In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in northern Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools. Four years later, the board approved a motion to restore the names....
I mean, same general region, northern Virginia, but not really his place of birth. Something like a hundred miles away.
It sounds like he was one of a number of people who got appointed via political connections.
I’d think that if one wanted to choose a Confederate military leader who did well, there’d be a lot of better choices. Like, the North-South division ran right next to Washington, DC, due to the Maryland/Virginia split, Richmond wasn’t that far away, and so northern Virginia was the location of a lot of important Civil War stuff and my impression is that generally, Confederate forces in the east performed better than those in the west. So one would think that the northern Virginia region would have a lot of prominent options.
If you wanted to pick a Confederate cavalry commander, I’d think that I’d pick someone like J. E. B. Stuart, who really did outperform.
Like his intimate friend, Stonewall Jackson, General J. E. B. Stuart was a legendary figure and is considered one of the greatest cavalry commanders in American history. His friend from his federal army days, Union Major General John Sedgwick, said that Stuart was “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.”[83]
Plasma (also known as Plasma Desktop) is a graphical shell developed by KDE for Unix-like operating systems. Plasma is a standard desktop interface. It was declared mature with the release of KDE SC 4.2. It is designed for desktop PCs and larger laptops. In its default configuration, it resembles KDesktop from K Desktop Environment 3 and Microsoft Windows XP; however, extensive configurability allows radical departures from the default layout.
The PinePhone is a smartphone developed by Hong Kong-based computer manufacturer Pine64, intended to allow the user to have full control over the device. Measures to ensure this are: running mainline Linux-based mobile operating systems, assembling the phone with screws, and simplifying the disassembly for repairs and upgrades. LTE, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and both cameras can be physically switched off. The PinePhone ships with the Manjaro Linux operating system using the Plasma Mobile graphic interface, although other distributions can be installed by users.
“Rice” isn’t a technical term. It’s a reference to “ricing”, derived from “rice rockets”, inexpensive Asian cars that are heavily modified with things like spoilers and LED lighting and whatever to look glitzy. A “rice” is the result of “ricing” something.
Rice burner is a pejorative term originally applied to Japanese motorcycles and which later expanded to include Japanese cars or any East Asian-made vehicles.[2][3][4][5] Variations include rice rocket, referring most often to Japanese superbikes, rice machine, rice grinder or simply ricer.[3][6][7]
Wingding with a blender goose nunchuk paddleboat.
Well, you could goose Blender with some theming, I guess.
The norm in the US – lethal injection – is apparently to essentially knock someone out, then stop their heart. I don’t imagine that one feels anything.
In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousness followed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):
Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short-action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the person unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will—even in the absence of the following two drugs—cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.
Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, which causes complete, fast, and sustained paralysis of the striated skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.
Potassium chloride: a potassium salt, which increases the blood and cardiac concentration of potassium to stop the heart via an abnormal heartbeat and thus cause death by cardiac arrest.
There are a few states that differ. Last time I looked it up, one state still permitted the condemned to request hanging, but it looks like they stopped that, probably because it was a pain to do. I recall reading that the last one that was done, the state had to dig around in old records to figure out how the heck you compute drop length for a given weight and such.
In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:
Lethal injection in all states as primary method, in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable
Nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama
Electrocution in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina (primary method)
Gas chamber in California and Missouri
In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, gas chamber in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.
In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; gas chamber in Wyoming).
Apparently Vermont technically still has electrocution on the books for treason.
All 26 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. As of 2021, South Carolina is the only autonomous region in the United States of America to authorize its 1912 Electric Chair as the primary method of execution, citing inability to procure the drugs necessary for lethal injection. Vermont’s remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.
However, given that very few people in the US have ever been convicted of treason at all – despite people liking to claim that something is “treason”, it’s actually an extremely narrowly-defined crime – much less under Vermont state law, that’s probably largely academic.
Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as “only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, “adhering to the enemies” of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.
Death sentences for treason under the Constitution have been carried out in only two instances: the executions of Taos Revolt insurgents in 1847, and that of William Bruce Mumford during the Civil War.
Constitutionally, U.S. citizens who live in a state owe allegiance to at least two government entities: the United States of America and their state of legal residence. They can therefore potentially commit treason against either, or against both. At least 14 people have been charged with treason against various states; at least six were convicted, five of whom were executed. Only two prosecutions for treason against a state were ever carried out in the U.S.: one against Thomas Dorr and the other after John Brown’s conspiracy. It has often been discussed, both legally and in matter of policy, if states should punish treason.
Neither of those was in Vermont – one was in Rhode Island and the other Virginia, and the only instance of the two in which a death sentence was applied was in Virginia, after the John Brown uprising.
We only know about when humans mastered fire or started using metal. But we know the exact date when the first powered flight took place. What are some really early “first ____” we know the date of for sure?
Skimming some material online, it looks like the best mechanism to get day-level dating for very old historical times are going to be celestial events, like eclipses, because we can run motions of those bodies backwards to compute precisely when the event occurred.
The first recorded notation referencing an eclipse dates to about 5,000 years ago, according to NASA. Spiral petroglyphs carved on three ancient stone monuments in Ireland at Loughcrew in County Meath, depict alignments of the sun, moon and horizon, and likely represent a solar eclipse that occurred Nov. 30, 3340 B.C., NASA reported.
That isn’t a first (well, other than in being the first known recorded eclipse to us), but my bet is that it’ll be some event on the same day or within a specified number of days of an eclipse or similar.
So that probably places an outer bound on when such an event would have been known to have occurred, unless there’s some other form of celestial event recorded way, way back when.
EDIT: Though it sounds like there is some controversy as to whether that is in fact what is being depicted.
EDIT2: and also according to the article, our accuracy in running those back that far starts to fall off:
Perhaps the biggest hole in Griffin’s theory is the date of the ancient eclipse that coincided, more or less, with the tomb’s construction. Earth’s rate of rotation fluctuates just enough over time to make calculating the path of totality for prehistoric eclipses imprecise. In fact, even programs designed to make those calculations can only do so reliably about as far back as the eighth century B.C. Steele says.
“We can’t just calculate back to 3000 B.C. and say that such-and-such an eclipse was visible in a certain place,” he adds. “The 3340 B.C. eclipse might not have been visible in Ireland at all.”
It sounds like one complexity is that while eclipses can be run accurately (maybe not where they are visible), the problem is that when the day occurred is not, and you want to know the day. Apparently, there are some unknown factors affecting the rate of Earth’s rotation a bit, and the error is enough that it becomes significant across millennia.
Precisely predicting future eclipses, or plotting the paths of historical eclipses, requires knowing the positions of the sun, moon and Earth. Computers can track the motions of each, but the challenge here is that these motions are not constant. As the moon causes tides in Earth’s oceans, the process also causes the moon to slowly drift away from the Earth and the length of day on Earth to slowly increase.
Essentially, the length of a day on Earth is getting longer by roughly 18 microseconds every year, or one second every 55,000 years. After hundreds or thousands of years, that fraction of a second per day adds up to several hours.
The change in Earth’s day also affects dating historical eclipses — if the difference in the length of day is not corrected for, calculations may be inaccurate by thousands of kilometers. As such, when using eclipses to date historical events a correction must be applied; uncertainties in the correction can make ancient eclipse identifications harder to pin down in the absence of additional information to help narrow down the possibilities.
Measuring changing day-lengths
For those solar eclipses that are well established, they open a window into tracking Earth’s length-of-day across the centuries. By timing eclipses over the last 2,000 years, researchers have mapped out the length of Earth’s day over that same span. The value of 18 microseconds per year is an average, but sometimes the Earth slows down a bit more and sometimes a bit less.
Tides alone can’t explain this pattern — there is something more going on between the moon and the Earth, and the cause is still unknown. This mystery, however, can be explored thanks to solar eclipses.
We can measure a change in length of a day on Earth with instruments now, but we wouldn’t be able to capture that change hundreds or thousands of years back in time without a precise measuring stick and records of eclipses over millennia and across the world. Total solar eclipses allow us to peer into not only our own history, but the history of the Earth itself.
So if you had an event that was recorded happening in conjunction with an eclipse, we could maybe tell you pretty precisely how long ago it was in units of seconds. But we wouldn’t know how many days ago it was, because the day is not a fixed unit of time and we don’t know sufficiently-accurately how the length of a day has changed over that period.
Sim racers are among the most enthusiastic of all gamers, often spending thousands of dollars on equipment on top of thousands more on PCs and monitors.
These guys are selling a six gauge “starter pack” for about 1500 euros. I imagine that one wants at least the basic controls too.
Looks like 845 euros for the pedals, 500 euros for the yoke, and 230 for the throttle. It also looks like the throttle doesn’t come with the throttle controller, so that’s another 150 euros.
The breach here is pretty minor, in my book. Name, address, specifics of computer purchased. The name and address is pretty much available and linked already. The computer isn’t, but doesn’t seem that abusable. Maybe it could help someone locate more-expensive, newer computers for theft, but I don’t see a whole lot of potential room for abuse.
I use Eclipse on Android, because it’s open-source, I used it on Reddit and was familiar with it, and because Jerboa had some really obnoxious bugs that I don’t recall anymore.
A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.
The computer I get. The coffee maker…okay, for some people I get. I dunno if a printer is at the top of my priority list but, hey, I dunno, maybe she needed it for work.
But:
A Keurig coffee maker.
Man, if I were squatting in a store sign, I think that I would be using a Mr. Coffee and Folgers ground coffee, not a razor-and-blades-model coffee maker.
Setting aside whether they want her living in their sign, if they know that she’s there and let her stay, I’m pretty sure that they have liability if there are problems. She was living on the roof of a building, no obvious way up or down, and if they say “sure, go ahead and stay” and she is climbing off the roof one night and falls, that’s on them. Not to mention that I am pretty confident that a store-roof-sign is gonna violate a long list of code requirements for legal housing, from insulation to having a bathroom.
And even if you’re gung-ho on the concept of relaxing liability and code for property owners who don’t charge or something like that because you want a lower bar for homeless shelters or something, I am almost certain that the kind of place that they’re gonna aim to permit isn’t gonna be people living on a roof in a sign.
EDIT: Also, while I don’t know the specifics of this store, it’s apparently in a shopping center (and the article referenced that she may have climbed up from other commercial buildings, so they’re probably adjoining). I think that the way those work is that the stores don’t normally own their individual properties, but that they lease from a property owner who owns the strip mall or shopping center, and it’s not like the store can just go start treating the property as residential even if it wants to, even aside from zoning restrictions from the municipality.
Lemme check Google Maps.
Yeah, it’s the “Northwest Plaza” shopping center. Looks like they share a building with a pet food store and a UPS store and such, and there are other buildings in the shopping center.
Yeah, and at Street View level, you can see that there are more businesses in the same building. Like, a buffet restaurant, a pharmacy, etc.
Like, setting aside the whole question of whether society should subsidize more housing, this just isn’t somewhere that it makes a lot of sense to put someone, even if that’s the aim.
Squatter’s rights wouldn’t be applicable here, time aside.
The point of squatter’s rights isn’t to try to generate more housing in random nooks, but to force regularization of the situation – like to encourage property owners to act to eject people now rather than waiting fifty years and then, surprise, enforcing submarine legal rights.
Using squatter’s rights requires that possession be adverse and open. Like, you can’t secretly hole up in a corner somewhere, as the person in the article did. You have to be very clear, have everyone know that you’re living there. The property owner also has to be making no efforts to remove the person. Those restrictions aren’t just arbitrary – they’re to limit it to situations where is a long-running divergence between legality and the situation in place and where nobody is attempting to rectify the situation themselves (either via selling rights to live there or ejecting a person or whatever).
That can be used as a heuristic, and that may be good-enough to disrupt widespread use of VPN protocols.
But it’s going to be hard to create an ironclad mechanism against steganographic methods, because any protocol that contains random data or data that can’t be externally validated can be used as a VPN tunnel.
I can create “VPN over FTP”, where I have a piece of software that takes in a binary stream and generates a comma-separated-value file that looks something like this:
So I have an FTP connection that’s transmitting a file that looks like this.
That’s human-readable, but the problem is that it’s hard to identify that maybe all of those fields are actually encoding data which might well be an encrypted VPN connection.
You can do traffic analysis, look for bursty traffic, but the problem is that as long as the VPN user is willing to blow bandwidth on it, that’s easy to counter by just filling in the gaps with padding data.
You can maybe detect one format, but I’d wager that it’s not that hard to (a) produce these manually with a lot less effort than it is to detect new ones, and (b) probably to automatically train one that can “learn” to generate similar-looking data by just being fed a bunch of files to emulate.
A censor can definitely raise the bar to do a VPN. They don’t need a 100% solution. And they can augment automated, firewall blocks with severe legal penalties aimed at people who go out of their way to bypass blocks. They can reduce the reliability of VPNs, make it hard to pay for VPN service, and increase the bandwidth requirements or latency of VPNs.
But on the flip side, steganography is going to be probably impossible to fully counter if one intends to blacklist rather than whitelist traffic. And if you whitelist traffic, you give up the benefits of full access to the Internet. Some countries have chosen to do that – North Korea, for example. But that is a very costly trade to make.
EDIT: Probably an even-more-obnoxious “host file” for steganographic data would be a file format that intrinsically encrypts data, like a password-protected ZIP file. For protocols protected by X.509 certificates, like TLS, China can mandate that everyone trust a CA that they run so that they can conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on connections. But ZIP doesn’t do that – it only uses a password. Users cannot trivially backdoor their ZIP encryption so as to let the Great Firewall see inside. So if someone starts using an encrypted ZIP file format to use as an encrypted VPN tunnel, China would be looking at blocking transfers of encrypted ZIP files. And there’s gonna be less bandwidth overhead to an encrypted ZIP file in terms of encoding than my above CSV file.
And even if China, after a long, arduous effort, transitions people off encrypted ZIP, all one needs is a new file format in use that uses encryption.
I’m not saying that governments will necessarily take issue.
I’m just saying that that has to also get past publics and their representatives in legislatures.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to do – people have called this a “Marshall Plan 2.0”, and the original was – ultimately, though not as initially presented – both done and overwhelmingly grants. But my point is that if Russia isn’t actively-invading a country in Europe, I think that it’s gonna be harder to get the political momentum for funds than if Russia is doing so.
And we’re not talking pocket change – it’s hundreds of billions. Russia’s frozen funds are already in the hundreds-of-billions, so that’s a significant chunk of that covered already.
I’d rather have the more-difficult-to-raise-money-for things have the easier-to-get money aimed at them.
I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.
Oh, that’s interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.
I’d be pretty confident that it’s not. There have been lots of companies that show up in the space, and they haven’t been clobbered by other companies via the regulatory process. Those haven’t been owned out of China. Those companies aren’t gonna care about the ownership of a competitor.
And the US went to extreme measures to ensure that China didn’t control 5G infrastructure via Huawei, considered it security-critical, and the competitors there are out of Europe, Ericsson and Nokia. And the US did some local restrictions on Huawei phones (and two other state-owned Chinese phone companies) being sold to military members at bases, but not on other Chinese competitors.
And there are a number of prior restrictions that the US has placed on companies owned out of China company. For example, I know at one point a Chinese holding company bought a solar farm directly overlooking a US naval weapons testing facility and the US mandated that the owners divest.
Like, agree with them or not, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that the US government has very real security concerns specifically about Chinese companies.
I mean, I can believe that Google is probably enthusiastic (is “Youtube Shorts” the closest equivalent? Maybe there’s someone else who does similar things), but I don’t buy that Google fabricated this. If that were the case, you’d expect to see a bunch of prior China-related restrictions, but would expect to see a lot of Google-related restrictions, but what one actually sees is the opposite.
Virginia school board votes to restore names of Confederate leaders to schools (www.nbcnews.com)
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in northern Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools. Four years later, the board approved a motion to restore the names....
[ Kali / Mobian] [ KDE Plasma/Mobile ] Pinephone rice (lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5b2ee290-39b1-4c3b-bcf2-811111ff3c7f.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/867399c0-be43-4c78-aba9-618fa0f8734b.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ef23a92f-b0fc-49ce-b00a-d2786f53d3a6.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/81e6f038-6603-44db-9d24-1238d360fdc3.png
Starting anew, after a few months of Skyrim and Fallout, I'm back at the main menu
My GOD did Inon Zur go all out with the soundtrack. It’s so fucking good
Record-breaking increase in CO2 levels in world’s atmosphere | Experts issue warning after finding global average concentration in March was 4.7ppm higher than same period last year (www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/9388627...
Alabama sets nitrogen-gas execution for man who survived botched 2022 effort (www.theguardian.com)
What are some of the earliest "firsts" that we have a definite date for?
We only know about when humans mastered fire or started using metal. But we know the exact date when the first powered flight took place. What are some really early “first ____” we know the date of for sure?
Nintendo Switch Is Removing Integration for X, Formerly Twitter (comicbook.com)
Corsair to go all in on sim racing with plans to acquire Fanatec and help with its €70 million debt (www.pcgamer.com)
Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
what lemmy web app do you use and why?
Homeless woman was living inside Michigan rooftop store sign with computer, coffee maker (apnews.com)
How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic (gfw.report)
Archived version...
Peter Thiel was trapped inside a student debating hall by pro-Palestine protesters accusing him of genocide (www.businessinsider.com)
Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
EU agrees €3B raid on Russian assets to buy weapons for Ukraine (www.politico.eu)
Late concession by Belgium paved way for deal on using profits to buy ammo for Kyiv’s war effort....
This laptop was MADE to be HACKED! (www.youtube.com)
How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas (sherwood.news)