frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik,

There’s an entire corpus of books and documents critiquing the current system and on how a society based on mutual aid would work. None of them “expect everything to be provided for free”.

frezik, (edited )

2d printers need to be a lot more precise. 300dpi means each dot is placed with less than a tenth of a mm, and that’s not even particularly impressive for a 2d printer. 3d printers get away with a lot more slop than that.

That’s only talking about greyscale. Color requires precise alignment of the cartridges for at least 4 base colors (higher end photo printers have even more) , and the mix of those colors must be carefully controlled to get accurate output.

frezik,

Christopher Tolkien was blocking a lot of things. Even the Jackson films sneaked by and wouldn’t have been made of he could have stopped it.

He’s dead now, and the new heirs to the rights like money. They also have about 20 years before the copyright expires. Which isn’t that long; that’s about as much time between now and the Jackson films. To keep ahead of the clock, they’re greenlighting a lot of garbage and risk running their franchise into the ground.

frezik,

There was a guy who did this with a lawn chair and helium ballons. Yes, he did get fined by the FAA.

frezik,

Doing that for Trademark law is why they didn’t bother lobbying for longer copyright this time. They could protect their Mouse trademark without relying on Steamboat Willy like they did before.

frezik,

I could have sworn he said he had a legal degree in his home country of Australia, but I can’t find any evidence of it now.

frezik,

Helps that HBomberGuy hasn’t posted endless rounds of response videos. That’s how you milk the drama for views.

Conversely, I’m getting a little tired of Karl Jobst mostly becoming a drama channel against fraudsters like Billy Mitchell or the Open Hand Charity. Those guys do deserve it, but it’s sucking oxygen away from Jobst’s usual commentary on speed running techniques. He’s also working outside his specialty–these are American cases, and he’s a lawyer under Australian law–and not all his claims carry weight.

frezik,

He was sued by Billy, yes, but the charity case is unrelated.

frezik,

As is usually the case for this kind of thing, there are tons of good chocolates from America. They just don’t come from major brand names.

For that matter, Nestlé is Swiss.

frezik,

That’s a myth. Nobody is going to claim Hershey’s is quality chocolate, but they don’t use sour milk. Nor does American chocolate in general.

frezik,

Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.

If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.

frezik,

Major engineering organizations, like the IEEE or the ASME, often require degrees, but do have exceptions built into the rules for on the job experience. So this does happen, and regularly enough that there’s consideration for it.

frezik,

Back in the 90s, I was asked to critique a local business web site. I noticed a picture wasn’t loading correctly on Netscape Navigator when it was working fine on IE. Turned out, the designer had stuck in a 5MB BMP image. This when a whole lot of people were still on 56K modems.

frezik,

Odd they bring up TIFF. That one is more like a container format that can hold many different types of images.

frezik,

PNG mainly lacked support from Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Photoshop). IE didn’t handle PNG transparency, while Photoshop had a shitty PNG implementation that tended to produce files larger than an equivalent GIF. Held back widespread adoption for almost a decade.

frezik, (edited )

GIF doesn’t have transparency (Edit: more accurately, ranges of transparency). I thought that was the joke.

frezik,

You can leave the password blank. Though that does mean anyone driving by your house might have their phone or whatever automatically connect to it. A few devices also don’t seem to like blank passwords (I think the Wii refused to connect that way).

A simple password is fine. Keeps completely random people out, and devices will connect OK. Edge-based security is flawed, anyway.

frezik,

I have a randomly generated password for my wifi (mostly historical reasons), but I hang QR codes around for it. Unfortunately, not enough devices support that sort of thing.

frezik,

Jokes on them. WPA2 length limit is 63 characters. It might let you put in one longer than that, but it doesn’t use the extra characters.

frezik, (edited )

The dictionary isn’t a legal framework or international organization. The UN has a convention on genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Item (c) comes the closest to what Sisko did, but he did it in a way that gave them a chance to get out, so it’s not a perfect match. Forcing conditions for removing a group probably wouldn’t qualify under any of these. That said, it can be a factor in Ethnic Cleansing, but the Maquis aren’t really an ethnic group.

frezik,

That commenter already is the surgeon general of Florida.

frezik, (edited )

It’s only a big deal because of what Disney didn’t do, which is lobby to extend copyright yet again. That’s it.

Oh, and Steamboat Willy itself can be distributed as much as you want, at least in the US. It’s a good year to be a connoisseur of 1920s animation.

frezik,

I’ve had a fan fic on the back of my head where the Borg start out as a small group exploring networked community like that, but some of the members are more radical than others. One believes that people need to be brought under collective influence in order to solve their social problems and sees individuality as a problem. However, when the more virulent form of the collective gets going, she becomes a hypocrite who refuses to subsume her own individuality to the collective while inflicting the same on everyone else.

That’s why the Borg Queen seems so contradictory. She actually is.

frezik,

Best thing about Voyager was that it kept Berman busy on something else so he could only fuck up DS9 a little bit.

frezik,

Cyndrical locks are pretty easy to pick, though. There’s a $20 tool where you stick it in and wiggle it and done (this sentence is dirty and I’m not apologizing). Newer stuff uses different springs on each pin so they don’t all pop at once, but then you just wiggle it for one pin, turn it a bit, then hit the next one. Takes longer, but it’s not hard to learn.

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