tastyfreeze

All news has been a tool of spooks for a very long time. The official CIA Operation Mockingbird started in the late 40s. Now that AI is involved its news? None of it can be trusted.

DVDStyler - free, simple, cross-platform, and open-source.

Haha, not starting the movie when the disk loads is one of my pet peeves. When I burn DVDs for friends I still put in a menu to facilitate chapter or episode selection. But, I set the menu to only load after the movie has completed or the user pushes the menu button on their remote. For episodic disks all of the episodes will play before the menu appears.

2000s disk special features started getting a little wild. Who wants to play a "game" as a special feature with their DVD remote? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

I wouldn't say the UK is now, but was the most powerful empire to have existed. What else would you call a nation that 65 nations have claimed independence from? They can't claim independence if they weren't once part of the empire.

Not illegal. Card issuers required merchants that wanted to accept their cards to not have separate pricing for cash and credit card. It would have been a lot more difficult for credit cards to take over as the primary payment method if they had to convince consumers that the convenience of a card was worth paying 3-5% more on everything. Exceptions started being added for public entities, like municipalities, that wanted to accept cards.

> So non credit card users end up paying more credit card fees than credit card users which is nonsense.

The business just makes more money on cash transactions. It would be interesting to find if the cost of cash handling/losses is comparable to the card processing fees.

Microsoft owned Bungie when they named their assistant Cortana.

Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.

Dungeon Crawler Carl book 7. Started the series in January. Most books I've read in a year since I read the Expanse series.

Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

The phrase is "jump the gun" or "jumped the gun" as in a fault start in a race started with a gun.

This is where the idea of teachers as guides comes in. Let the kids find what interests them. The guides facilitate deeper learning as it is needed to understand more. The goal is to foster the curiosity. Learning is a byproduct.

I have found for many young kids lack of studiousness is not that they are not self-motivated. It is that whatever is being taught is worse than boring to them. The lack of motivation in schools comes from a lack of interest or too slow of pacing.

By the time they get out of primary school most have had the curiosity that drives motivation beat out of them.

Radiology and imaging gets that treatment everywhere. They are treated as a photography service for doctors and only doctors can diagnose.

Look no further than the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Nothing is allowed to proceed or be published without their sign off.

Step 3 is profit. As in, "we are robbing you blind but that's not my hand in your pocket".

Great essay. The Patriot Act may have been the obvious turning point but the FBI had public data collection programs even earlier. The goal was keyword watching of all network traffic. The desire for more collection is baked into government. It is hubris that leads powerful people to think if they only had more control they could stop all ills. The deceit of power makes people believe it doesn't matter what the outcome is if the goal is noble. That is why the founding fathers put restrictions on government power. The people that run it will always fall for the same traps of power because they are just like everybody else.

So yes, it is high time to discuss how our rights apply in a digital age and put some reasonable restrictions on the power available to government.

I have little doubt that the OST was circumvented by definitional tricks. That is how the game of treaties and power is played. Something like rods from God or a conventional bomb orbiting platform wouldn't be considered a WMD but most certainly are the types of weapons common folk would think the OST forbids.

I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.

We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.

I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.

In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.

Sounds like a good experiment. That experimenter said that deeper water required faster spinning to draw the vortex to the bottom and that the shapes don't appear until the center of the vortex is dry. So they did some experiments with deeper water but it was easier to make the shapes with less water.

That is a much better explanation than the one I saw. From that video the polygons only appear once there is a dry region at the bottom. Could we be getting a view of what constitutes a planetary surface at the bottom of the vortex?

Years ago there was a video on YouTube showing that geometric shapes appear in a vortex of water at different rates of spin. While it is neat that these shapes appear in atmosphere of another planet I have since assumed that it is the same dynamic as shapes in water vortices.

I was expecting a box for storing potatoes. If you have a short season with closer to 100 frost free days a box like this won't get you many more potatoes than not burying. There just isn't enough time to grow more spuds on the buried vines.

If you do manage to grow 100 lbs of potatoes the good news is they store really well in a cool damp environment. I don't have very cold winters and have stored root vegetables in a cooler filled with dirt/sawdust successfully. The closer you can get the storage environment to cold but not frozen dirt the better they will store. I have stored potatoes for 2 years then planted them to grow more. They just have to stay cold all summer or they will sprout.

SMR proposals still use one plot of land. The plant is just built to house multiple reactors.

Hmm... rules for thee but not for me. Sounds like the beginning of the end for the EPA. Two tiered rules breed resentment. There are already plenty of people that don't like the EPA. Making exceptions just makes it easier to argue the EPA is useless or just a tool for oppressing the little guy.

That is the Fed educated position. The Keynsian view of economics sees the good economic times as normal and bad economic times as the aberration. Thus, from that view you go into debt to hold the economy over until the good times return.

I've always seen that as an excuse to spend more that you have. Its a trap that is difficult to get out. It is the same as taking more personal debt that you can service. But in the case of the government the bank never says no.

Self governance means more that picking people to lord over you.

I was referring to both grand and petit jury in general but yes, that is correct.

Yes, it was technically theft. Officers found the vehicle at his house shortly after it was reported missing. Not really an opportunity to return it. If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".

Steal a car to rush somebody to a hospital then return it after and the letter of the law will convict you as a felon. It is the jury that could decide, as representatives of the community, that you should not be a felon for saving somebody's life even if you technically stole a car.

In most states the jury instructions are to make their judgement based solely on the evidence presented to them. These instructions make a jury a cog in the prosecution machine. The purpose of a jury is a final check on the government's execution of the law by members of the community.

My last stint on grand jury we had a case that none of us felt great about. It was a felony theft charge where the thief likely used the vehicle regularly but took it in the middle of the night to return home. He was at a logging camp where he pays for accommodations but they had no work for him. After 3 days he got frustrated and left in the middle of the night. Camp foreman called the law reporting the vehicle stolen. The officer went and checked at the now missing guy's house and the vehicle was parked in his driveway.

The whole group felt the felony charge was too much for that series of events. Somebody said "I don't want to vote on this". I suggested that is a valid option. The vote was the weakest of all the cases we covered. Several abstentions but just enough to send the case to trial.

To me that is nullification in practice. It is "the community" deciding that they don't believe the State is right in pursuing conviction. Juries are meant to be a randomized "council of elders" type body not just cogs in the machine.

Using your belief in jury nullification as a tool to get out of your duty as a citizen rubs me the wrong way. You have to participate in the functions of civilization if you want it to reflect your beliefs.

No, I mean using atomic bombs to manufacture these alloys at scale. In the 50s a-bombs were proposed for all sorts of workaday uses. Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today.

I am sure that somebody will take up the task of reproducing these alloys using intense heat from a non-atomic source. New alloys can be quite lucrative but developing them requires just as much experimentation as making new drugs. I'd imagine that getting to an alloy of 7 metals through progressive experimentation would take awhile. Now we know it's possible and have a possible production path. That is enough to spur some experiments down that road.

Interesting. Bring on the A-bomb foundries! Had this been discovered during the exploration phase of atomic bomb use we probably would have seen A-bomb foundry proposals.

There is a hypothesized process in this paper that sounds like a graduate thesis on its own.