I saw a story in the #BostonGlobe about how liquor licenses in Boston cost $600,000.
That's ridiculous!
Um, taxi licenses used to be expensive, too…
So why can't some (white, naturally) guys when an app figure out how to just break the law? It worked for Uber and Airbnb with their illegal, unlicensed business.
"Imagine suspects hiding in #LosAngeles. The Army decides to carpet bomb the entire city in the hope of killing suspects. This is what is happening in #Gaza"
Imagine a ruthless gang has been running LA, for years. It attacked, say, the rest of California in brutal raids. So now LA is being bombed relentlessly. Attacking schools and hospitals and residences. Most structures have been damaged if not destroyed. Most residents have been displaced. Famine is setting in.
California is attacking everywhere in LA because the gang hides anywhere—in shools, in hospitals, in residences. Plus, LA people aren't really human, and should go to Mexico.
@ned And don't forget: The people of LA largely LIKE the gang that hides among them. They completely hate the rest of California, and the rest of California hates the people of LA. The bad blood goes back a long time, Sacramento has done a lot of bad stuff over the decades, as has this and related gangs.
(That is, in this analogy. In reality California and LA love each other.)
@ned Gazans are anti-Hamas…to a point. Compared to Israel they love Hamas. In my analogy they are a ruthless gang, and LA knows they are a ruthless gang. There is a limit to how much anyone can like being drilled by a corrupt and ruthless gang, one that has been running things pretty poorly, for years. But they are the enemy of LAs enemy…
Hanas is certainly not as competent, popular, and cudly as Hezbillah. Nor as hapless as the Palestinian Authority.
@ned Yes, but in some neighborhoods I suspect the local gang gets some respect that is not just fear. (I don't hang out in those areas, so I don't really know.)
If I had to choose a SINGLE film as the best overall film ever made at any time in any category, I would without hesitation name "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962). However, to appreciate it fully, it really needs to be seen in its original Super Panavision 70 form on the best theater screen with the best audio system you can find. There are a vast number of reasons for my choice which I will not try detail here right now. I will mention in passing though, that when you watch this epic, keep in mind that (according to the film's editor Anne V. Coates who mentioned this at a screening I attended), there is only a single process shot (that is, an effects shot) in the entire film, which is a shot of the sun. Beyond that, everything and everyone you see is real. No CGI of course. No mattes. Fantastic.
@lauren Sure, "real" for some values of "real". And only one process shot is notable. But don't get carried away.
Next you'll say "photographs don't lie" (assuming no fancy darkroom techniques) or come up with genre of minimally scripted television and call it "reality TV". Heck, if people started believing "reality TV" be real…things could get out of hand. Some resulting star could gain respect and go into politics, maybe even people discarding any belief in reality itself.
Just got my new passport. Every time I renew, the new one comes with more sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features than the last one. It's an astonishingly secure document for something produced on-demand at scale (relatively) inexpensively.
(I just noticed the font used to print your name, expiration date, etc has a little star in the white space inside the letter A).
In the early days of computer terminals, it was not uncommon to have keyboards that featured no more than "2-key rollover". That meant that if you hit more than 2 keys closely together -- common with touch typing -- the results would be, well, not what you wanted.
This was, however, better than the situation with IBM keypunches, which had mechanical keyboards with 1-key rollover. That is, you could only type one character at a time, and all other keys were physically locked out until you released the first key.
To the extent that search engines know which content is created by generative AI, they should offer a search parameter to users that excludes all known AI-generated content in search results. Where possible, a sticky "never show me AI-generated content" option should also be available. #Google
@lauren But what if the AI generated page has doubleclick ads on it, ads that Google makes money off of? You expect them to leave that money on the table? What kind of "data driven" management could permit that?
If AT&T figured they could make more money from crypto than from telecom they'd probably turn off all their telecom services and rebrand appropriately. They don't give a damn about their customers' safety, security, or anything beyond how much money they can be squeezed for. For all the faults of the old Bell System, they WERE devoted to public service. Now AT&T is just busloads of evil clowns.
@lauren The old AT&T was a regulated monopoly, and they took their responsibilities seriously.
The thing currently called AT&T today is full of "data driven" MBAs. And they keep discovering there are regulations encumbering them. And someone again has to explain what "regulations" are…and the MBAs shocked!
I blame Reagan. It's not all on him, but I'll let him be the poster child.
(Same way I consider "Hot Pockets" the poster child for food industry killing us with addiction and obesity.)
AT&T is sending out letters warning they want to kill virtually all landlines (and perhaps related data circuits where fiber is unavailable) across essentially their entire coverage area throughout California. This would have devastating effects. Related CPUC meetings will be taking place through March.
Landlines provide crucial services for individuals, businesses, and other organizations in a wide variety of situations -- not just emergencies when cellular and Internet service tends to rapidly fail, but also for vast numbers of people in areas with poor, unreliable, or in many cases (even in large sections of major cities!) NO cell service, NO fiber, etc.
Landlines often provide the only available communication in a wide variety of security and safety situations, from elevators to interior spaces of all sorts where cell service simply doesn't work.
Many disabled and other persons have crucial equipment that depends on landlines. Often they are not tech-savvy and do not have friends or relatives to help them through forced technology changes.
AT&T has been shirking its public safety responsibilities for years, while still leveraging their effective monopoly on services in so many areas.
Their new effort must be stopped. I'll have much more to say about this as the situation progresses.
@interpipes@lauren I finally ported my wireline service at home to VoIP because it wasn't reliable. Just a couple blocks from the nearest "central office", but Verizon was out of good working copper pairs on my street. New England weather (sometimes wet, sometimes dry, sometimes freezing, sometimes hot—sometimes cycling through several of those in a short time) is hard on such infrastructure, and without spending on maintenance, it quits working.
Aha, my friend @W2AYZ sent me a photo of his ham radio bicycle trailer, full mobile radio with antenna mounted in a bicycle trailer (with batteries) -- contemplating my own setup, just because... #hamradio#BikeTooter
Dame Agatha Christie died #OTD in 1976. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. via @wikipedia
@gutenberg_org@wikipedia I think she wrote more than that, my brother was looking at the bookshelf at our parents' house and darts he counted more than that.
A regular e-mail I get from the folks at @TheConversationUS had intriguing subject "Church without God", a new movement, because church isn't all about God. It can be a valuable community, something atheists want too.
When I was a kid—a long time ago—such things did exist. Called "Unitarian Fellowships", they weren't opposed to God (as many angry, out-of-the-closet atheist are today), but God was pretty optional.
At least my experience, back when. Nice people, being good, not afraid of a god.
I was reminded today of the moment Dennis Ritchie fought the lawyers and won. They were reprinting the Unix ACM paper and the new trademark rules required that he change "PDP-11 Unix file system" into "PDP-11™ computer system UNIX™ system file system" in the reprint. He prevailed but only after agreeing to put Unix in italics, uppercase, and adorned with ™ at its first appearance. A win, though, really.
What's wrong with this design? Pressure pushes the plug out of the cabin instead of holding it in place. There can be 20,000 lbs of force on the plug depending on the inside/outside pressure differential. (psi * length in inches * width in inches).
@penguin42@BrucePerens_K6BP Correction: You are right. According to an LA Times story bolts that were to prevent "shifting up then blowing open are missing".
Looks like Boeing did a cheat and the door plug has a slide up and down feature to get specific bits of the door on the inside of specific bits of the plane. But the door plug must have slid some, at 16,000 feet.
Boeing engineering used to be belt-and-suspenders operation, but MBAs correctly computed suspenders cost money.
#37c3 is over and now it is probably the right moment to ask how you #health status changed because of travelling to/from the event and/or joining the congress in person. #mask#ffp2#ffp3
Please note, it's not about #COVID only. At my last Congress, I missed 1½ days because of #Congressseuche and this was long before COVID.