Posts by Irony Deficient 1354 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2008
With the construction of the Drogden Tunnel and the Øresund Bridge two decades ago, it’s possible to drive a car from Portugal to Norway via Denmark and Sweden without requiring an extended ferry journey. (There is a €57 toll for one-time crossings of the tunnel/bridge combination in a car up to 6 m [19′ 8″] in length, though.)
If the counter that holds your kitchen sink is of standard height and you’re taller than average, then some kitchen renovation to make that counter 2″ (5 cm) higher would probably provide great relief to your lower back. If that’s not an option (for whatever reason), then putting off washing your dishes until the following morning (right after your back has had several hours of rest) may minimize the burn.
From a legal perspective, signing a contract is taken to be a voluntary action unless proven otherwise; the same applies to contracts that contain mandatory arbitration clauses, even if the matters put under arbitration are allegations of illegal acts — legally, the “forced” mandatory arbitration was voluntarily agreed to by the signatories of the contract (unless proven otherwise).
So who is to say that Russia’s land-grab is actually illegal? (Rather than unethical, stupid, counterproductive, etc.)
Regarding the invasion of Ukraine, see article II. of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, to which the USSR was a party when the Pact became effective on 1929-07-24, and for which all of the USSR’s constituent republics became legal successors when the USSR was dissolved:
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
Thus, the invasion of Ukraine, as a settlement of a dispute between parties of the Pact which is not being conducted by pacific means, is plainly illegal. However, since the Pact lacks an enforcement mechanism, one could reasonably ask what value the Pact provides to pacifists — let alone to Ukrainians (or provided to e.g. Afghans and Iraqis, since Afghanistan, Iraq, the US, the UK, Australia, &c. are also parties to the Pact).
In this typeface (Arimo, a kissing cousin of Arial), the superscript digits are, in my opinion, too small. I’d used a HTML sup element instead to create the 40. (The version with superscript digits is ⁴⁰ — and for some reason, the superscript zero is being rendered smaller than the superscript four in this comment’s preview.)
… and letting them absorb neutrons.
There’s not enough 6Li available commercially to produce enough tritium to support fleets of fusion reactors fueled by deuterium and tritium. 7Li could be used to produce tritium, but because the 7Li reaction is endothermic, it would require much more energy to produce a given amount of tritium using 7Li vs. using 6Li.
To grant an extradition request, the extraditing state does not need criminal jurisdiction in a case; what it needs is dual criminality for the crime(s) which the accused is alleged to have committed. The extraditing state does not sit in judgement of the accused; rather, it rules on the validity of the allegations of the requesting state, to ensure that dual criminality applies.
Regarding US jurisdiction, the superseding indictment [PDF] alleged that there were four different victim multinational financial institutions, all of which had US subsidiaries which were alleged to have been affected by the purported actions of the accused.
Four of the 13 counts in the indictment were applied to all of Huawei, Skycom, and Meng; the other nine counts did not involve Meng. Given that the four counts alleged against Meng were also alleged against Huawei and Skycom, which of those counts made her “the first person ever charged in history for the alleged acts of a corporation”?
As thames noted below, Meng was not charged with breaking either primary or secondary sanctions; rather, Meng was charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracies to commit bank and wire fraud, all of which are crimes in both Canada and the US, thus meeting the “dual criminality” requirement to request extradition.
… the american people can count themselves lucky that JFK held his famous speech in Berlin, and not Hamburg…
Why? American people have been cracking wise with “I am a jelly doughnut *” since shortly after his speech there.
It might have been as comical in Frankfurt as in Hamburg, but neither of these cities was surrounded by the DDR.
* — “Berliner” is a US English translation of „Berliner Pfannkuchen“.
A version of it, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, has also been attributed to Churchill, albeit without a source. The earliest sourced version might be the title of an article that was written in 1976 by M. F. Weiner in the journal Medical Economics : “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.”
Two articles by one author presenting one point of view at one symposium does not a political site make.
If you don’t like an author’s point of view on a particular topic to the point of declaring a site’s technology coverage “pretty pointless”, then perhaps not reading that author’s articles on that site could be the basis of a simpler coping mechanism.
The median hourly wage for older techies is £25Doesn’t make an ounce of sense to me. I’m paying people significantly more than that in central and eastern Europe. Even after charges and taxes.
What’s their definition of “techie”?
The important word there is “median”. Are your older techies in central and eastern Europe being paid the median hourly wage for older techies where they live? If not, then the situation with your older techies is not directly comparable.
Our dog weighs in at about 90 lb (41 kg), so in the vicinity of one female Rottweiler. SWMBO chooses the dog chow; it’s neither cheap nor from a bargain bin, but our dog generally lays mines twice a day, and one sandwich bag may not suffice for every walk. I usually keep two or three plastic grocery bags in my front pocket, in case one or two of them have holes at the bottom, in which case double-bagging to pick up the dog’s excreta is a case of “better safe than sorry”. (I’ve never heard of Smart & Final before, so perhaps they’re primarily found on your side of the Sierra Nevada.)
Because your jurisdiction requires it? (In the States, “alcohol-free” beer is actually beer with an alcohol content ≤ 0.5% by volume, so despite the categorization, it’s not necessarily alcohol-free here. A person is unlikely to attempt mass consumption of such beer to achieve a buzz, but the letter of a law does not always reflect a law’s intended purpose.)
Not everywhere on this side of the pond — the option of grocers providing plastic bags was made illegal in my state a few years back. (The grocers who’d also offered gratis paper bags now sell them instead.) I had used the plastic bags (after getting the groceries home) to pick up dog deposits during our walks; once my hoard of bags has been exhausted, I’ll be left with the reüse of plastic bread bags. (I could use the same plastic grocery bag on multiple walks, since its opening was so wide; each plastic bread bag can only be used on one walk.)
No, it wasn’t. To quote article V. of the Loi du 18 germinal an III (Law of 7th April 1795):
V. Les nouvelles mesures seront distinguées dorénavant par le surnom de républicaines ; leur nomenclature est définitivement adoptée comme il suit :On appellera,
Mètre, la mesure de longeur égale à la dix millionème partie de l’arc du méridien terrestre compris entre le pôle boréal et l’équateur ;
Are, la mesure de superficie pour les terrains, égale à un quarré de dix mètres de côté ;
Stère, la mesure destinée particulièrement aux bois de chauffage, et qui sera égale au mètre cube ;
Litre, la mesure de capacité, tant pour les liquides que pour la matières sèches, dont la contenance sera celle du cube de la dixième partie du mètre ;
Gramme, le poids absolu d’un volume d’eau pure, égal au cube de la centième partie du mètre, et à la température de la glace fondante.
Enfin, l’unité des monnaies prendra le nom de franc, pour remplacer celui de livre usité jusqu’aujourd’hui.
Note that all of these units except the franc were defined in terms of the meter. The kilomètre was defined in terms of the mètre in article VI. of the same law.
… we ended up with "7th Month", "8th Month", "9th Month" and "10th Month" being the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th month!!
That happened well before C. Julius Caesar’s time. The year-starting-with-January was the last modification of the consuls’ annual term of office in the Republican era, some time before 150 BC. The original year-starting-with-March (when a blob of “unmonthed” days followed December, before the introduction of January and February) ended in the early years of the Republic, in the 5th century BC.
The renaming of Quinctilis (“5th month”, now known as July) happened after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, and the renaming of Sextilis (“6th month”, now known as August) happened in 8 BC, during Augustus’ reign; both were honors from the Senate. Timewise, Caesar introduced the Julian calendar, and Augustus sorted out the misapplication of the frequency of leap days in the Julian calendar.
For actual imperial messing about with month names, you have to look at the later month name changes that didn’t stick. The most extreme case was under Commodus, who renamed all twelve months with twelve of his own personal names in 192 AD; one of those twelve personal names was Augustus, but I don’t know if his Augustus was the same month as August. (He also renamed the city of Rome after himself; he was assassinated later that year.)
… built on an old and outdated OS design like Linux.
Caesar had to cope with reforming the much older and more outdated system of the Republican calendar. His redistribution of days from the leap month to the other months (and his choice of when the new leap day would occur) were arranged so that they wouldn’t break the connections between the frequent sacred and commemorative days throughout the calendar.
The frequency of the leap month was determined by the pontifex maximus, which was an appointed political position with religious duties. The pontifex maximus would often manipulate when the leap month would occur, to happen more frequently when political allies were in power and to happen less frequently when political enemies were in power. Throughout the seventeen years of the Second Punic War, omens were interpreted such that no leap month should be declared until the war was over; ten years after that war ended, the accumulated timekeeping error was such that calendrical January started in what we know as mid-August.
Not again. Victory was not declared on poverty; victory was declated on extreme poverty.
… we started with Russia. Lets add Iran, China, North Korea and anyone else without honest elections or representation. Zero trade and full economic blockades until they decide to join the world without human rights violations.
I strongly suggest that before implementing such a strategy, you research “our” (for whomever “we” comprises) supply chains in all industries to see how zero trade with these countries would affect “us”. (It seems that you’re unconcerned with how zero trade would affect the warm, welcoming, and generous Chinese people whom you’ve encountered, let alone the warm, welcoming, and generous Chinese people — and such people in other countries that you’ve deemed to lack honest elections and representation — whom you haven’t encountered.)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-ancient-geometry-problem-falls-to-new-mathematical-techniques-20220208/
That article’s URL was rather misleading; I wouldn’t call a geometry problem from 1925 “ancient”.
Still, given the requirement of dividing a pie into 10200 discrete pieces, liquefying a pie of one shape and pouring it into a dish of another shape would require far less labor.
See this comment from 2013 for a further discussion of the histories of “gigantic”, “giant”, and “giga-”, both of etymology and pronunciation. Greek didn’t (and doesn’t) have the soft G sounds of either English or French; in modern Greek, γ (g) before ε (e) or ι (i) is pronounced /ʝ/, which is found in some pronunciations of the “y” in English “yeast”, so its closest standard English approximation is /j/, the sound of modern English Y. The modern English Y sound was also one of the sounds of Old English G; this was the first sound in Old English gigant.
So, is it just me or is Delaware only “famous” for being the US own internal version of the Cayman Islands except without the beaches?
It is best known as a financial center — more than half of all US publicly traded corporations are incorporated in Delaware, even if they otherwise have no connection to the state, because of its business-friendly corporate law. DuPont was founded there in 1802 and always headquarted there, and at one time was the largest chemical manufacturer on Earth. (They merged with Dow in 2017, and were spun off again in 2019, still in Delaware.)
Delaware has beaches, and months of hot weather, but since I’m not a sunbather myself, I can’t comment on how they compare to beaches elsewhere.
In our case, we were told the lottery proceeds would be in addition to the existing funding from the state and the school property taxes.Yes I see all the voters are responsible for the situation. It is up to each to make an informed decision and show others the facts to support those decisions.
Then the proper response would be for the voters to boot the lottery tall tale tellers out of office, as happened in the city with the manipulators of traffic light durations.
You have more faith that the next guys will do better for all than the last did for few.
No, I have more faith that a compromise plan in which most people get a portion of what they want is typically better than a “my way or the highway” plan in which some people get everything that they want and a larger group of people get nothing of what they want. In my view, doing nothing through gridlock is an example of the latter.
I think you helped make my point. There are laws and regs that should only be handled on a local level. The closer to the people, the more freedom we have due to greater control and oversight of our government. Without exceptions, that would force the laws or regs to be made at the appropriate level.
I didn’t understand your point as being one of subsidiarity (that legislation should be undertaken as close to the affected people as feasibly possible) — I understood your point as being one of universality (that legislation should apply to everyone without exception), which is why I tried to think of a plausible example where universality would not have to be a defining feature. I agree with your view on subsidiarity.
On the quota point, we pay taxes for enforcement.
As any jurisdiction should for any law or regulation which is worth enforcing. Would you then say that selling permits for quota allocations would not be bribes to the bureaucracy? Or, if you still consider that to be a form of bribery, how would you design a more just system of quota allocation?
I like hearing others point of view as mine is not always correct.
Ditto. All of us benefit from reading each others’ points of view.
In our state, “just pass the lottery - all the proceeds will be going to the schools.” B.S. The schools have yet to see the money.
It’s not necessarily B.S. — for example, the lottery proceeds by themselves might be insufficient to fully fund the financial needs of your state’s schools. Or some portion of the state taxes that were previously allocated to your schools before the introduction of the lottery might have been reällocated to other insufficiently funded areas of state responsibility, because the lottery proceeds had been forecast to surpass the amount of the reällocation.
I am for government. I don’t want or have an interest being in charge of making sure those things are working. What I am not for is the bureaucracy we have.
Do you see the average voter in your state as having any responsibility for the bureaucracy that you have? Do you see perpetual gridlock as the only plausible response to the actions (or inactions) of your bureaucracy?
I am for gridlock so we can have a breather for a couple of years.
Gridlock won’t provide a breather; what it will provide is a couple of additional years for solutions to be avoided (“kicking the can down the road”) and existing political attitudes to ossify further (“if you’re not for us, you’re against us”).
If a law or regulation is passed, there is to be no exceptions, NONE. You can’t bribe (get a permit) the bureaucracy into allowing you to do it.If the law is needed, it needs to be for EVERYONE.
What if a proposed law or regulation wouldn’t directly affect everyone in your state? For example, suppose that marine biologists have documented a precipitous decline in commercial fish stocks in your state’s waters over the past 25 years, and recommended to your lawmakers that commercial fish catches be placed under a quota for some number of years to allow the fish populations to rebound, e.g. a total catch by all commercial fishermen of some number of tons of certain fish species per year. Should such a law or regulation not be passed because it would only directly affect commercial fishermen in your state’s waters, and wouldn’t directly affect everyone? If it should be passed, should permits to catch certain amounts of particular fish species per year not be sold to commercial fishermen as a means of allocating the quota, because sale of the permits would be bribes to the bureaucracy?
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
If there’s anything that history shows, it’s that government always has time to meddle in other stuff, even when it’s busy fighting itself.
You’ve cut the phrase too deeply — it’s not “near-rectilinear”, but “near-rectilinear halo”. Starting with a circle of a particular diameter, within which a halo orbit and an elliptical orbit both have the same maximum diameter as the circle’s diameter, some of the halo orbit’s segments will have a lesser curvature than those of the elliptical orbit, and other segments will have a greater curvature than those of the elliptical orbit. The “near-rectilinear” part suggests that the halo orbit’s segments of lesser curvature will be much longer than its segments of greater curvature.
NASA did. Their primary audience for explainer articles is US taxpayers, who are accustomed to units like (avoirdupois) pounds, (statute) miles, and (Gregorian) months rather than kilograms, kilometers, and megaseconds. They probably prefer specifying SI units in technical documents.
At least 10 states sent out postal ballots without being requested. (based on 2020, not sure what they have done for 2022)
Ballots were mailed to all registered voters in my state for the recent election. I go to the polling place anyway because folks with petitions to put items* on local ballots† gather outside the polling place in the hope of finding people who are willing to sign the petitions. I heard an estimate on the radio that about five of every eight voters voted by mail in my state this year, which will make it harder for folks with petitions to get enough signatures for their projects to appear on their local ballots.
The US is rather notorious for deliveries being stolen from doorsteps.
That would depend upon the particular doorstep in the US; the risk varies by locale.
The serious oddity with the US system is the use of drop boxes rather than sending back via the postal service.
There isn’t a single “US system”; elections here are administered by the states, and different states have different rules and options. In my state, the mail-in ballot could be deposited in a drop box, sent back via the postal service (but had to be received by 19:00 on election day to be valid), or returned in person at the polling place. An in-person voter didn’t have to use the mail-in ballot, but if a ballot provided by the polling station were used, he‡ also had to sign a document stating that his‡ mail-in ballot wouldn’t be used.
* — e.g. a lump sum from local taxes to support “meals on wheels” preparation and delivery of food to older residents
† — which, if a threshold of signatures of local residents has been met, are put to a vote on a different election day
‡ — epicene
I see your choices as the following:
Only you can decide which choices are worth pursuing.
Unfortunately the firmware update servers are down for that machine (it would barely cost them anything to keep those up, but fine).
Does archive.org have a clone of the relevant server page that held the firmware updates?
I contacted them to ask if there was a way to obtain this firmware. I have heard…nothing. I’d accept “sorry, no”. But simply no response. What does one do?
Try, try again? Look for Denon enthusiast sites to see if another 3808CI owner can provide the relevant firmware updates to you?
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