TauZero @ TauZero @mander.xyz

Posts

7

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297

Joined

2 yr. ago

probably is illegal in well developed countries

That's indeed the case here! I always found the wording of it cute:

New York City Administrative Code, Title 10: Public Safety, § 10-108 Regulation of sound devices or apparatus

It is hereby declared that the use or operation of any radio device or apparatus or any device or apparatus for the amplification of sounds from any radio, phonograph or other sound-making or sound-producing device, or any device or apparatus for the reproduction or amplification of the human voice or other sounds, in front of or outside of any building, place or premises, or in or through any window, doorway or opening of such building, place or premises, ... is detrimental to the health, welfare and safety of the inhabitants of the city. ... It shall be unlawful for any person to use or operate any sound device or apparatus in, on, near or adjacent to any public street, park or place, for commercial and business advertising purpose.

Doesn't mean it doesn't happen ALL THE TIME in some parts of town.

Single-use plastic packaging! All packaging now comes in a set of standard ISO sizes and satisfying some engineering constraints and requirements. You get a Coke from a convenience store - it comes as a 0.5L glass bottle. You finish with it, put it on a rack inside the store with all the other empty 0.5L bottles to be taken back to the factory to be washed and inspected for chips and reused. It could be filled with Pepsi next time! Just slap on a new paper label.

I have played through Skyrim and No Man's Sky in Linux VR. Valve has done a great job keeping up the development of Linux Steam VR, especially considering how low its market share is. It's part of their nuclear option against Microsoft and Windows or something.

I too think having factors of 3 and 4 would be neat, which just proves we should change our number system to base 12, as somebody else in the thread suggested 😊.

The picture is clearly at the very least a composite, because there are zero clouds anywhere. I was skeptical whether it can be called a "photo". Given how clear the unlit terrain is, even in the ocean around the Bahamas for example, I thought it must have been a visualization, or a photo of daytime terrain shaded blue and overlaid with a map of nighttime lights. But I found the actual source:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/79765/night-lights-2012-map
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/79000/79765/dnb_land_ocean_ice.2012.13500x13500.B1.jpg
It really is a (composite) photo taken by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, whose cameras are so sensitive they can see reflected moonlight and "the nocturnal glow produced by Earth's atmosphere", albeit partially in the infrared.

This new image of the Earth at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.

The nighttime view of Earth was made possible by the “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as gas flares, auroras, wildfires, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

I'm unsure though what "assembled from data" means exactly. At the very least the colors are artificial, shifted from the infrared-to-green range of the camera into human visual range. This page describes some more how the sensor functions, along with raw photos:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/IntotheBlack

That's true! Receipt checks can get lost! I was replying to "They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen" though. The "can't" is a store policy thing, not a law thing.

The fractions don't help me when I go to the grocery store and unit price of one bag of nuts is "per pound" and the unit price of another is "per ounce". You'd better be good at dividing by 16 in your head if you want to price-compare! And you'd better be good at remembering how many fluid ounces are in a quart when you go to the olive oil aisle (hint: it's not 16).

American says: "We have democracy in our country. I can stand in front of the White House and shout "Down with Reagan!" and I will not be punished". Soviet replies: "Oh, not a big deal, we also have democracy. I can stand in the Red Square and shout "Down with Reagan!" and I will not be punished either."

a new (imo better!) way to govern and distribute power in online services

I'd argue federation is the old way, the original way the internet was built, and the centralized walled-garden ecosystems ran by FAANG is the new way. Email, usenet, even http and world wide web itself are examples of federation.

To say the purpose of life is to reproduce is like saying the purpose of a raindrop is to keep falling down. We should not confuse purpose with cause! Natural selection for self-replication is how we ended up here, but, as you said, we have free will to choose where we go next.

Shopkeeper's privilege does exist, many stores simply choose not to exercise it.

Fucking R-rated maps...

I'm guessing they do not want you to go in and take photos of the screen because they cannot control the safety of PHI of other patients - like if you go in behind the counter and somebody else's profile was pulled up on another screen that ends up in your photo, or you rush to the keyboard and start flipping through records before they can stop you. It is reasonable to expect to receive copies of your PHI in paper or electronic (email? flashdrive?) form, I wouldn't demand more.

What is odd is that the papers they have given you are missing dates. I am guessing this is not malicious intent to deceive on their part, but rather some odd deficiency with their computer system which they are too embarrassed/unable to explain. When it prints it doesn't come out the way it shows on the screen. Given how they have tried to fix the problem by writing in the dates manually, they are not trying to hide the dates per se. I would just let it go and accept the papers as is, unless you have specific reason to believe the dates are incorrect. You could even ask them to write a statement at the bottom to the effect of "dates are correct as shown, written by hand to circumvent a computer problem" with the office signature/stamp. Then even if it comes to legal proceedings or whatever, the court can treat handwritten documents the same as printed ones.

As a point of data, I've had a no-photo policy for 20 years, and haven't started missing it yet.

Forbidden Planet (the original black and white is best but the color version is okay too)

Which one is the black and white version? The original Forbidden Planet (1956) was already in color, which is why maybe it's easy to misremember it in black and white it being so early. There has not been a remake yet, unless you count the Star Trek franchise itself 😄.

Menthol makes it easier to start smoking, to continue being a smoker for longer than the person would have done otherwise, and to smoke more, because it makes smoking less irritating and tastes better. You are correct in that the menthol molecule itself is not a carcinogen.

That means no one was interested. I get the same on dating sites.

It never kicks in for me when it should, but I figured out I can force trigger it manually with the magic SysRq key (Alt+SysRq+F, needs to be enabled first), which instantly recovers my system when it starts freezing from memory pressure.

I was gonna reply the "S" in "ISO" stands for "standardization" but apparently ISO doesn't stand for anything.

The yyyy-mm-dd format (ISO 8601) is the only one that is unambiguous, because no one so far in history has ever used the yyyy-dd-mm format (at least until some xkcd-reading jokester probably will start using it just out of spite). I use ISO 8601 everywhere. It has the additional benefit that filenames get sorted correctly in lexographical order.