litchralee @ litchralee @sh.itjust.works

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It's unclear if you mean an outdoor faucet appearing out the side of a house, or a freestanding garden spigot. But in either case, the full solution often involves replacing the spigot with a frost-free spigot. It prevents freezing by having the valve located somewhere warmer, such as within the house or underground.

The normal handle will turn a long rod connected to the valve, and when closed will drain the excess water out the spigot, leaving no water outside or above ground that can freeze. The freestanding spigot has the complication of needing an underground gravel base to drain the excess water into.

An alternative might be to use an air compressor to force water out of your spigots, as part of annual winterization. This only works if you don't plan to use the faucet during the cold season, though.

I'm going to take a first stab at some parts of the question.

Regarding rheostat vs resistor, I don't think one term replaces the other. In modern terminology, a rheostat refers to a two-lead device that varies in resistance. Whereas a resistor implies a fixed resistance. Rheostat brakes would make sense, since a fixed amount of braking current would be... unusual. "Variable resistance brakes" would mean the same, but is longer.

For cycles vs Hertz, I've not personally come across a technical reference which only listed "cycles". Rather, old radios often list "cycles per second" when documenting the intermediate frequency, for example. So compared to writing "cycles per second" or "cps" over and over, Hertz is much shorter and easily abbreviates as Hz (eg MHz, kHz).

For condenser vs capacitor, I honestly haven't any idea. I'm also keen to see some other answers to this question.

I understand where you're coming from, and fully agree that anytime someone goes to prison for something they didn't do, society is doubly worse off: once because the wrong person has been jailed, and once more because the real culprit has evaded justice.

That said, what you're describing is an issue with the practice of plea bargaining, not necessarily with giving less time for defendants pleading guilty. There are very compelling arguments that we should ban plea bargaining, as it's extremely one-sided, among other things. But while plea bargaining is partly enabled because the sentencing guidelines allow leniency for pleading guilty, I would argue we should keep the latter.

As a society, we should incentivize people to voluntarily come forward and atone for their crimes. If a murderer pleads guilty and divulges the location of the buried body, the victim's family can have a proper funeral service. But if that murderer instead flees, there's a chance that officers can make an arrest, but there's also a chance of successfully evading the law. Even if taken into custody, there's no requirement that a hardened murderer needs to reveal the burial location, and our laws prohibit beating that answer out of anyone.

A principle in law is that different criminal behavior should be punished proportionally. Ruthless killing versus accidental death. An accident versus indifference to human life. A clouded conscience versus a maligned intention toward the victim's family during a prolonged trial. This is what the sentencing guidelines seek to implement, moral hazards be darned.

I'm not sure I'd characterize any of the figures as "a super high chance of getting out of it", unless you mean leaving in handcuffs. Bear in mind that defendants that plead not-guilty but are then found guilty at trial get a worse penalty than if they had pleaded guilty in the first place. The federal sentencing guidelines intentionally recognize that people who plead guilty are taking some responsibility for their crime, and so it shaves a few months off.

Defense attorneys are supposed to help a defendant weigh the bird in hand (a plea deal with the prosecutors) against the two birds in the bush (prospect of acquittal at trial). And that's only if the prosecutor wants to even do a deal: they don't have to, since sometimes justice cannot be served by anything less than a jury verdict. Other times, a lack of a plea deal is part of looking "tough on crime" or to set an example.

I phrased it that way because I'm also unsure as to how "ex-convict" should be used and how most people use it. I've heard other people say it to mean anyone who has been released from prison, although that doesn't make much sense for someone who just serves their time.

As a result, so far as I'm aware, it's colloquially ambiguous, and lawyers and jurists may have a more stringent definition they might use.

In the Pew Research article? I arrived at a trial acquittal rate of about 17%.

In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%).

While that's still about 1 chance in 5, that's still some really bad odds when it comes to the matter of possibly being imprisoned. I imagine most Americans think they'd have better odds than that, but the data shows otherwise, to a scary degree.

Formally speaking, a conviction will attach once a defendant is found guilty by a trial court. Even while one or more appeals may be ongoing, it is accurate to describe the defendant as convicted. The status of a federal conviction sticks until such time the conviction is judicially overturned by a successful appeal, or when pardoned by the executive. But not clemency, which is a reduction in the penalty by the executive, but retains the conviction.

A person who has their conviction overturned or pardoned can no longer be accurately described as convicted. Although colloquially, it's unclear if "ex-convict" is an acceptable description or not.

The latter group of defendants -- the ones convicted by a jury -- also receive heavier sentences, since the federal sentencing guidelines recommend that defendants pleading guilty before trial get a reduced severity score, potentially shaving months off the sentence, or omitting the custodial sentence entirely, replaced by probation.

Compared to the total number of federal defendants (using 2022 data), there appears to have been a slightly higher rate here of going to trial than defendants overall. Both sets demonstrate that when federal prosecutors bring cases, they don't tend to miss. Also demonstrated is how federal trials rarely result in an acquittal.

Does this mean judges and juries are biased against federal defendants? Likely not, since again: federal prosecutors tend to only pursue a case they know they can win. Knowing this, it must be a tough job for federal public defence lawyers but someone has to do it.

Specifically for toilet bowls, if you find that a stain won't shift even after using a normal toilet bowl cleaner solution and a normal toilet brush, don't try to brush harder as this will scratch the porcelain surface. Also don't try something abrasive like steel wool or the green/blue side of a kitchen sponge.

Instead, what you want to do is dissolve the stain. Others have suggested CLR and that might work. But if not, then you can obtain "acidic toilet bowl cleaner", which contains hydrochloric acid, aka muriatic acid. This will remove most anything normally staining a toilet bowl, but make sure you handle it sturdily and carefully; it can mess you up. Gloves and eye protection are highly recommended, until the bowl is brushed, the stain is gone, and the bowl is flushed. Turn on the bathroom fan or open a window for ventilation during and after cleaning.

In general, for difficult cleaning jobs, don't try to clean harder, but clean smarter. If you're putting your whole body weight into a towel or a brush, there's almost certainly an easier way. Good luck!

Like many things, it's very fact-intensive, varying in different circumstances. As others have noted, the abilities of the person undertaking the decompilation will influence the decision. But so will strategy: the overall goal can drive how decompilation is approached.

For example, suppose you're working for an airline company and need to rewrite some software used on an ancient IBM System/360 machine and was written in the COBOL language, for which no source code is available and you cannot find many people who even know COBOL. Here, since the task is to rewrite the code, decompilation is just to tell you how it works and then you'll want to write the new program in a modern language. It may be useful to decompile to a different language if such a decompiler is available, say to the C language, which you better understand.

Sure, it may be that C isn't what the new program will be written in, but if your C reading skills are sufficient, then this is a valid strategy.

The skill of a decompiling engineer -- or any engineer really -- is leveraging your skills and your tools to tractably attack the difficult problem at hand. Many equally-skilled engineers can plausibly approach the same problem differently.

The implicit assumption with decompiling code is that the goal is either to inspect how the code works, or to try compiling for a different machine. I'll try to explain why the latter is quite difficult.

As you said, compilation to machine code only keeps the details needed for the CPU to accomplish what was instructed. And indeed, that is supposed to be efficient to run on that CPU, by reason of being targeted exactly for that CPU. But when decompiling, the resulting code will reflect the specificity to that same CPU. If you then try to compile that code for a different CPU, it will likely work, but will likely be inefficient because the second CPU's unique advantages won't be leveraged.

To use an example, consider how someone might divide two large numbers. Person A learned long division in school, and so takes each number and breaks it down into a series of smaller multiplications and subtractions. Person B learned to do division using a calculator, which just involves entering the two numbers and requesting that they be divided.

Trying to do division by blindly giving Person B that series of multiplications and subtractions to do on the calculator is extremely inefficient because Person B knows how to do division easily. But Person B is following Person A's methods, without knowing that the whole point of this exercise is to just divide the two original numbers. Compilation loses context and intent, which cannot be recovered from decompilation, for non-trivial programs.

Here is an example why source code is useful when it provides context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code . Very few people would be able to figure out how this works from just the machine code.

I recall watching a documentary (on Curiosity Stream maybe? I'm no longer subscribed) on data storage longevity. It covered DNA storage, which I think this PBS video w/ transcript provides more recent coverage of its developments. As well as holographic storage, which I could only find the Wikipedia page for.

As for which one I think might be the future, it's tough to say. Tape is pretty good and cheap but slow for offline storage. Archival media will probably end up all being offline storage, although I could see a case for holographic/optical storage being near line. Future online storage will probably remain a tough pickle: cheap, plentiful, fast; select at most two, maybe.

If the server is sent a signal to shutdown due to a grid outage, who is telling it the grid was restored?

Ah, I see I forgot to explain a crucial step. When the UPS detects that grid power is lost, it sends a notification to the OS. In your case, it is received by apcupsd. What happens now is a two step process: 1) the UPS is instructed to power down after a fixed time period -- one longer than it would take for the OS to shut down, and 2) the OS is instructed to shut down. Here is one example of how someone has configured their machine like this. The UPS will stay off until grid power is restored.

In this way, the server will indeed lose power, shortly after the OS has already shut down. You should be able to configure the relevant delay parameters in apcupsd to preserve however much battery state you need to survive multiple grid events.

The reason the UPS is configured with a fixed time limit -- as opposed to, say, waiting until power draw drops below some number of watts -- is that it's easy and cheap to implement, and it's deterministic. Think about what would happen if an NFS mount or something got stuck during shutdown, thereby running down the battery, ending up with the very unexpected power loss the UPS was meant to avoid. Maybe all the local filesystems were properly unmounted in time, but when booting up later and mounting the filesystems, a second grid fault and a depleted battery state could result in data loss. Here, the risk of accidentally cutting off the shutdown procedure is balanced with the risk of another fault on power up.

Answering the question directly, your intuition is right that you'll want to limit the ways that your machine can be exploited. Since this is a Dell machine, I would think iDRAC is well suited to be the control mechanism here. iDRAC can accept SNMP commands and some newer versions can receive REST API calls.

But stepping back for a moment, is there any reason why you cannot configure the "AC Power Recovery" option in the system setup to boot the machine when power is restored? The default behavior is to remain as it was but you can configure it to always boot up.

From your description, it sounds like your APC unit notifies the server that the grid is down, which results in the OS shutting down. Ostensibly, the APC unit will soon diminish its battery supply and then the r320 will be without AC power. When the grid comes back up, the r320 will receive AC power and can then react by booting up, if so configured. Is this not feasible?

I love this fact so much. MN is based. Long live l'Etoile du Nord!

Trademark law addresses confusion in commerce. So if someone boarded a flight based in part on the flag of the destination, hoping to reach the sunny shores of San Diego but instead landed at the cold shores at Duluth, then perhaps whoever drew up the ad for that flight might be liable for something closer to fraud rather than trademark violations. Maybe the Visit California department could raise a trademark challenge, but that's an uphill battle because it's not disallowed to use a state flag in other situations.

Texas Roadhouse, a chain of BBQ restaurants, flies the Texas flag on their buildings. And while they do heavily lean into the whole Texan thing, no one is under the impression that Texas Roadhouse is an official arm of the State of Texas, to proselytize the BBQ religion to people far and wide, or some such.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to have some fun with this idea.

A cursory review of the relevant California Government Code section 420 -- blaze it! -- provides a description of the California state flag, and also a picture of it. Or it would in the print version of the code. While there doesn't appear to be a specific bit of law which authorizes the state to retain the copyright on the flag, there is case law which disallows the state from retaining copyright for "government documents", with exceptions which wouldn't apply here. So it's reasonable to assume that California doesn't have the copyright on its state flag, with it likely being in the public domain.

This would suggest that Minnesota could indeed use the flag to mean something else, the same way anyone can with public domain material. Now, if this occurs outside of California, that state could not enforce any sort of rules pertaining to how the flag is used. Even within the state, California's authority to control how public domain material -- or more broadly, any material at all -- is circumscribed by the First Amendment in any case. The exception would be for those agencies and subdivisions of the state itself, which it can and does control. See Gov Code section 435, which disallows cities from having confusingly similar flags. The other exception would be uses of the flag which perpetuate fraud or some other related crime, since then it's not the speech being punished but the conduct, which happens to involve a flag-related expression. But neither of these really speak to the flag being used by another sovereign entity within the state.

Supposing for a second -- and this is where we're really departing from reality -- the several states had embassies at each other's state capitals, but without the equivalent protections afforded by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationships. And by that, I mean each state buys land in other states, without creating sovereignty issues, owning that land as any other individual or corporation could. In such a case, if the Minnesota Embassy in Sacramento were to fly the flag of California as its own, what could California do? If they drafted a law like section 435 that applies to individuals, the First Amendment would present a barrier. If the law applies to out-of-state entities, it might run against the Dormant Commerce Clause, in a very broad interpretation of interstate commerce. If they apply it to all sovereign entities operating within the state -- which would include the Minnesota Embassy, since the State of Minnesota owns it -- then the thorny question of state sovereign immunity in state court would arise.

In a California state court, would the State of Minnesota have sovereign immunity? If instead of Minnesota, it were a foreign country like Scotland, the answer would be a resounding yes. But here is a state vs state issue. The proper venue would be a court with original jurisdiction over states, and there's only one of those: the US Supreme Court.

As to what the state of California would assert as a cause of action? I suppose they could raise a criminal violation of their freshly-drafted law, with the risk of devolving into whether a US State has its own rights of free speech, which other states must respect. Alternatively, they could raise an action in equity, such as a tort (MN's use of the flag is costing CA somehow) or defamation (MN's use of the flag asserts falsehoods about CA).

At this point, we're deep into legal fanfiction and it's time to stop haha. Needless to say, I think the situation in real life would be messy if it were to happen.

HDDs also support ATA Secure Erase, although it will take a few hours rather than the few minutes it would wirh an SSD.

There will always be some instructors that are more dogmatic than pragmatic. All the same, there will be instructors that have pearls of wisdom to offer. Regarding the "break" and "continue" keywords, this lays somewhere in the middle.

One of the purposes of higher-level programming language is to remove from the low-level, machine-specific language of assembly, by offering other, more descriptive constructs, like "while", "for", and "switch". In the C language, "break" is almost mandatory in a "switch" statement but only occasionally shows up in a "for" loop, excepting drivers. In Python, "break" only exists in loops, but there are lots of loops which can be replaced more efficiently with comprehensions, so "break" can be a sign of poorly organized logic.

If you can specify which programming language you're learning, it would help to understand what your instructor might have meant to teach.