I think that the idea that the EU might have had behind the cookie popup mandate wasn’t to actually provide any useful information or options on a per-site basis, but to make users more aware of the amount of tracking occurring.
On an individual website standpoint, I agree with you – the cookie popup law is obnoxious, and does a poor job of solving a technical problem that is better solved by just not retaining cookies. In fact, not retaining cookies – a better approach, since I don’t have to worry about whether the website is actually doing what it’s saying – exacerbates the cookie popups, because it ensures that a site cannot track you to remember whether it has already shown the cookie popup, so makes it do so all the time. Plus there were already long-existing technical options for a browser to automatically tell a website not to track the user, like P3P, that aren’t disruptive from a UI standpoint. I’m just saying that I’m not sure that providing a user a way to avoid tracking on an individual website is actually the goal.
On a related note, though…generally-speaking, I don’t care much about EU regulation insofar as it doesn’t affect me. People in the EU can do what they want, and if they want to place restrictions that affect people in the EU, fine, whatever. I start to have a problem, though, when websites present cookie popups to me. I’m not in the EU. Now, in fairness, they do seem to have tamped down on that somewhat – some European websites that used to show them to me seem to have stopped. But I still do get them from the occasional website.
tries a few
Like, thelocal.it is still doing it, for example. France24 doesn’t appear to be, though, and I’m pretty sure they used to.
It was especially obnoxious for European websites that had some localization feature for everything but then had the cookie pop-up hardcoded to whatever was locally used of the eight million European languages out there. So the entire website would be presented in English to me except the one popup that you have to click through before seeing anything else, sometimes has extra buttons, and is in Dutch or something.
It is absolutely a cookie popup law, because you have to ask permission to use them for anything nonessential, like tracking, which pretty much everyone does.
But again, I don’t care as long as it’s only people in the EU that have to put up with it. You vote for the people who put the legislation in place, and if you want to, you can just vote them out. If I want to legislatively address it, I have to push for laws that penalize companies that do it here, which is ridiculous.
They can stop tracking you, that way they don’t have to ask anything… which is precisely what they don’t want to do
Probably not, but a lot of them do. Meanwhile, I’d already solved that problem in a more-effective way than Brussels had by not letting them retain cookies at all, so what Brussels accomplished was to make a bunch of cookie popups get thrown in my face and require me to disable my more-effective solution if I don’t want to click through them all the time.
uBlock origin has lists to remove a lot of the popups (and blocks most trackers), browsing the Web in 2024 without it is torture.
I’m using uBlock too. This is what makes it through.
EDIT: Not to mention that even the EU’s own website didn’t stop using tracking cookies. Even they just started throwing up the dialog. And I just checked, and they’re still doing that in 2024 and still showing it to me, though I’m not in the EU.
So, I am not a vinyl fan, and do not own any. And I agree that the “quality argument” about vinyl being analog and thus being higher fidelity is pretty senseless. But a couple of points:
The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles.
Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as “victims of the loudness war”.
Because of the limitations of the vinyl format, the ability to manipulate loudness was also limited. Attempts to achieve extreme loudness could render the medium unplayable. Digital media such as CDs remove these restrictions and as a result, increasing loudness levels have been a more severe issue in the CD era.
I’d guess that audio recorded with the expectation that it would be played on vinyl is probably optimized for that format
Same idea for old headphones or amplifiers or whatever. I don’t know specifics.
LCD and LED displays, in 2024, are pretty much across-the-board better than CRTs in 1990. But a lot of old video game emulators try to reproduce artifacts that resulted from low display fidelity of CRTs. Scanlines. Blurriness. Blooming. Curvature of display. Even a bit of color fringing or the like. That’s because the game was designed to be played on the system in question (or one closely approximating it). The art very frequently looks better, less jagged.
I have magnificent MIDI soundfonts that can make any MIDI audio played on my computer sound vastly more realistic than it does on old, 1990s computer synth hardware or on something like a Super Nintendo. But the music can sound much worse, because the artists were designing the soundtrack with an eye to making it sound pleasant on hardware that had the characteristics of the time.
Album art
Vinyl records were not very space efficient. But that meant that artists had a huge amount of space to create album artwork compared to CDs.
That’s not something that I’m personally into, but some people really are.
Now, all the above being said, I don’t own vinyl or a turntable and have no interest in ever getting one. But there are some arguments that I can understand for why people may prefer them.
First, I’d encourage anyone to save. And as a place to keep savings, the market has done pretty well as to long-term returns. Having money in a portfolio isn’t incompatible with working for a living.
Let’s take a hypothetical investor named Annie as an example. At 25 years old, Annie has just landed her dream job as a chef, with a starting salary of $30,000 per year. She knows she may never make considerably more than that, but she doesn’t care – she loves her job! She also loves the idea of eventually retiring, though, and because the restaurant she works at doesn’t offer pension or retirement benefits, she knows she’s going to have to make that happen on her own. Living modestly, she’s able to set aside an extra $100 per week, putting that money into an S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.70%) index fund that conservatively returns an average of 9% per year.
How much will Annie have at the end of just 30 years? Incredibly, somewhere around $790,000.
Surprised? This is even more surprising: If Annie can keep finding that extra $100 per week for another 10 years, she’ll be sitting on roughly $2 million at the end of that 40-year stretch.
If she retires at 65, and you figure 2% inflation and use their 9% pre-inflation return, those savings generate a post-inflation maybe $140,000/year for her to live on without cutting into the portfolio in real terms.
But, okay, second, set investment aside. Let’s just say “does the economy matter”?
Like, if there’s a recession, GDP contracts. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people look at that and say “Well, that’s just some abstract number. It’s got no effect on me.”
Inflation, on the other hand, clearly causes prices to rise.
I was looking at a poll from a bit back talking about how most people – especially in Germany and the US, two of the three countries polled – deeply dislike inflation. They would much rather have a recession than see high inflation.
In general, economists are going to go the other route. They’ll say that recessions are really bad.
So, during Biden’s (and Trump’s, during COVID) time in office, a number of policies were made (not necessarily by them) that tended to avoid recession, but encourage inflation.
Polling shows that people were unhappy with Biden on the economy, because high (well, as the US goes) inflation showed up during his time in office.
Biden kept quoting figures that are generally considered to be very positive. Low unemployment, for example. But…there was that inflation.
When GDP drops – and a sustained decline in GDP is what constitutes a recession – it’s indicating that there’s less economic activity going on. What that tends to represent is a lot fewer people working – a lot of layoffs. Companies going under. Maybe furloughs or reduced hours, in some cases. The impact there is that a lot of people have their income go away or be cut, a lot of things get upended.
With inflation, on the other hand, wages are sticky, tend to take a while to catch up, but do catch up. There aren’t huge job losses. Things more-or-less keep moving along as they were.
I don’t think that Trump or Biden would have acted wildly different on the matter. You could swap their periods in office, and both would have followed their recommendations, which would have been to favor policy that encouraged inflation and avoided recession, though then the inflation would have shown up when Trump was in office. They’re not doing it because the economists advising them have some special love of having Americans pay higher prices, but rather because they’d consider that preferable to a recession and the problems that accompany that. Also, neither drives the Federal Reserve, which is what adopted an important chunk of that inflationary policy. In the absence of the pandemic, neither would have wanted inflation – it’s not that high inflation is desirable, just that it’s preferable to the alternative of recession.
I will give USB the benefit of providing power, which permits for active noise cancellation. You want ANC on headphones that have a 1/8 inch TRS plug, you gotta get power somewhere, like a battery. But, yeah, kinda sucks to either tie up the only port on the phone or deal with (even a small) passthrough adapter hanging off the headphones.
If you could get a case designed for your phone that had an embedded USB hub, pass-though USB port, MicroSD USB Mass Storage adapter, and audio adapter, would you tolerate that? The angle of the headphones jack might be constrained to come out of the left or right of the case.
The waterproofing argument – which I have heard before – makes no sense at all to me for a TRS audio jack. You can seal the port off from the rest of the phone. Okay, dump it in water and you will short contacts, but TRS connectors get shorted anyway every time you’re plugging or unplugging something into them. They’re pretty much the one connector that is guaranteed to need to be able to handle having the contacts shorted.
The “space” argument, that it consumes a lot of space in the phone, that I get.
Some American-made, precision-guided weapons supplied to Ukraine have proved ineffective on the battlefield, their accuracy badly diminished by Russian jamming efforts, according to Ukrainian commanders and a Ukrainian military research project....
There are anti-radiation weapons, like HARM, but GPS isn’t some super-strong signal. A jammer can be a long way from the target, out of range of the weapons that are trying to hit the target.
Along with @maciejwolczyk we’ve been training a neural network that learns how to play NetHack, an old roguelike game, that looks like in the screenshot. Recently, something unexpected happened.
Not my bug and not CS, but I think that the most-difficult bug(s) I’ve read about is the American Mark 14 torpedo in World War II. A combination of constrained budget for testing before the war, extreme inability to meet supply (and thus provide some for testing), difficulties in observing the things in production in operation (it’s a torpedo, and the target probably isn’t too amenable to you looking at the thing if it doesn’t work well), secrecy, cutting-edge technology, and several other problems, a number of modes of operation (including both a contact and proximity magnetic fuze), and including multiple bugs that had a tendency to mask or affect each other, including specifically:
A tendency to run deeper than set (and sometimes go too deep and not hit or detect a ship)
A tendency to bend a critical pin on impact if the torpedo impacted a ship at something like right angles, but not at an angle; if bent, the torpedo would not detonate.
Testing that happened in the Atlantic, but with most use in the Pacific. It turns out that Earth’s magnetic field is not uniform, and varies enough to throw off magnetic fuzes and cause premature explosions or non-explosions.
…led to the US fighting a war that was heavily-naval, where the main weapon for sinking major ships was the torpedo…but where that torpedo wasn’t really very functional for something like 18 months of fighting.
I know older titles are usually the topic in this community but a lot of the popular f2p games are getting pretty old now too, and if you’re like me you’ve been curious about some of them and even pleasantly surprised now and again....
If you mean free-to-play in the sense of a commercial game that one can play without payment, but where it is supported by data-mining or in-app-purchases or ads, I can only off-the-cuff recall playing a few games in that category:
World of Warships. I played one round against humans.
Defense of the Ancients 2. I played one round against human players and some time against the computer.
Fallout Shelter. I didn’t like it much, though I do like the mainline Fallout series.
I remember some gamebook game on Android that showed ads at the bottom.
I’m not playing any of those currently. Broadly-speaking, I don’t like the model. I’d rather just pay up front.
If you’re talking about free-to-play-with-the-aim-of-selling-you-on-a-larger-game, I’ve played plenty of those – in the 1990s, shareware and demos were a common way to promote a game. But they’ve kind of fallen out of favor in terms of DLC. I don’t think I’ve played any of those for a while.
If you’re talking about entirely free games, then I’ve played plenty of those. I think the two that I’m currently playing off-and-on, both open-source, would be:
Shattered Pixel Dungeon, an Android roguelike. !pixeldungeon
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a (mostly PC; there’s an Android build and you can play it on a touchscreen, but it’s really better-suited to a keyboard) open-world roguelike. There’s a not-very-active Threadiverse community at !cataclysmdda; the subreddit is much more active.
So, I see some comment, post view from my instance is missing comparing to view from that original instance. Which prevent me to interact (like, comment)...
If it’s due to defederation, no. If it’s due to defederation, your only option is to choose a new home instance.
One thing you might have done is have deselected the language (including “unspecified”) on your home instance. That would hide comments and posts tagged with that language. I did that inadvertently. If that’s it, just turn it back on.
Or you could have blocked the user or instance on your home instance, and if so, you can unblock them.
Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add “udm=14” to the search URL....
If you’re using the browser search field to do your searches, I expect you could simply have Firefox at least can simply set up a custom search using “!g” and using whatever search URL you want. Then Firefox would redirect the search before DDG sees it. Should also be a little faster, since you don’t need to go to DDG first.
There may also be some browser addon that can rewrite URLs.
A New Jersey electrician who repeatedly attacked police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Friday to 12 years in prison by a judge who called him “a menace to our society.”...
Same reason missionaries went to dangerous places in past centuries, I imagine. There are people in need to convert, and the risks aren’t all that meaningful if you honestly believe in your message. What’s the worst someone can do, kill you? You’re in heaven then. It’s life that’s the difficult and painful period to get through, not what comes afterwards.
Involuntary manslaughter is the killing of a human being without intent of doing so, either expressed or implied. It is distinguished from voluntary manslaughter by the absence of intention. It is normally divided into two categories, constructive manslaughter and criminally negligent manslaughter.
Criminally negligent manslaughter is variously referred to as criminally negligent homicide in the United States, and gross negligence manslaughter in England and Wales. In Scotland and some Commonwealth of Nations jurisdictions the offence of culpable homicide might apply.
It occurs where death results from serious negligence, or, in some jurisdictions, serious recklessness. A high degree of negligence is required to warrant criminal liability. A related concept is that of willful blindness, which is where a defendant intentionally puts themselves in a position where they will be unaware of facts which would render them liable.
Criminally negligent manslaughter occurs where there is an omission to act when there is a duty to do so, or a failure to perform a duty owed, which leads to a death. The existence of the duty is essential because the law does not impose criminal liability for a failure to act unless a specific duty is owed to the victim. It is most common in the case of professionals who are grossly negligent in the course of their employment. An example is where a doctor fails to notice a patient’s oxygen supply has disconnected and the patient dies (R v Adomako and R v Perreau). Another example could be leaving a child locked in a car on a hot day.
It’s sad the lawyers are sucking money from the victims’ families.
I’d give reasonable odds that they aren’t.
So, some lawyers do cases on contingency. Basically, if they lose, they don’t get paid. But if they win, the plaintiff agrees to give them a (potentially quite substantial) chunk of the payout.
A contingent fee (also known as a contingency fee in the United States or a conditional fee in England and Wales) is any fee for services provided where the fee is payable only if there is a favourable result. Although such a fee may be used in many fields, it is particularly well associated with legal practice.
A contingency fee is a payment agreement between an attorney and a client. Instead of paying an upfront or hourly rate, the client agrees to pay the attorney a percentage of any compensation recovered.
This percentage is usually between 20% and 50%, according to Cornell Law School.
So, say you’re one of the lawyers here. You figure, okay, all of these parties you’re suing have real money. You sue them. Maybe it costs you $N to do the case. But if your expected return is $100N, and maybe you’ve got a 1-in-30 chance of getting lucky with a sympathetic jury and winning a big payout, then the expected return says that it’s worthwhile to just throw mud at a wall and see what sticks.
Your odds probably aren’t great of winning any of these lawsuits, but every now and then, you can get really big payouts, which makes up for the case being a long shot. Do enough of them – and here, they’re suing a bunch of parties – and it becomes increasingly likely that you’ll win one.
The families this week also announced lawsuits against 92 Texas Department of Public Safety officers. The lawsuit names the Uvalde School District and several of its employees as defendants, including the then-principal and then-school district police chief.
The families also plan to sue the federal government, their attorney said, noting that over 150 federal officers were at the school.
Even deeper pockets than the companies involved.
The money here ultimately comes from the company’s customers if they win (since it results in higher prices) or if they win against the government, higher taxes. The families probably won’t pay anything in the event of a loss. In a win, they’ll split the money with the lawyers.
You can’t cut any taxes or programs to fund your idea. Nothing else in your government is going to change. It can’t be a tax that you avoid somehow. The money comes from you and similar people in your situation. Don’t try to get around it in some way....
Well, to pull up some things that I’ve groused about on the Threadiverse recently:
In the US, I’d probably support more federal education subsidy, though I’d be also fine with individuals paying more for it. What I would like to see is states paying less, as if people move from state to state, the state that loses population is paying the bill to educate the labor force of the state gaining population, though, so I don’t know if that’d meet your concern for “cutting taxes”. I’d be okay with paying more to iron out a misincentive, though.
I’ve wanted the government to deal with looking into existential AI threats. I don’t think that it makes sense for private industry to do so – the incentives there just don’t make sense. That’d take funds.
The same would go for certain other technologies that have potential to create existential risks. I don’t know what the situation is for genetic engineering, but I expect that there will come a point in time that we are capable-enough at genetic engineering that we can create some pretty unpleasant self-replicating things.
We don’t have self-replicating nano-machines either, but those would be something of an analogous risk; this is the gray goo scenario.
Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy (the literal consumption of the ecosystem).[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.
All three of those deal with technologies where one can create systems that rapidly expand without control and which I’d expect to become increasingly-accessible to humanity.
Military: I don’t think that we have an effective counter for small UAVs today. This one we’re already looking into. The closest thing we have in Ukraine today is maybe VAMPIRE (a vehicle-mounted system that launches APKWS missiles at aircraft). That’s relatively cheap as anti-aircraft systems go, but it’s still much more costly even in just per-shot variable cost low-end drones. China has enormous production capacity of low-end UAVs.
There are some policies that I think that it’s probably most-appropriate for government to tackle, and I’m sure that dealing with them would cost something, but I’m not sure that the main barrier here is the money.
I’m not really a big fan of having radio devices broadcasting unique IDs from a tracking standpoint; a number of widely-used protocols do this. Tire pressure sensors are mandated by government do this. I think that it would be hard to avoid this without government involvement. Industry has little incentive to avoid this.
I think that we still have glaring problems with computer security as things stand; it’s an area where I don’t think that we are where we’d like to be in 2024, given how connected the world is. I don’t have a specific program that could be funded that would fix the problems. In the past, there’s been government-funded research here. It has maybe mitigated some problems; I think that Windows having a SAK was probably the result of government requirements.
I’ve complained about a lack of financial literacy education being made available in public schools. That’d cost something. But I don’t know if that could really be a “spend more” thing, since unless one is going to extend time spent in school, it’d involve cutting something else.
I don’t have any concrete pet projects, but I’ve generally not objected to funding basic research on outer space. Cosmology doesn’t really have much of a route to a direct return; it’s not really something for private industry. But I think that there’s value to humanity building its understanding of the universe. NASA’s had a list of projects that it had to cut to cover expanding James Webb Space Telescope costs; that may have been a reasonable prioritization, but I kind of regret that we had to give those up, even if they don’t directly buy me much other than some novel science stories.
Work towards colonizing outer space is also something that I don’t think has a whole lot of near-term potential for commercial return, but I’d like to see it happen – probably nowhere near within my lifetime – as maybe one of the better routes to help provide a backup for humanity. It might provide great benefits, but the window for that is just too long for private industry to deal with. It is probably a project that will span a number of generations, but some generation needs to start if it is to happen.
Hmm. I mean, for something to be the remit of government, I’d say that it generally should deal with internalizing an externality or being something that private industry just can’t handle, and that’s usually due to scale. I’m sure that there are some other things that’d fall under that category. Looking at the above:
National defense should be done by government, because it deals with internalizing an externality; national defense is a public good.
Changing who pays for education away from state level deals with internalizing an externality.
Privacy in radio systems, at least insofar as it applies to systems where network effect applies – like, say, the Bluetooth network – involves internalizing an externality; my decision to purchase a device that increases lock-in to a network that limits someone else’s privacy has a negative externality for them.
Computer security has something of a positive externality in that compromise of one device can lead to an attack vector to another. It also runs into a problem where a device is difficult for an end-user to assess the security of; that’s not an externality, but having informed consumers is a requirement for an efficient market. I don’t know if it’s really possible for most consumers to ever reasonably be sufficiently-informed to assess the security of computing devices that they buy across-the-board. It’s like asking someone to assess the safety of an aircraft before riding it (where we solved the problem differently, without government spending, by assigning strict liability to manufacturers…maybe we could do that for computers, but that’d kinda kill open source, and I don’t much like that idea).
Financial literacy education…hmm. I guess I could also live with that being in private schools or homeschooling or whatever. It doesn’t have to be public schools. But since most people in the US attend a public school, improving the situation there pretty much requires government action.
Basic research on some things like outer space…I guess I’d say that that provides some benefit. It’s non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so it’s a public good with positive externalities.
Colonizing outer space is just outside the kind of time window, I think, that private industry can handle today.
But there’s a slew of red flags right now — like a large and growing share of people, particularly Gen Zers, taking on such high levels of credit card debt to cover their spending that lenders have stopped loaning more money to them.
So what are they spending on? Someone must have profiled this, like off credit card data and retailer data or something.
When asked how the current economy has changed their spending habits, groceries and mobile phone/wireless were the only two categories where Gen Z is spending more than they have in the past. Take-out/food delivery, gaming, electronics, and online news experienced the greatest pullback in spending, with 36% or more of Gen Z saying they are spending less in these categories.
Millennials and Gen Z’s trendy new splurge: groceries
Gen Z, meanwhile, said they often choose high-quality snacks and beverages, which makes for expensive grocery bills.
One 23-year-old Gen Zer told Business Insider by text that he spends about $130 on groceries for a week and a half. “Fancy sodas and drinks” and “random snacks at Trader Joe’s” account for the bulk of the bill. He also said he spends about $35 on protein bars.
The success of the canned water brand Liquid Death is an example of young people’s willingness to spend on flashy food and beverages. The brand shot up to a valuation of $1.4 billion thanks to a recent round of funding, Forbes reported. Peter Pham, an investor in Liquid Death, previously told Business Insider that part of the brand’s success comes from its appeal to younger generations.
“The healthy food-and-beverage space has historically been a stale category filled with boring brands,” Pham told BI. “This creates a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for disruptive brands who know how to tap into culture and talk to Gen Z and digital natives.”
Huh.
Well, I guess racking up a lot of debt for any reason isn’t ideal (well, okay, unless it tends to have a positive return on investment, like education). But I suppose that as luxury spending goes, there are probably probably worse things that Gen Zers could be spending on than marked up groceries. Doesn’t really translate into some kind of ongoing costs. The examples that are given don’t sound particularly unhealthy. It’s not one massive one-off load of debt; they have time to pull back if it gets problematic.
“Liquid Death” appears to just be carbonated water in a can. If you count externalities relative to, I dunno, beer or something like that, it may compare favorably. And I suppose that if they’re doing well selling it, maybe they’ll have a bunch of competition, drive prices down.
kagis
And at least on Amazon, it looks like it’s not all that much more than soda, anyway.
So you’ve got spending on – maybe somewhat-marked-up – healthy food and phones, which you can arguably call a tool with a positive return. I think that society will probably survive.
So, technically, “inflation” can refer to many metrics. But in terms of CPI, which is usually what people are talking about, deflation isn’t happening. We had 0.4% inflation (not annualized, just for the month) in April, the last month for which data is available.
Hagerich was one of several Americans facing a potential mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years in prison on ammunition charges in Turks and Caicos.
goes looking for the actual law
So, this appears to be the relevant section of the criminal code. I’m not sure how they got to 12 years. But there are different rules that take into account intent:
Here’s the one I believe is applicable with intent to injure, which has a ten year minimum:
Penalty for possessing firearms with intent to injure
Any person who has in his possession any firearm or ammunition with intent by means thereof to endanger life or cause injury to property, or to enable any other person by means thereof to endanger life or cause injury to property, whether any injury to person or property has been caused or not, commits an offence and is liable on conviction on indictment to a mandatory term of imprisonment of not less than ten years with a maximum term of imprisonment for life and a fine without limit. (Substituted by Ord. 28 of 2010 and Amended by Ord. 8 of 2018)
Here’s the one without intent to injure, just possession, which has a seven year minimum:
Firearm to be licensed
(1) No person (other than a licensed gunsmith in the course of his trade) shall keep, carry, discharge or use any firearm or ammunition unless he is the holder of a firearm licence with respect to such firearm, or in case of ammunition he is the holder of a licence for a firearm which takes that ammunition. (2) No person licensed under subsection (1) shall keep a greater number of ammunition than is specified in his licence. (3) A person who contravenes subsection (1) or (2) commits an offence and is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term of not less than seven years but not exceeding fifteen years and a fine without limit. (Amended by Ords. 28 of 2010 and 8 of 2018)
I don’t think that the issue was that the legislators didn’t account for intent to cause harm.
That being said, I also do think that it’s plausible that the legislators were operating under the assumption that anyone in-country couldn’t have gotten ahold of any ammunition other than via going way out of their way to do it, whereas if someone’s flying in from where it’s everywhere, it’s a lot easier to inadvertently wind up with it.
I don’t think that the law is, in its present form, a good idea, though. I mean, even if you consider purely-domestic cases, there have to be cases where someone can accidentally wind up with ammunition. Okay, maybe we place an onus on international travelers to specially check their luggage. But, what happens if, I don’t know, some cop screws up and leaves a magazine somewhere? Someone doesn’t notice the thing, and bundles it up with some other stuff to a lost-and-found. That looks to be sufficient to violate the law as it stands, but I can’t imagine that it’s be reasonable for every person to inspect everything they’re picking up with a seven year minimum sentence at stake. The only person there who I think could reasonably have acted differently would have been the cop, but the law would punish random-lost-and-found guy.
The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, when it runs out of hydrogen in the core in approximately 5 billion years, core hydrogen fusion will stop, and there will be nothing to prevent the core from contracting. The release of gravitational potential energy will cause the luminosity of the Sun to increase, ending the main sequence phase and leading the Sun to expand over the next billion years: first into a subgiant, and then into a red giant.[139][142][143] The heating due to gravitational contraction will also lead to expansion of the Sun and hydrogen fusion in a shell just outside the core, where unfused hydrogen remains, contributing to the increased luminosity, which will eventually reach more than 1,000 times its present luminosity.[139] When the Sun enters its red-giant branch (RGB) phase, it will engulf (and very likely destroy) Mercury and Venus. According to a 2008 paper, Earth’s orbit will have initially expanded to at most 1.5 AU (220 million km; 140 million mi) due to the Sun’s loss of mass. However, Earth’s orbit will then start shrinking due to tidal forces (and, eventually, drag from the lower chromosphere) so that it is engulfed by the Sun during the tip of the red-giant branch phase 7.59 billion years from now, 3.8 and 1 million years after Mercury and Venus have respectively suffered the same fate.[143]
By the time the Sun reaches the tip of the red-giant branch, it will be about 256 times larger than it is today, with a radius of 1.19 AU (178 million km; 111 million mi).[143][144] The Sun will spend around a billion years in the RGB and lose around a third of its mass.[143]
After the red-giant branch, the Sun has approximately 120 million years of active life left, but much happens. First, the core (full of degenerate helium) ignites violently in the helium flash; it is estimated that 6% of the core—itself 40% of the Sun’s mass—will be converted into carbon within a matter of minutes through the triple-alpha process.[145] The Sun then shrinks to around 10 times its current size and 50 times the luminosity, with a temperature a little lower than today. It will then have reached the red clump or horizontal branch, but a star of the Sun’s metallicity does not evolve blueward along the horizontal branch. Instead, it just becomes moderately larger and more luminous over about 100 million years as it continues to react helium in the core.[143]
When the helium is exhausted, the Sun will repeat the expansion it followed when the hydrogen in the core was exhausted. This time, however, it all happens faster, and the Sun becomes larger and more luminous. This is the asymptotic-giant-branch phase, and the Sun is alternately reacting hydrogen in a shell or helium in a deeper shell. After about 20 million years on the early asymptotic giant branch, the Sun becomes increasingly unstable, with rapid mass loss and thermal pulses that increase the size and luminosity for a few hundred years every 100,000 years or so. The thermal pulses become larger each time, with the later pulses pushing the luminosity to as much as 5,000 times the current level. Despite this, the Sun’s maximum AGB radius will not be as large as its tip-RGB maximum: 179 R☉, or about 0.832 AU (124.5 million km; 77.3 million mi).[143][146]
Models vary depending on the rate and timing of mass loss. Models that have higher mass loss on the red-giant branch produce smaller, less luminous stars at the tip of the asymptotic giant branch, perhaps only 2,000 times the luminosity and less than 200 times the radius.[143] For the Sun, four thermal pulses are predicted before it completely loses its outer envelope and starts to make a planetary nebula. By the end of that phase—lasting approximately 500,000 years—the Sun will only have about half of its current mass.[citation needed]
The post-asymptotic-giant-branch evolution is even faster. The luminosity stays approximately constant as the temperature increases, with the ejected half of the Sun’s mass becoming ionized into a planetary nebula as the exposed core reaches 30,000 K (29,700 °C; 53,500 °F), as if it is in a sort of blue loop. The final naked core, a white dwarf, will have a temperature of over 100,000 K (100,000 °C; 180,000 °F) and contain an estimated 54.05% of the Sun’s present-day mass.[143] The planetary nebula will disperse in about 10,000 years, but the white dwarf will survive for trillions of years before fading to a hypothetical super-dense black dwarf.[147][148] As such, it would give off no more energy for an even longer time than it was a white dwarf.[149]
What do you just not give a single fuck about that so many people try to make you give a shit about?
Stocks, Investing, Gambling, Bitcoin .etc...
Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine (www.nytimes.com)
Some American-made, precision-guided weapons supplied to Ukraine have proved ineffective on the battlefield, their accuracy badly diminished by Russian jamming efforts, according to Ukrainian commanders and a Ukrainian military research project....
So here's a story of, by far, the weirdest bug I've encountered in my CS career. (threadreaderapp.com)
Along with @maciejwolczyk we’ve been training a neural network that learns how to play NetHack, an old roguelike game, that looks like in the screenshot. Recently, something unexpected happened.
What free2play game are you currently hooked on?
I know older titles are usually the topic in this community but a lot of the popular f2p games are getting pretty old now too, and if you’re like me you’ve been curious about some of them and even pleasantly surprised now and again....
Best Buy, Geek Squad most impersonated for scams in 2023 (www.theregister.com)
As a lemmy user in an instance, is it possible to tell the instance to fetch missing post/comment ?
So, I see some comment, post view from my instance is missing comparing to view from that original instance. Which prevent me to interact (like, comment)...
Does One Line Fix Google? - A “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago | tedium.co (tedium.co)
Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add “udm=14” to the search URL....
Man insults judge who sentenced him to 12 years in prison for attacking police during Capitol riot (apnews.com)
A New Jersey electrician who repeatedly attacked police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Friday to 12 years in prison by a judge who called him “a menace to our society.”...
deleted_by_author
Missionaries killed in Haiti by gang are state reps' daughter, son-in-law, nonprofit says (www.usatoday.com)
Judge Orders Alec Baldwin to Face Trial for ‘Rust’ Shooting (www.thedailybeast.com)
Uvalde families sue makers of AR-15, 'Call of Duty,' Meta over mass shooting (abcnews.go.com)
What policy or program would you pay more taxes to support?
You can’t cut any taxes or programs to fund your idea. Nothing else in your government is going to change. It can’t be a tax that you avoid somehow. The money comes from you and similar people in your situation. Don’t try to get around it in some way....
What’s really happening in America’s economy (Trump and Biden spin aside) (www.cnn.com)
Deflation Never Happens, Except Right Now (nymag.com)
American arrested in Turks and Caicos over ammo found in bag gets suspended sentence of 52 weeks* (www.cbsnews.com)
Red Lobster files for bankruptcy, restaurants will stay open (www.nbcnews.com)