Yup yup.The Rebel Flag is a modern invention of racists, it was never officially flown in battle or otherwise. The one it was based on was square, making it a different flag, and only flew over one company in the Confederacy. Most Confederate soldiers wouldn't have even recognized it. Didn't have to, there were many Confederate flags but only one union flag. They only needed to recognize the one.
To produce plant-based cheeses that feel and taste like dairy cheese, scientists have their sights set on fermentation. In a new research result, University of Copenhagen scientists demonstrate the potential of fermentation for producing climate-friendly cheeses that people want to eat.
Gideon Cody, the small-town Kansas police chief who spearheaded a raid on the Marion County Record, resigned Monday, Marion Mayor David Mayfield said. Mayfield hired Cody in the spring and suspended him last week without explanation. At Monday’s Marion City Council meeting, Mayfield announced Cody handed in his resignation...
He was hired, performed the task he was hired for, and left, sounds like it to me.
Executives have used this for decades. Governments with armies hire mercenaries for the same reason, has gone on for centuries. Romans did it, it's so old. It's not a far off speculation here ... it's a well known, well practiced pattern of authoritarian behavior.
Why do you guys think bad cops who resign over and over keep getting hired the next city over?
It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.
You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews....
It's this. It's a business decision. You don't spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there's contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.
Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.
But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.
So when 3 was announced? I haven't even looked at it.
Sept 22 (Reuters) - The Supreme Court of Alabama is weighing whether to allow the state to become the first to execute a prisoner with a novel method: asphyxiation using nitrogen gas....
This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won't be the ones to do it.
You guys all knew that right? Doctors don't administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won't be administering gas either. Some po'dunk cop will.
Because doctors take an oath that begins "first, do no harm". This has forever been the problem of the very notion of "humane execution", there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.
Know what's just as effective? Bullets. But we can't call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It's not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They're lynchings. Violent theatrics. That's the point.
They shouldn't be legal, it's barbaric. But you already said you weren't for them, so I'm just preaching to the ether.
Sept 21 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump has urged fellow Republicans in Congress to shut down the government to thwart the federal prosecutions against him, although any funding lapse was unlikely to stop the cases from being pursued....
And even those wouldn't be affected by a shutdown. When the government shuts down, it's not like the justice department grinds to a halt. Federal trials continue.
Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors the company will "quiet the noise" in a culture war that has pitted social conservatives against the global media and entertainment conglomerate, according to an analyst note on Wednesday.
He's a fascist troll. Block him. Check his history. Classic "rack up reputation in game subs and then spam right wing hate speech everywhere else". Dude is a total fash troll, again, block him. Fedi works best when we block those guys because just responding to them is spreading their messages through your network.
Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.
He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It's literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.
I really don't get why people think he's all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn't sell, theft and litigation.
Microsoft doesn't want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that's fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.
Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would've costed more to be able to run less.
As to being reliant on Windows, that's been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There's no good reason they shouldn't. The whole verified question goes out the window. That's huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They're still reliant on MS in major ways.
Adding more natural areas across our towns and cities could cool them by up to 6°C during heat waves, according to new research from the University of Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE).
This is important for managing heat on a human level in cities. So I'm not saying this is stupid.
But don't get this twisted: This is useless for addressing the climate change problem. It's not even a bandaid on a stab wound, this is equivalent to offering someone bleeding out a glass of warm water and fanning them with a brochure about new plastic doodads. A trillion trees planted tomorrow wouldn't even be a pebble on the pavement to that SUV flying down the fiery freeway.
I'm gonna propose to the alien believers a different explanation of UAPs: they're black projects. Yes all those physics defying things are man made, and they probably have an understanding of physics we don't currently know about in the wider public.
Technology trends exist. We can see them. It's no wonder that every generation's stereotype of unidentified craft always always always mimicked the latest generation of military flight tech. That's what's been true since the inception of the whole thing. It's true today too, thirty years from now we'll get a public look at the crafts they're testing out in the skies today. Be that because they get used or because they become obsolete. Thats how it goes.
So why the hearings in Congress? Because they're black projects. We're talking trillions in this rabbit hole. Congress very much has an urgent want to understand what they military might be keeping from it, vis a vis private contractors. We're talking multiple times the budgets of nation-states and we're getting receipts that are basically "trust me bro"s.
But Congress can't very well tell the truth of all that without undermining the American military, and thereby America itself. So they go along with the same "aliens" reasoning, "uhh yeah, let's go with that, okay", and keep pressing for more information.
Is that crazy? Yeah, you bet. But it's no crazier than believing all that and that there's aliens. Because the alien conspiracy crowd asserts virtually everything I just said, just, with aliens. Aliens aren't necessary for any of it though.
In the history of nations there's never been a more sure-fire way to lose democracy than making an enemy of the military complex propping it up. So Congress ought to be careful too, keep a little plausible deniability for themselves.
If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can't engineer it, there's a question of why. As much as we'd like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they're linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It's entirely possible there's "new physics" at play even if they're only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who's to say, really?
So while I'm not gonna disagree with you, and you're right there's a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don't really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We're talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That's magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it's possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.
Until then? Hard to close doors other than just "do we need this for the story". And aliens don't need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That's just another example of "any secret is the exact secret I want it to be" kind of thinking. See also "everything I don't understand is a communist" or more recently, "everything I don't like is woke". I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There's more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would've had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? "Because it's absurd." Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.
I detect sarcasm. Y'all think those same minds weren't participating in any shit? Great minds led to climate change after all. Great minds are behind average rich chumps like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Great minds enable horrific things throughout history. It wasn't stupid people developing plastics and chemicals through the last century. So let's remove the idea that any of these people are inherently good.
Beyond that, compartmentalized knowledge is kind of the whole schtick of military intelligence. They're good at it. Arguably that's the whole core framework all military hierarchy is built on, otherwise it's just militia. We've built cities in secret before, military bases exist in secret all over the place. And many of those secrets involved quite literally the greatest minds of the century. Hard to keep quiet about bombs though, right? That was going to come to light. What if it weren't a bomb though? What if it could stay quiet?
Over and over and over history shows us great minds faced with the ethical problems of developing weapons of war and what do they do? Arrive at the nearly universally the same conclusions. Bigger weapons mean fewer wars, so they develop them. Archimedes to Oppenheimer, Da Vinci to Einstein. Tesla. Von Braun. Seriously all of them were weapons makers for the same idyllic reasons, "ending war".
But were they wrong? Isn't war much less than it ever was?
I'm a fan of looking to history for answers about our future because human beings - despite all the technological and social changes - really haven't had the time to truly change in even five thousand years. The brains still work largely the same as always, we're just given more tools to work with.
The California Senate voted on Thursday to grant unemployment benefits to workers who are on strike. The bill passed with a 27-12 vote. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA have each expresse…
This is a bill to amend the existing laws. The amendment is really just about removing hurdles, period. There really aren't added stipulations about who it applies to. They also took the opportunity to make the wording more inclusive of everyone, dropping him/her, etc.
Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.
Sounds like they could though?
Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of "let's pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law" actions by major companies because ... well, who's stopping them?
The agency now must decide whether products containing the ingredient, like some Sudafed and NyQuil products, should no longer be sold or perhaps give companies lead time to substitute other ingredients.
Harris Wolobah, a healthy 14-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, tragically died last Friday, hours after eating a single ultra-spicy tortilla chip seasoned with two of the hottest peppers in the world.
Case provides further evidence. We know peppers can lead to serious consequences. Case in point, these chips have warning labels on them already. Don't eat if pregnant, nursing, heart condition, etc.
That last one is the active player here. The kid had an undiagnosed heart condition. It's not his fault, it's not the fault of the chip maker either. It's just a sad happening. Not every sad happening needs to result in legal actions and regulations or ... anything, really. Guns are still legal after all, I don't want to hear fuck-all about banning fruits and vegetables.
Counter point, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I'm not gonna argue your brother ("my sister in law is the wife of a cop" is a strange way to say that) is evil simply for being a cop, no, but your brother does defend bad cops all the time. Every cop does. They call it a brotherhood for a reason, and the expectation is that their brotherhood runs deeper than yours. Be aware of that and keep him aware too. Because if he's "one of the good ones" he's in real danger if ever he spoke out against the bad ones. Real, life threatening danger. That I can say that of police and back it up with a dozen examples of cops killing other cops should at the very least give you pause.
By the way if you do the "don't assume their gender" thing from my assumption that it's your brother, oh boy they're in a lot more danger than I originally thought.
Starfield players continue to push the game—and their computers–to the limit by spawning thousands of items in inappropriate places, like stuffing 20,000 potatoes in a spaceship. Watching potatoes roll out of an air lock is great, but what if you could watch 10,000 milk cartons descend onto a population zone like a lactic...
In a controversial bid to expose supposed bias in a top journal, a US climate expert shocked fellow scientists by revealing he tailored a wildfire study to emphasize global warming.
I think this is worse, arguably. Don't get me wrong, Wakefield wasn't good. But this is actually worse.
Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn't care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.
So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.
This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there's frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn't saying any of that. It's simply saying "here's a reason not to trust climate science at all". That's the argument. That's way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.
Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn't take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.
In an April 2023 statement submitted to the U.S. Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample...
Somehow? I'm not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I'm correcting you. That's all.
I'm not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.
So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don't do this childish "well fine" act where you pretend I'm controlling what you can and cannot say.
By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn't it?
Call me a hypocrite, that's fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.
[News] Senator Calls For Return of Old Mississippi Flag: ‘Our People Died Under That Flag’ (www.mississippifreepress.org)
Mississippi Sen. Kathy Chism, R-New Albany, said the Legislature should not have retired the Confederate-themed state flag.
Ancient technology turns plant-based cheese into 'something we want to eat' (phys.org)
To produce plant-based cheeses that feel and taste like dairy cheese, scientists have their sights set on fermentation. In a new research result, University of Copenhagen scientists demonstrate the potential of fermentation for producing climate-friendly cheeses that people want to eat.
Police chief who raided small Kansas newspaper resigns (www.kansas.com)
Gideon Cody, the small-town Kansas police chief who spearheaded a raid on the Marion County Record, resigned Monday, Marion Mayor David Mayfield said. Mayfield hired Cody in the spring and suspended him last week without explanation. At Monday’s Marion City Council meeting, Mayfield announced Cody handed in his resignation...
Creator of Cracked Paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation Mod Will Place "Hidden Mines" in Future Mods (wccftech.com)
The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing "hidden mines" in his future mods....
Payday 3's launch is another great advert for not making your game 'always online' (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews....
Ancient Humans Created Super-Fertile “Dark Earth” (www.popularmechanics.com)
Researchers now hope to use the environmental engineering success to combat climate change.
Alabama seeks to execute prisoner using nitrogen gas asphyxiation (www.reuters.com)
Sept 22 (Reuters) - The Supreme Court of Alabama is weighing whether to allow the state to become the first to execute a prisoner with a novel method: asphyxiation using nitrogen gas....
[News] Trump urges government shutdown in unlikely bid to 'defund' his criminal prosecutions (www.reuters.com)
Sept 21 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump has urged fellow Republicans in Congress to shut down the government to thwart the federal prosecutions against him, although any funding lapse was unlikely to stop the cases from being pursued....
Disney CEO says company will 'quiet the noise' in culture wars (www.reuters.com)
Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors the company will "quiet the noise" in a culture war that has pitted social conservatives against the global media and entertainment conglomerate, according to an analyst note on Wednesday.
Microsoft would buy Valve 'if opportunity arises,' said Phil Spencer in leaked email (www.pcgamer.com)
But its prime target was Nintendo, according to a 2020 email leaked during the FTC v Microsoft trial.
Scientists call for a tree planting drive to help tackle heat waves (phys.org)
Adding more natural areas across our towns and cities could cool them by up to 6°C during heat waves, according to new research from the University of Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE).
NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens (arstechnica.com)
NASA’s independent study team released its highly anticipated report on UFOs on September 14, 2023....
California Senate Approves Unemployment Pay for Striking Workers (variety.com)
The California Senate voted on Thursday to grant unemployment benefits to workers who are on strike. The bill passed with a 27-12 vote. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA have each expresse…
Cult of the Lamb Developer Threatens to Delete Game on Jan 1 Amid Unity Backlash - IGN (www.ign.com)
The developer of superb action-roguelite Cult of the Lamb has threatened to delete the game on January 1 amid a row with game engine company Unity.
A Decongestant in Cold Medicines Doesn’t Work at All, an F.D.A. Panel Says. The panel’s vote tees up a likely decision by the agency on whether to essentially ban the ingredient, phenylephrine. (www.nytimes.com)
The agency now must decide whether products containing the ingredient, like some Sudafed and NyQuil products, should no longer be sold or perhaps give companies lead time to substitute other ingredients.
Teen’s death after eating a single chip highlights risks of ultra-spicy foods (arstechnica.com)
Harris Wolobah, a healthy 14-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, tragically died last Friday, hours after eating a single ultra-spicy tortilla chip seasoned with two of the hottest peppers in the world.
Fediverse troll creates pro-police community, immediately gets negative reactions from cop haters on Lemmy (lemmy.world)
!thankthepolice...
10,000 milk cartons descend on Starfield's biggest city in newest physics benchmark (www.pcgamer.com)
Starfield players continue to push the game—and their computers–to the limit by spawning thousands of items in inappropriate places, like stuffing 20,000 potatoes in a spaceship. Watching potatoes roll out of an air lock is great, but what if you could watch 10,000 milk cartons descend onto a population zone like a lactic...
Scientist shocks peers by 'tailoring' climate study (phys.org)
In a controversial bid to expose supposed bias in a top journal, a US climate expert shocked fellow scientists by revealing he tailored a wildfire study to emphasize global warming.
U.S., FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting (theintercept.com)
In an April 2023 statement submitted to the U.S. Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample...