Posts by jake

Re: I think I get it...

"they were stopping all cars on freeway between San Diego and LA."

Perfectly normal when a perp is suspected to be running along that particular highway. We had a roadblock on Hwy 12 here in Sonoma a couple months ago; some entitled twat figured he could out-drive the police+Motorola. He'll be cooling his heels for the next 5 years or so, and the rest of us won't have to worry about his antics.

"Fortunately the office looked in the car and based purely on a glance was able to determine that there was no need to question any of us"

Becuse they were looking for a Mexican national in a blue Ford pickup, and you were obviously pastry white Brits in a green Chevy sedan?

"I assume they have some sort of pyschic powers."

Yeah. That must be it.

::coff coff::

Re: I think I get it...

First of all, before casting too many stones you Brits might want to compare and contrast the duties and etc. of your very own Border Force.

Just out of curiosity, I spent the morning calling about 70 people I know (friends, family, former students, etc.). These folks range the gamut of American society. (Rich, poor, educated & not, various races and religions, etc. etc.)

I asked them all the same question: "Have you, or anybody you know or have heard of directly, ever been stopped by the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as "the US Border Patrol"), for ANY REASON AT ALL, at any location other than at the actual border, or a proxy for the border such as an airport or seaport?"

They all said "no", just as I suspected.

The border patrol just plain doesn't pull over random people on a whim. They don't have the manpower for it.

They DO target smugglers of various descriptions after their goods have entered the country. Having a 100 mile limit allows them to ignore little things like county and state lines, which would otherwise allow the perps to move on to the next location before being busted.

Last time I checked ...

... the Equal Protection clause applies only to state and local governments, not the Feds.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

"You can't have one rule for citizens and another for non-citizens. That's unconstitutional in itself."

Don't be silly. American drug dealers are perfectly welcome to practice their trade (see San Francisco and Oakland), whereas them dern furriner drug dealers need to be turned away at the border after confiscating their drugs. I have never seen even the most liberal of civil rights lawyers argue otherwise, either.

Re: Careful where you put that thing

No more so than if the phone is in your pocket, which after this ruling is to say not.

Re: Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

The effect itself goes back to the first proto-shaman separating the ignorant from their meager scavenged food because his cave or hollow tree looked scary. Cushiest job in Africa a couple million years ago, I'm sure.

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

At the near exact rate of one second per second.

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

Probably one of the three Puma[0] (or their sprog) that Mary Chipperfield released from her circus/zoo in Plymouth onto Dartmoor back in '78.

Side note: Puma don't shred sheep. They take them apart with almost surgical precision. I lose a few every year to the critters ... no grudge on my part, it's a cost of doing business in this neck of the woods. If bits of sheep were scattered about, it was probably dogs and/or birds that did the scattering. Likewise, I have never seen one of the big cats kill more than one sheep at a time, on an as-needed basis. The only times I have seen multiple sheep kills it has been caused by feral dogs[1], HOWEVER, the cats might be attracted by the fresh kill, especially in the cold of Winter, and thus get blamed for it. Dog tracks are supposed to be seen on a farm, right?

[0] Mountain Lion, Cougar, Catamount, Florida Panther, etc. depending on where you live.

[1] Three or four house-pet dogs (from a couple-three houses) running together without human supervision are nearly a pack of feral dogs. Five running together are a feral pack, and will no longer listen to humans while they are together. The size of the dawgs doesn't matter. It's the lack of direction of a human pack leader that causes this, they revert. Palo Alto had a big problem with feral dogs out at the dump (tip to you brits). It turned out that a dozen or so were using a local creek as a highway to join up and go terrorize the workers ... but they were all home in time for dinner, with their owners none the wiser. Until we started trapping and checking tags.

_{Feral poodles! I've seen it with my own eyes! The horror!}

Re: Seriously guys…

Who cares what the Fedora set have to say about Plasma? This is part of the same crowd who brought us the systemd-cancer ...

Instead, for KDE related matters perhaps ask KDE instead[0]?

Quoting from that document:

Why not a new Compositor?

Given that KWin was designed as a X11 Window Manager and later as a X11 compositor the question is valid, why not to implement a new Wayland compositor from scratch. Most parts of KWin are X11 independent. E.g. the Desktop Effect system is able to integrate Wayland clients without any change, the same is true for Window Decorations and other parts.

Another reason is that the KWin development team does not have the manpower to maintain an independent X11 window manager and a Wayland compositor. Starting a new Wayland compositor would mean to stop the work on the X11 window manager, which would be a bad move as we cannot know yet whether Wayland will succeed and will be supported on all hardware. Also in future KDE will have to provide an X11 window manager.

So no. KDE/Plasma will be running with X11 into the foreseeable future.

[0] For the copy/paste folks: https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland

Re: Not bad, not bad at all.

I use Sendmail, mostly out of sheer inertia. Started using it before general release, evaluating it as a replacement for delivermail in the early 1980s and have been using it ever since. I fully admit that today it is way overkill for my personal needs, but I know how it works and I'm loath to throw away four decades of experience. I setup most of my clients with something that has a much smaller learning curve.

Re: DNS-over-https

Wait ... Chromium REQUIRES the English name and barfs on an actual Internet address?

That is very, very b0rken behavior. What are the alphagookids thinking?

Re: Not bad, not bad at all.

Agreed. Not bad at all.

I'll still be using (Al)pine into the foreseeable future, though. Works fine for my needs, and my fingers know it.

_{Probably doesn't hurt that I run my own email servers, at least for important stuff ...}

"How do they do that then?"

Simples ... MarsLab doesn't hire cowboys who might be tempted to buzz Perseverance's MastCams and other foolish stunts.

_{Not a lot of drone repair shops that make house calls out around Mars.}

Re: Wrong place for the solar panels?

A large part of the problem with dust on the panels is static. Blowing more atmosphere at it exacerbates the issue. I see a similar effect here on Earth with my own panels.

Re: Be a man!

"Since livers can grow back after donation"

No.

A partially lost liver can, in some circumstance, regenerate itself to it's original size. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, though. Too much to go wrong in the process.

Re: Be a man!

Don't give the fuckers any ideas!

The point is to get the government's nose OUT of health care, not to give them yet another excuse to spy on law abiding citizens.

Last time I looked, practicing medicine without a license was against the law here in the US ... and yet here we are, politicians practicing medicine without a license.

The answer isn't "42", nor is it 'because". The answer is ALWAYS either the actual answer, or "I haven't the foggiest ... let's find out!".

Never lie to a child, and never waffle. All that does is teach them to lie and waffle. Unless you're trying to raise a politician, of course.

"Let's be honest, at least some of them are hoping to find a loophole in it..."

Any scientist should relish the thought of finding a major flaw in the general scientific consensus. Most major scientific breakthroughs in human history have begun with an observant person watching an event and saying "Now, THAT'S peculiar ...".

Re: Capital idea comrades!

"I haven't seen the movie. I probably should."

Probably not. As usual, Hollywood took liberties with the original to make it palatable for the lowest common denominator, and the film is quite lacking as a result.

Two different issues.

One's a supposed "public safety" thing. The other is RF interference that should have already been addressed, but hasn't.

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

"I was bemused by how much imagination would be required to extract anything vaguely NSFW from ascii art"

The current crop of hand-wringers and namby-pambys seemingly find offense everywhere they look.

Prudery runs in waves. This too shall pass. And return. And pass ...

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

From Wiki:

"The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has published a braille edition of Playboy since 1970.[99] The braille version includes all the written words in the non-braille magazine, but no pictorial representations. Congress cut off funding for the braille magazine translation in 1985, but U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan reversed the decision on First Amendment grounds.[100]"

[99] Not my footnote.

[100] ANMF

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

Here's a few old men doing important historical research at the Computer History Museum. No, I am not in this video, but I may have contributed to the delinquency ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

"back in the days of line printers or otherwise text only printers"

These are still those days ... I use line printers, dot matrix and daisy wheel printers near daily.

Horses for courses & all that.

Re: Two and a half grand on a game

"The worst I ever did as a child was discover the joy of modems and run up a six hundred quid phone bill..."

I rode my Bultaco to Stanford with a handful of 8" floppies. The latency sucked, but my bandwidth was much higher than your modem.

I didn't have your phone bill problems, but did run the risk of getting busted by the cops (the Stanford Police hated dirtbikes on campus ... ).

Re: Dystopian

"Meanwhile the bastards are allowed to keep extorting as much money from kids with impunity as they ever did."

There is no extortion, the kids are voluntarily paying the money.

HOWEVER, and the elephant in the room, is that kids in most countries are not legally allowed to enter into a contract without parental (guardian) consent. No matter how you look at it, these so-called "microtransactions" are just as much of a contract as purchasing a car or a house. At some point, some hot-shot lawfirm is going to file a class action asking that all these transactions entered into by children should be nullified and the monies returned to the parent/guardian (less the lawyer's fees, of course!) ...

Re: Dystopian

"The parents thought (and why should they not, they are not experts) that the ipad was locked."

What ever happened to the concept of due diligence?