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thebrid

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I'd echo the gp's thoughts. There are parts of the City and the West End that are basically devoid of trees.

My biggest bugbear in London is the number of developments that have a "token tree" with one lonely tree in one corner, often doing quite poorly, presumably included to check some item on a planning consent checklist.

Of course, London has many green spaces and on the whole has plenty of trees, it's just they're quite unevenly distributed.

Why exactly? Isn't the primary reason for having public markets that companies can sell equity to fund growth?

The stock market has companies from massive to tiny. Each investor has the right to choose whether or not to invest in any one company. Some might be best served by investing only in profitable blue chips. For others, investing in IPOs is appropriate.

Your ire might be better directed at index companies who change seasoning rules right before a big IPO forcing unsuspecting investors to invest in unsuitable companies. And kudos to indexers like S&P who do not change the rules.

I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.

While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.

[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...

You could just pay for premium. No ads, you can play content in the background on mobile and the creators get more money out of it. There is so much good stuff on YouTube in pretty much any niche you care to mention. Not to mention that YouTube's equivalent of Spotify is included in the price!

Businesses may benefit from this move. People driving past in cars are unlikely to stop by a local business in Manhattan. People passing by on foot are much more likely to.

The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.

Reducing traffic has other benefits in terms of making a place more liveable. If a street is full of vehicle traffic and noisy, it is a place people don't want to be & so pass through quickly. If you make the space nicer, people are more likely to want to dwell and spend money with local businesses & restaurants.

Manhattan can be quite unpleasant at times, but it's been really nice to see recent efforts to try to improve that:

  - Partial pedestrianisation of broadway
  - The 14th Street busway
  - New protected bike lanes
Baby steps for sure, but better than doing nothing!

As much as I love the Internet Archive, is it really that crazy? The four factors used for determining fair use are:

  * the purpose and character of the use
  * the nature of the copyrighted work;
  * the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
  * the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
In the Internet Archive case, they're distributing whole, unmodified copies of copyrighted works which will of course compete with those original works.

In the AI use case, they're typically aiming not to output any significant part of the training data. So they could well argue that the use is transformative, reproducing only minimal parts of the original work and not competing in the market with the original work.

One of my favourite releases of 2023 was a well restored edition of Laurel & Hardy's first year (1927) of films[1].

The copyright holder had neglected them somewhat with them only being released in ancient DVD-era masters.

This new release gives the films a full digital restoration based on the best archival materials from around the world.

I genuinely think without public domain day, this never would have happened and I very much hope we see a similar edition of their 1928 films next year.

[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/laurel-and-hardy-year-o...

You might be in luck here! In the US, patents last for only 20 years. Since, the Game Boy was released in 1989, any patents are long since expired.

Using the Nintendo logo might (NB: Not a Lawyer!) be permissible if it's required for software to run on the hardware. This was a big part of the Sega v. Accolade case.[1]

There are still new games being released on cartridge for the original Game Boy. The most recent I'm aware of is Ruby & Rusty last year.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

[2] https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk/product/ruby-rusty-save-the-cro...

Both Dell and Lenovo will sell you laptops with Ubuntu. The selection is admittedly (significantly) smaller than for Windows laptops, but it certainly removes uncertainty over whether the hardware will be supported.

My last two personal laptops came with Ubuntu pre-installed - the first a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and more recently a Ryzen-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13. I've been extremely happy with both.

There's a lot wrong in that for such a short sentence.

The Beatles were not at all renowned for lip syncing. They grew up playing live in Hamburg and played countless live shows, both during and post-Beatles. Many of their most famous TV appearances including Ed Sullivan were performed live. I'm sure you can find times when they were required by shows to lip sync, but I find the criticism a little bizarre.

As for writing by committee, about 88% of the songs they recorded were written by the band themselves. Which committee are you referring to then? Perhaps you take issue with the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership? That would stretch the definition of committee to its limits. For you, any music written by more than one person is unacceptable?

My understanding is whipper is more paranoid than abcde. whipper does a couple things to ensure a perfect rip:

* Rips tracks twice and ensures the checksums match (retrying if they do not)

* Compares the track checksums against the AccurateRip database

I think this gives much more confidence that the result is correct. The tags seem a lot more detailed with whipper too.

The UK uses hand-counted paper ballots and often has multiple elections on the same day. You just have a separate ballot paper for each election.

It's not unusual to have votes for some combination of Member of Parliament, Regional Parliament, City Council, Local Mayor and Police Commissioner all on the same day. Members of the European Parliament too, until recently.

It really doesn't take that long. Polls close at 10pm and first results can come out around midnight. Depending on how close the result is, the winner is often known around 6am the next day and the new Prime Minister can be in office by the afternoon.

The UK has a similar system. You are required to go to a specific place to vote but these are normally very local and just for your neighbourhood, e.g. in the local school or church hall. My last three polling stations have been 0.1, 0.6 and 0.2 miles away.

There are 35k polling stations for 47m voters so each station has to process only ~1,300 voters in 15 hours. Queueing is unusual in my experience. Postal votes and voting by proxy are also options.

I was searching for a good ARM board for tinkering a while back and settled on the Odroid N2+. That has a pretty good trade-off between performance and price. It retails for less than $100 and has 6 cores total, 4 performance A73 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz (compared with the 2 GHz A72s here) and 2 efficiency A53 cores at 2 GHz. This has at least good Linux support with armbian[1] and ArchLinux ARM[2].

Outside of Apple, there are not many modern options. The A73s above are 4 generations old now. There are some ARM laptops with the faster Snapdragon 8CX chip but these still don't come close to the M1.

[1] https://www.armbian.com/odroid-n2/

[2] https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/amlogic/odroid-n2

The official word from TV Licensing is quite misleading (which admittedly is in their interest). You do not require any exemption nor to correspond with them at all.

Their "officers" are private individuals employed by a private company who have no special rights to enter your property. Absent a search warrant, it is almost certainly a mistake to allow them to enter your property.

Warren Buffett talks about the profitability of Insurance Companies a lot in his annual letters. A key part of this is the float. Insurance premiums are generally paid up front but losses are paid out after the fact. This means they end up with large amounts of other people's money (or "float") which they can invest.

If the company does a good job estimating risk and pricing policies, they will make a profit on the policy itself. If that happens, they are effectively being paid by their customers to hold their customers' money and get to keep any investment returns on it!

https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-insurance-flo...

Harvard's Nutrition Source web site [0] is the best source I've found. It has a wealth of evidence-based information. The accompanying book "Eat Drink and Be Healthy" discusses what features make a study reliable or not. The web site will be more up-to-date on specific dietary advice.

The Harvard School of Public Health are behind 2 of the biggest ongoing studies on diet, the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study[1], which has followed 50,000 men for over 30 years, and the Nurses' Health Study which has included 275,000 people over 40 years.

[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/

[2] http://www.nurseshealthstudy.org/

The advice you've been given so far is sound. Do the Andrew Ng Coursera course. It will give you a great introduction to key areas of machine learning. Andrew Ng is a terrific educator.

The level is pitched just right - enough maths to understand what's going on and implement it yourself - but not so much that it detracts from the key focus of the course.

The exercises give you a great opportunity to actually implement the algorithms covered and really aid understanding.