technothrasher

Your Miles Davis comment triggered a memory of college radio. In school in the early 90's, I had a 3-6am show Wednesday mornings, and mostly said and played whatever I wanted, as nobody was really listening anyway. One week, the guy who did the Friday night 6-8pm slot called me and asked if I could sub for him. I was way down on the call list, but nobody wanted to sub on a Friday night. So I took his slot and did my normal show. I immediately got a bunch of complaint calls that I was crap (which was fair, I was), and one guy who kept calling in over and over demanding I play Miles Davis.

On the other side of the coin, I also had a 10am Saturday news slot, which was just a quick 10 minute read of my pick of the top stories off the AP feed. I was on the city bus discussing the slot with my buddy who did the sports right after me, and the bus driver overheard us and said he listened to the station on his bus route, and loved us on Saturday mornings more than the other news readers. He was my only known fan in my very short lived radio "career".

Hmm, really? That's interesting.... [time passes] ... I found more information than I really needed on how to kill one's self with helium, and I saw some places making suggestions that helium be cut with oxygen, seemingly starting with a New Zealand coroner in 2011, but nothing suggesting this had been implemented at any sort of scale. The links I found on Amazon for party balloon helium tanks all mostly proudly state they are 99%+ helium.

Working in process control, this is an everyday thing for me. But I prefer to use pulse frequency modulation, which is what a lot of dedicated DACs use.

Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe.

Nobody? France, as the most extreme example, has a rate of 1.52 per 100K. That's about a thousand people a year. That is certainly a small percentage of the population, but it isn't "nobody".

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

I cannot ever manage audiobooks, because I tend to wander while I'm reading, thinking about what I just read, processing it, mulling it over, or exploring it in some other way. With a book, I just go back to where I stopped reading when ready and carry on. But with an audiobook, it keeps going while I'm thinking and not listening, and I miss it and have to rewind an unknown amount, over and over.

But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft.

Bankruptcy is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Charging somebody with theft, whether appropriate or not, does not resolve the civil debt. So, they are convicted of theft and still haven't paid back their debt. Then what? Fine them? Seems pointless in a bankruptcy situation. Indentured servitude? Slavery is not ever a winning argument. Debtors' prison? That just shifts the indentured servitude to the state, has been tried extensively throughout history, and doesn't actually make things better. Bankruptcy as as solution acknowledges that the situation is unwinnable and starting over from nothing, with a public notice to others to be wary about extending credit, is likely the only way out.

Hard to be unexpected for the many of us who lived it. It wasn't that long ago. I remember first seeing a ColecoVison, which shipped with Donkey Kong, and being amazed that, unlike on the Atari 2600, the home version of Donkey Kong actually looked very close to the arcade version.

What kind of timekeeping do you consider "junk"? I'm currently wearing a $50 Chinese watch with a knock-off Seiko automatic movement in it, and I just now timed it out of curiosity at -5s/day.

Wikipedia has an entry that lists a few court cases, mostly showing that this strategy, as you surmise, fails to stand up in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

I noticed that when I used one of these OSM based nagivation apps (I forget which one now), it suggested I leave my house by heading over my retaining wall, driving down a wooded hill, through a swamp, and then onto a nearby road. But because it was OSM based, I was able to discover the problem, fix it, and then when the app updated their data, the issue went away.

I have since noticed, to my frustration, that whatever map data Uber uses has the same issue, and will send Uber drivers to this road behind my house that doesn't actually have any access. Trying to explain this to Uber and get it fixed is basically impossible.

The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.

It means exactly what I expected. The wireless connectivity has been removed (for regulatory compliance in situations where wireless isn't allowed), but wired connectivity is still there.

My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.

we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence

Note that this definition of "children" includes ages up 24 years old. Not that the US doesn't have a gun violence problem, but pretending 24 year olds are "children" in order to gain a better sound bite doesn't help anybody.

The scanner manufacturers proudly advertise that their systems dump the scanned IDs to a back-end database for storage and later use.

I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."

Well, heck, why not? The more typical modern usage of the word henge means an earthwork consisting of a ring-shaped bank with a ditch in the middle. It was taken from Stonehenge, and note that Stonehenge does not fit that definition of henge (because its ditch is outside the bank). The henge in Stonehenge actually means suspended, as in "suspended stones". So go ahead and pile on another definition also quasi-related to Stonehenge, I say.

These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.

Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.

DRM-free classics that are out of copyright.

I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.

I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.

Upper deck, perhaps a different story.

I only ever flew on the upper deck in coach configuration, and the last time I did that was about twenty five years ago on SAA. It wasn't anything special, but it was a little quieter.

Somewhat apropos today, the solstices/equinoxes are by their nature celebrated at the same time of year universally. Granted, not everyone celebrates them, but you couldn't ever get everybody to celebrate anything.

I also have a gay porn doppelganger who didn't show up. Must be a conspiracy against gay porn.

I was told I had a roll on "The Walking Dead". Interesting that it decided I was an actor, but didn't list the one adult film that somebody with my name was actually in.

what you in the USA would call an LLC

"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.

I believe the only Audi car made in Mexico is the Q5. My US model 2025 A3, btw, is dead on (+/- 1 mph).

Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.

I would have argued that this is also the wrong answer, as without the GAP to bring people to the mall, nobody would be trafficking their little ice cream store at all. Did a mall vendor really not understand the reason they had opened up shop in a mall?

It all dates back to the Andrew Messaging System at CMU, developed in the 1980's. Originally the format was "<username>+<keyword>+<args>@example.net" where the mail server would interpret the keyword and arguments to route the message in whatever unique way that keyword would dictate (e.g. bob+dist+~/mailinglist@example.net would read the file mailinglist in Bob's home directory and deliver the email to addresses listed in it). If the keyword was not recognized, it would just deliver normally. So bob@example.net and bob+alias@example.net were equivalent, and could be used to filter after the fact if desired.

I was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.

Wear whatever makes you happy without apology. Rolex, Timex, Apple Watch. Whatever. I find a large inverse relation between people who care about the cost of the watch you wear and people who are actually interested in the mechanical function of a watch.

Related I guess, but these celebrity "bling" watches are entirely the least interesting part of horology.