since us humans operate on narratives and just-world fallacies, it's really easy for us to construct a post hoc story about why a certain billionaire succeeded. But it's all luck.

(I remember that I read about this research in Scientific American, but I don't have the link handy.)

ZFS is more than just a filesystem, it's a fully-integrated disk management system which replaces mdadm, LVM, LUKS, nfsd, rsync, as well as the filesystem. It's great for NAS boxes and file servers, since you can give it a big pile o' disks, and it slices and dices, and offers simple commands to create whatever volumes you need.

If I remember this site correctly from back then, it was one of those run by idiots that made you upload a PDF of your résumé, and then enter all of the same info in web forms. This tracks.

Speaking of hard water, I recently installed a water conditioner/descaler instead of replacing my dead water softener. It's an electronic device that mounts on the water supply pipe, and uses a couple of wire coils to create an electric field that makes the calcium ions in the hard water stick to each other instead of pipes and fixtures. I was skeptical, because the description of how it works sounds a lot like many woo-woo devices that use "magnetic fields" to do... something. But I read up on water descalers, and all of the information that I found was very straightforward, listing the pro's and con's of descalers versus softeners.

And it works! I checked the water utility reports for the wells which serve my area, and found that they're all "very hard," but quite low on manganese. Therefore, I don't mind that the minerals stay in the water; they just go down the drain instead of building up on things. It's actually starting to dissolve the scale buildup on my faucets, slowly. No need for vinegar to have soft fabric out of the laundry, either. I like that it descales all of the water in the house, so I don't have to bother about which is softened and which is not. It was also cheaper than a water softener, and I don't have to buy salt regularly. Also, it's an older house with galvanized pipes, which soft water will corrode.

Anyway, random aside on hard water.