Amicius

So if tips or donations are prohibited, why is there a page on Stripe support detailing rules for donations, one of which is "for a good or service that has been provided?"

https://support.stripe.com/questions/requirements-for-accept...

A resignation made under duress is invalid under Canon Law. Benedict was under a death threat and the SWIFT system had been shut down in Vatican City as an extra lever to exert pressure. The day after Benedict made an announcement about resignation the SWIFT system for the Vatican was turned back on. There is more than this but there is significant evidence that neither did Benedict resign of unencumbered free will nor did he intend to fully resign the office of the Vicar of Christ but that he intended to "enlarge the office" to be a two-person role having an active and a contemplative/passive member which isn't possible.

Francis isn't the Pope: Benedict is.

One of the criticisms I heard recently about YAML is that there's no way to know if you received a full document or just a fragment since there's no grammatical structure for indicating the document is complete. While JSON and XML are far more verbose at least it's obvious if you didn't get the full document on transmission. Perhaps a compromise could be to use YAML as a compositional tool to emit XML or another more formal configuration format?

How about a tool/script/program that converts a Google Takeout mbox file(s) to a SQLite database? I could make use of that...

The article mentions that while the Apple ARM chips are faster per core, the Intel chips are faster at multi-core operations. How is that possible?

If the Supreme Court gets to redefine the meaning of one word, there's nothing to stop them from redefining any other word -- or all of them. As Cavanaugh pointed out in his dissent, it's not the role of the court to legislate, and Congress' recent attempts to amend the Civil Rights act proves they know the language is inadequate for protecting LGBT persons and that it's their job to fix it.

From the majority opinion: "The parties concede that the term 'sex' in 1964 referred to the biological distinctions between male and female."

I am not a lawyer but this sounds to me like the Supreme Court just admitted that while the text of the law doesn't include protection for gay or transgendered persons, they are going to retroactively "understand the term" as though it does.

How, then, can we assume any of the laws mean what the text says when a court can decide words mean something else? I have to agree with the dissent in this case; amending the Civil Rights to update, expand, or clarify the definition "sex" is the surest way to protect gay and transgender person from a future court taking a strict textual interpretation and annulling this ruling.

Too bad the court system can't create the equivalent of a bug report for legislation. If we had that then in this case the SCOTUS could have issued a legislative mandate to Congress requiring them to clarify or expand the definition of "sex" so that now-protected classes are protected from a further court ruling on what the actual text of the law says. It is the role of the court to interpret the laws, not make them.

There is a strong legal argument to be made here. If one can simply identify as trans but the law doesn't provide a definition under which this would work, you're opening up ambiguity as to what the law even is and how it's to be used to protect someone claiming such an identification. This is a great case where a dissenting opinion is done for the protection of those seeking title as a protected class from those who will shoot the ambiguity loophole to deny the protection this decision purports to offer.

The majority opinion and dissents are rich sources of insight as to how the law in question will be applied as to how the decision could affect precedent in the future so I agree that the least the journalists could do is name the case so those of us who want to go to the source can look it up.

For example, the "legalization of gay marriage" case from a few years back contained phrases and platitudes about "love not being illegal" but the crux of the decision came down to the majority's opinion that a license issued in one state shouldn't be rejected in another. It didn't specify MARRIAGE license... which immediately made me comment to co-workers that in addition to requiring marriage licenses issued in any state had to be recognized in all 50 states, logically this ruling also stipulated that a concealed carry permit issued in any state would have to be recognized even in states that didn't issue concealed carry permits (Illinois at the time) as well as states in which it's very hard to get them (New York and California). To my knowledge, nobody has tested this by getting arrested in such a jurisdiction with such laws and challenging it citing Obergefell v. Hodges.

How can a service be bother end-to-end encrypted and have what is effectively a wire-tap that allows for services like real-time transcription? Even if we assume the transcription service is part of an e2e call the operation of the transcriber would still need to generate logs or allow for improvement over time. I don't see how privacy and real-time transcripts are both possible at the same time.

When I think of privacy technology I usually think of Signal or Wire or secure messaging apps... the problem with these is that they run on Android or iOS which have security issues themselves. I'm aware of PinePhone and Librem which claim to be a lot more secure but I'm curious what the legal requirements are for a phone to obtain FCC approval in the US when it comes to privacy. For example, new phones MUST encode GPS information when making a 911 call -- this has been a requirement since 1996. What other potentially privacy-invading tech is required in a handset these days?

A lack of MOTIVATED instructors is more accurate. There are more than enough retired HAMs who would love to teach interested students -- they just don't care for digital modes.

Why isn't Amateur Radio a key part of STEM? What do ALL of us have in our pocket that operates on radio (you might even be reading this comment on one)? How many modern homes don't have WiFi? What's the magic that allows smart-meters and wireless doorbells to work? Heck, what's the signaling mechanism on a WIRED communication? RF and radio is key to so much of modern life that unless your STEM program is geared toward training people to do basic research you're using RF in some capacity along the way.

And not only teach RF but then apply across other things like robotics and flying. One of the major public service aspects of Amateur Radio is emergency communication. Rather than humans trying to word-paint what's happening in a storm why not have a camera-equipped drone zoom out to a vantage point and shoot back HD imagery via 1.2GHz? How about weather stations communicating primarily via APRS instead of via WiFi directly?

So many possibilities... though without low-cost VHF/UHF SDR radios much of this will remain a dream.

I think something that could draw in a LOT of people -- and be an awesome STEM tool -- would be non-cost-prohibitive VHF and UHF SDR radios that can be easily controlled wirelessly (Bluetooth, WiFi, or both) and allow for any number of modulations from standard FM as is used on 2m/70cm, analog slow-scan TV, digital TV, digital voice, data and more. Heck, the creation of a handshake protocol that starts as AX.25 and the stations identify a switch-to protocol would be great, and since it's digital and we're assuming SDR, that handshake could be "Oh, you don't have the ABC123XYZ codec? I'll send it to you now!" Yes... trusting a CODEC from an unverified source could be dangerous but that's part of the fun of experimentation!

Yo DHH: it might be an Apple credit card, but it's The Squid (Goldman Sachs) who are running the actual banking side of the house. If anyone is limiting your wife's credit line "because she's a woman" it would be The Squid's bankers, not Apple.

While I appreciate the audio codec discussion and bandwidth-to-accuracy tradeoffs, how much of the speech recognition could be done on-device rather than shipping it off to the cloud? It's my understanding that it's a matter of installing pattern files for analyzing the audio without needing to fail over to the cloud; how many GB are we talking to be able to cover normal daily speech, assuming a minimum of jargon? For the hearing impaired, not having to hit the cloud at all seems like the best option (and you don't need to compress the audio at all or worry about cloud-trip bandwidth).

Been there several times. But with a current salary over $140k and a large family I have no idea where to start over without cutting back so far that it would massive disruptive repercussions. Management? Recruiting? Something illegal? I have been so awesome with computers for so long I've gotten so highly paid at it -- and yet I HATE technology and computers. Where is the off-ramp?

“For reverse engineers and program analysts: x86_64 instruction decoding is hard.”

An idea that hit me while reading this: Using a tool like this should (help to) make it easy to determine if a commercial app is using GPL libraries illicitly by assembling a syntax tree of method signatures as a first line indicator that the executable contains code matching a GPL library. If first pass indicates a match a deeper analysis of operation codes could reveal “similarities too consistent to be coincidence.”

Or an I describing something that had been in use since 2001?

How about labels that operate independently of folders like Protonmail has?

This is getting to be a growing trend in Silicon Valley: employees demanding of their management and even CEOs certain action. Whether California a "right to work" state or not, I imaging employees demanding management do something that management doesn't want to do is grounds for dismissal. Are workers being let go for "standing up to management" like this?