pokey00

This is a valid criticism of the Python community and something the core language maintainers should look to address.

The author didn't include one of his custom source libraries that's not needed to understand the code, so that makes this a valid criticism of the Python community? lol

Until they start blocking VPNs like other streaming services? Piracy is a solution that doesn't end up a cat and mouse game. Sounds like op is paying for the content but it's region locked, so the dumbest form of pushing your customers to piracy.

You didn't have to convert voltages all the time for things you did in a car until relatively recently. All the typical 12V stuff could've run at 48V no problem. By the time we wanted to put computers in cars and charge our cell phones, switching supplies were readily available. The only part of the system now that really benefits from lower voltages are semiconductors.

Your maneuvering system just needs to be able to get tanks spinning.

Why cut it in half? Spray (or Mylar) on the outside.

A sudden discontinuity like that but continuing the same curve and jumping back... that's equipment malfunction 99% of the time.

It's a travesty how this has been handled. Massively rich corporations deflecting blame, lying to the public, and trying to cover up their own malfeasance in the pursuit of relentless greed. Profits over people, as usual.

Do you have any evidence of this being mishandled, or is this just parroting the reddit narrative?

eh poor example imo; that's guaranteed by the Constitution, not legislation.

Backing this up- I see that complaint all the time about US education, but I know me and all my peers had this impressed on us throughout our (public) schooling. People just don't care because to them, the word is right but the spelling part is a formality that can be ignored.

Are you kidding me? Government law enforcement sent her a cease and desist and threatened to charge her for protected speech. It's not a gray area. The purpose of the letter was to harass and intimidate a citizen for criticizing their government and to create a chilling effect on free speech. I don't know what potential legal remedies she has since the government would have to waive sovereign immunity, but at the very least, this special agent and everyone on his team needs to undergo some civil rights training. At best, public employees like this agent and the chain of command pushing policies like this need to be completely removed from public service.

Tough question to answer. Historically, privately owned artillery has been OK and was crucial during the Revolutionary War and all sorts of little skirmishes throughout the 19th century. It still is OK with the right tax stamps, but that doesn't say much about the natural right side of things... just because you can own them doesn't make ownership constitutionally protected. My pet theory that I've espoused on here before is that the 2A, in part, protects at minimum "bearable arms"- essentially a soldier's personal weapon. There's a very big gray area outside of that though, especially in regards to anything that explodes.

definitely, but I like to think most people here are more self-aware or are less extreme about shouting down others. the heavy-hivemind topics always have a couple of good "woah there..." meta comments, and unlike reddit, they don't get buried and disappeared for the most part.

Enshrined in the Constitution are the founding principles of the world's first liberal democracy. The men who wrote it and the electorate that ratified it were just a couple years removed from a horrifically bloody struggle for self-determination. The framers were well aware from personal experience that Liberalism could not have won had that generation allowed themselves to be disarmed.

I don't think guns are an identity thing (in general). I think individualism and self-sufficiency are part of a particularly American identity though, and guns can be a symbol or reflection of that. The loud minority that worships guns (to the extent that it is their identity) might be particularly loud, but they're not the main drivers of policy. For every 1 of that loud minority, there's 10 "regular people" with more nuanced and well-thought-out opinions that do drive policy, which is why you haven't seen sweeping legislation involving either side's favorite wedge issues.

The 1:10 ratio is made up... point being that like you said, "regular people" are obviously more numerous BUT what we see legislatively is their noticeable effect, not that of a loud minority. It's a common trope on the internet, mass media, and politicians that there's somehow some small pocket of psychos holding us back from utopia.

Don't know how close you follow US politics, but a good example is the talk around West Virgina's Senator Manchin, who's become a very convenient scapegoat for why the party in power can't pass their more controversial pieces of legislation. In reality, there's just much less solidarity amongst Democrats than politicians want you to believe. And that's fine- all lack of solidarity means is that there's some room for compromise, an absolute necessity in a melting pot of 330 million people.

You're 100% correct on the politicians and the shitty, un-nuanced civil discourse. It makes extremists on either end just scream louder and louder past each other while the rest of us are just more and more stressed out every day, worrying for the future of our communities and country.

any proposed solutions to try and protect the vulnerable from violence, or ameliorate the situation, are met with outrage

This is tough, and there are huge historical factors to take into account. The history of gun control legislation in the US is rife with racism, classism, ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty. Whenever the topic comes up, the outrage you see is a direct result of that history, whether those involved in the outrage are aware or not.

Generously speaking, the US (and the American sense of identity) has seriously struggled to transition from a society that broadly depends on guns to function, into a more specialized and developed society.

I think this is part of a broader "crisis" on how individualism and self-sufficiency fits in modern, developed society.

I honestly hope we figure it out, because I enjoy individualism and being self-sufficient; on a personal level, it makes me feel good about myself, and I think (maybe counterintuitively?) that it makes for stronger communities where people feel better for doing their individual part.

If the purpose of private gun ownership is to empower citizens to overthrow a tyrannical government, then no registration process should be warranted for destructive devices like javelins or SAM batteries.

This is non-sequitur to me. You're describing having the ability to immediately and effectively go to war with the US military and the entirety of the federal government. That's an absolute extreme. In reality, there would be A LOT of steps before that.

I'm in the #8 camp, but rephrased more generally to something I'm sure you've heard- People should be able to own guns to fight back against tyranny. At the absolute extreme, yeah, I'll admit that that includes potentially overthrowing the government, but in reality the scale is much much smaller.

Meaning, people should be able to own guns to bolster their community's defense from both foreign AND domestic threats. The few times that the 2nd Amendment has successfully been put in practice (wrt to fighting the govt), it was against corrupt local governments completely disconnected from any kind of heavy military hardware or active personnel.

I think stepping back and thinking about what "community defense" looks like, structurally, is a good exercise. You'll find that spread out in towns throughout the country, we have caches of equipment and weapons in local armories. In a "defense" emergency, that becomes the local "military gear co-op". A person provides what they can in the form of equipment, supplies, and weapons, and fills in the gaps with the armory. Other community members who are uh... overstocked... on guns and ammo give to the armory for others to use. Again, not at all limited to weapons and ammo, but that's what I'm focusing on here for the sake of simplicity.

--

Back to the extreme end- what does overthrowing a tyrannical federal government look like in reality? It doesn't just start out of nowhere with large scale conflict with the US military. It starts with balkanization, communities isolating, picking sides, pooling resources.... over time increasing violent attacks turning into gun fights, spread throughout the country. By the time a direct open conflict starts with a state or federal government, there is no single State or US military, there is no rule of law, and heavy military hardware is spread out among factions.

So while the 2nd Amendment might not be interpreted to mean "Your right to a SAM battery is constitutionally protected", if the extreme purpose of it becomes reality... you'll get your private SAM battery.

One last edit:

A non-exhaustive list of Things I think the 2nd Amendment (or the philosophy behind it) specifically protects:

- An infantryman's personal weapon (infantryperson? community defense is everyone's responsibility) and all equipment/accessories needed to maintain and operate it.

- Typical survival gear: backpacks, boots, mess kit, knives (bayonets! not just for stabbing; they're often multi-function tools), tents, etc

- Typical protective gear: helmets, ear plugs, goggles, body armor/plate carrier

Taken from my nowhere-near-complete understanding of contemporary gear. In 200 years, replace "rifle" with "phased pulse blaster" and "body armor" with "personal energy shield" if we're still stupid enough to be going to war with each other then.

Yeah, there's some gray area there and grenades are probably the best example.

Separated from philosophical side of things, they are legal to own Federally at least, at $200 a tax stamp. I don't know anything about the jurisprudence wrt to destructive devices.

edit: Another example might be DU ammunition, but I don't know if that's something carried by your typical soldier. I think it's more often in large caliber crew-served and vehicle mounted weapons, but have no actual basis for that.

home and work?

Telling, huh? In what way? I'd love for you to expand on that.

God the tone of your comment just set me off. What's the ugly sentiment and uglier mind? Just put it out there, whatever -ism you're about to accuse the parent poster of. Let's hear it without your cute little innuendo.

This is the exact kind of bullshit they're calling out. Netflix stuffs pop politics into every show they can and is relentless with it. They want to make sure their viewers are getting the "correct" politics, and not the "ugly sentiments".

Maybe, just maybe, some of us want to just watch some TV and not have whatever today's stupid social battle is shoved down our throats.

Yeah, I use them all the time for the specific memory layout part. At the same time, I've never had to go as far with optimization as trimming a few bytes off my structs for the program's memory footprint.

If that struct is getting written to storage or shoved over the wire though, I'll always optimize/pack them down, both for the size reduction and because it makes it easy to reconstruct on any other CPU.

I mean, are you really going to argue that the sole fact that the kids' genitals weren't entirely visible makes it not child pornography? Despite the fact that it was children being 'clothed', posed, and filmed purposefully in a way meant to sexually arouse pedophiles? Thank god the law didn't specify that genitals must be shown for it to qualify as pornography.

Do you think the adults filming and directing this stopped there? Those kids were eventually raped and that's probably on film too. The slippery slope isn't a fallacy when the stats back it up.

On top of that- letter of the law and spirit of the law... letter of the law doesn't mention the necessity of visible genitalia ... spirit of the law, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if you ask every legislator that voted for the law and the president that signed the law if it was intended that something like this qualified as child pornography within the definition of the law, they'd agree wholeheartedly. And that intent matters quite a bit.

The controversy exists because people with 0 context took the "oh that sounds gross but not illegal" stance and made dumb public statements about it that they then had to go back on.

like the other response pointed out, that's not my interpretation- there's a diversity of viewpoints, and that's the interpretation that I was taught by the Church I went to and by my parents.

I commented to expand on what looked like a really simplistic dismissal of an honest question... and you tell me there's disagreement (ie multiple viewpoints)... which was the entire point of my post.

Context? Different Christian religions and people have varying ways of reconciling the two. I (raised Catholic) was taught essentially that with Jesus's death, the old rules went out the window; all that goofy shit God used to command the Israelites to do didn't need to happen anymore because Jesus's death made up for it. So the Old Testament isn't super relevant outside of providing the context for the New Testament.

Also from Buffalo, same experience- someone bringing up religion in conversation would be odd. Would be really weird if they start talking about their relationship with God, praying, etc. Not that there's any problem with this stuff, but for me (and how I was raised), it's a private matter.

I've been away from Buffalo for maybe 15 years now and everywhere I've been outside of the north east, people will somehow work church and God into conversations. And for them, there's nothing odd about it... they just kind of assume I'm on board and it's not weird at all. I'm used to it at this point, but it used to be uncomfortable.

My anecdotal conclusion is that the "religion is a private matter" mentality might just be local to the northeast US.

I've tried this before, writing "return to sender" on spam, except was putting them back in the mailbox with the flag up. The mailman threw a minor fit after the 3rd or 4th time I did it, left a note in the mailbox complaining about it, and started circling with a pen "or Current Resident" on every piece of junk mail. I quit after that because pissing off the mailman is not worth it and I wasn't about to take the fight anywhere past that.

Backing this up, because without the context I thought it looked like a goofy/funny quirk in the law. But god damn...

The tapes contained numerous vignettes of teenage and preteen females, between the ages of ten and seventeen, striking provocative poses for the camera. The children were obviously being directed by someone off-camera. All of the children wore bikini bathing suits, leotards, underwear, or other abbreviated attire while they were being filmed. The government conceded that no child in the films was nude, and that the genitalia and pubic areas of the young girls were always concealed by an abbreviated article of clothing. The photographer would zoom in on the children's pubic and genital area and display a close-up view for an extended period of time. Most of the videotapes were set to music. In some sequences, the child subjects were dancing or gyrating in a fashion not natural for their age. The films themselves and the promotional brochures distributed by Nather demonstrate that the videotapes clearly were designed to pander to pedophiles.

As far as I can find, the conviction was upheld in the end... definitely the right decision.

Well, that's a pretty poor example to use to try to make your point. The Dixie Chicks (a country music group with a socially conservative leaning fanbase) went to a foreign country and decided to shit on their president for whatever the early 2000's equivalence of 'woke points' was. Europe was wildly anti-Bush at the time, so I'm sure it played well over there.

Their American fanbase (yanno, the MASSIVE group of people that enabled the Dixie Chicks' success... it sure didn't come from European audiences) turned on them because their values were obviously different and I guess Natalie Maines couldn't grasp that.

I don't have any evidence, but I'm leaning towards thinking that the people calling for Joe Rogan's cancellation aren't his main fanbase. That's the common thread with today's "social liberal" influence on media- people that are complete non-consumers of whatever winds up in the crosshairs just go to fucking war nowadays against whatever they've decided is offensive.

You've managed to provide a perfect example of what the parent comment was trying to point out. You've turned several extremely complex political and social issues into angry one-liners you can scream at your fellow countrymen- your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers. You know, the regular, non-evil people you live beside day in and day out.

I'm just sort of discovering the fediverse "scene". I still have a lot of research to do, but decentralization is very appealing to me. I have some questions, and maybe the answers will help other people too:

* What aspects are currently priority for improvements?

* What are lower priority problems or features that could be started now and worked on at a slower pace?

* Where is a good place for someone with programming, networking, and/or engineering skills to start getting involved with development?

* What can someone with little-to-no programming/networking or related "technical" skills do to further the development and uptake of decentralized social media?

* Are there any suggestions for good reading on this topic, both technical and non-technical? Websites, books, people/groups to follow?

Gotcha, thanks for the info. That does seem like a real problem, and I do see the complexity of the issue. Are there any current proposals for tackling it without adding centralization? Or do we just acknowledge/accept that that's a tradeoff?

Does firstmastodon.local need to be federated with anothermastodon.local for you to follow someone on it?

I don't understand the system well enough to know if this is a dumb question or not.