polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Which is also awesome, but not an argument against installing massive, terawatt capacity photovoltaic solar arrays across a desert.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Not only should one use ISO-8601 compliant data types, but also set the time zone and server time according to UTC time.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I mean, they'll just toss a $500 bribe to a Geek Squad employee, and have them spray your hard drive with "illegal data."

https://fortune.com/2018/03/07/best-buy-geek-squad-fbi-infor...

https://www.newsweek.com/best-buy-geek-squad-fbi-informants-...

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/fbi-geek-squad-best-buy...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fbi-geek-squad-customer...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/07/591698708...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/geek-squads-relationsh...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/04/03...

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

  However, continuous user tracking 
  via TLS session resumption is only 
  possible as long as the browser is 
  not restarted, because this clears 
  the TLS cache.

https://svs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/2018/2018...

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

No, it's really important to retain all those dots and slashes. This is not sarcasm. I'm being completely serious when I say this. It's really easy notation, and the differentiation of context for dots, slashes, question marks and hashtags is really useful.

  Wikipedia FR > Canada

I look at that angle bracket with the white space, and I get chills. And I'm not even drawing attention to that oh-so-glaring omission of the /wiki/ context. Truly horrifying.

Repeat. This is not sarcasm.

Dark roads ahead, friends.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Air horns are probably a great idea for bicycles. It would put someone on a bike eye-to-eye with a motorcycle in dense downtown traffic.

The thing about turning on a motorcycle, is speed's effect on the weight, and the only counter to prevent it from falling over is your strength, and ability to feel for leverage, versus tire friction.

At low speeds, powerwalking (letting the engine's idle push the bike at a walking pace) everything is reasonable, as long as you stay balanced. At speeds above 20 miles an hour, you cannot corner a motorcycle casually. You must pay attention to the road surfaces, and caliberate your speed according to how safe it is to lean the bike. If there is sand, gravel, rain, ice, oil/grease spots, or at night, flying blind to conditions beyond headlights, if you don't take the bike slow, keeping perpendicular to the ground, you risk a wipe out. Staying upright means taking a wide turn, or slowing down.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Mastodon really has the exact same feel as twitter. The difference being that CAP theorem produces really weird conversational effects.

If you look at the myriad Mastodon domains, operating as single-instance hosted websites, on whatever infrastructure they deploy to, very, very few sites have more than 1,000 users, and any of the under 1,000 club are filled with mostly geeky accounts, and a fanout of a handful of lurker accounts per each identifiable personality.

The one really, really huge Mastodon node is basically filled with sex workers (and their johns, presumably), and is operated out of Australia.

That being said, consider what CAP theorem does to conversations as federated servers pop in and out of existence as they go offline. It's going to be link rot to all hell. You can figure that the prostitution Mastodon instance is probably going to experience some pressure, and eventually collapse. And not only that, any users on that trunk of the federation will disappear. So what happens to the followers, and the followed? Where do the conversations go? Does it matter? It's mostly the promotional efforts of ladies (and not-so-much-ladies), hawking their fare.

Anywho, right now, suffice to say, Mastodon is in a weird place. The first people driven out of Twitter, were using Twitter as a bunker, after Backpage was dismantled. Then Twitter cracked down on those sorts of accounts, and now they're pioneering the largest Mastodon community in operation, because there are few open options.

So, Mastodon is likely going to become associated with that sort of Craigslist vibe, but in the form of a Web 2.0, single page web app, right now. And where that will take things in the future is anybody's game, but we see what happens to these underground bunkers over and over again. Mastodon will unfold a little bit differently though, because of it's Twitter-style publicity angle.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

100MPH tape!

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

On motorcycles you can be just a little bit more agressive, but selectively.

There's enough power to assert high speeds, and take the lead with quick acceleration, but due to the amount of surface area in contact with the ground, motorcycles have lower agility than bicycles, based on the weight that gets thrown around.

With most motorcycles weighing well over 200 pounds, depending on speeds, the usual turning radius cuts a pretty wide arc (not very maneuverable, ultimately), and stopping too short will throw you off the bike. You just lock up the tires, or peel out if you don't finesse the amount of force in play.

They can do more than a car, in terms of turning and stopping, but it requires agility, dexterity and practice. Whereas with a car you can just slam the brakes, and toss it in any gear, do whatever, and not even think about balance.

So, in a situation where you gain a feel for the attitude of some random car, and the driver is radiating the demeanor of a total dickwad, there are three choices. A. Stop, reroute, and go anywhere that fucker isn't. (the best, and most common decision, more than you might ever know) B. Clutch the transmission and rev loudly, to see if they know you exist, which often doesn't work because people listen to music and mostly try to ignore the world around them. C. When they inevitably don't respond to options A & B, release the clutch, and rev the engine to launch in front of that prick and blast off. Fuck the world.

People just really don't like to give other people choices, so you wind up doing a burnout in front of them, because they keep stepping on your toes. Hurts me more than it hurts them. Such is life.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

A lot of people keep their motorcycles extra loud for this reason. It pisses people off, to hear an extremely loud motorcycle engine, but a subset of riders don't do it to be cool, but really to gain attention as a survival mechanism. An overlapping group do it for both reasons.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

There's definitely still a sewage treatment plant near the site of the accident:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sheerness,+UK/@51.5112905,...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckton#Sewage_works

But you can't discount the difference between the dictionary definition of "sewage" versus the reality of incidental pollution as discovered in-situ.

Case in point:

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

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2010/03/post_25.html

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/ten-feet-of-black-mayon...

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/7/19/17590126/brooklyn-gowanus-dr...

http://nautil.us/blog/in-the-black-mayonnaise-of-brooklyns-g...

https://www.brownstoner.com/development/gowanus-canal-black-...

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161123/gowanus/gowanus-ca...

Also:

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

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Partly, the instinct is about feeling trashy, and having to replace worn-out old junk as it accumulates stains, scuff marks, battle damage.

It feels wasteful to have to discard perfectly useful items, because they look worn out. We all know that black, dark items tend show the least amount of wear, and in the interest of efficient frugality, some of us gravitate toward that instinct.

You look at a white t-shirt, and you know it's going to show pit stains by the end of the year. A black t-shirt might show some white accumulation inside the armpits, but not outside, and you really are only going to have to trash it, once some holes show up. Same with socks.

So too with hi-viz stuff. You just don't want to buy something, and throw it out, the moment it gives a sense of unintended imperfection. It's more an equipment maintenance perspective, than a live, situational awareness point of view. The best equipment is the stuff you have, and the stuff you have is the stuff you keep.

Being a little OCD, but that's what's going on under the hood, from my own perspective.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's funny because I have to dream back to all those coding interview challenges that, ostensibly, so desperately try to weed out the kind of person, the sort of rotten despicable wannabe, that incompetant non-programmer that would do something like this.

Oh, if only there were a coding challenge that could distinguish the true compiler bots from the pathetic slovenly flesh we hire into all these office chairs.

polaritron

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I don't think this is about what can be found on Wikipedia. The reality here is that this company doesn't seem to create it's own games, but habitually acquires creative companies.

More to the point, it seems to be little more than a gateway company, selectively permitting the operation of a limited selection of pre-approved properties to operate within the confines of a planned ecosystem that is slightly more advanced than an artificial monopoly.

That companies acquired by this shell entity have continues to produce games after being acquired, should not be regarded as the shell company creating games itself.

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