Others have tried to evade the spirit of the ban, using other digital devices sich as older iPods, or bringing walkie-talkies to school.

I’m not an advocate of smartphone bans, but necessity is the mother of invention, and I suppose that if some kids start cobbling together packet radio solutions to talk with their friends and reach the Internet, it’ll probably be an educational experience.

deleted by creator

My kneejerk reaction was “it’s not going to do much” too, but I’ve kind of mulled it over and I’m kind of inclined to feel more charitable towards the Portland stuff.

What did the Trump administration want when it was sending National Guard out? Images of conflict, material that they could use to show that there was some dire threat and dangerous criminality that the administration was handling. They got footage of a frog air-humping and some nude bicyclists that’s basically useless for that.

Looking at Fox News’s front page, they have:

• Emergency flights diverted from Portland hospital amid ‘laser party’ threats at ICE facility: report

and

• Portland mayor orders removal of police tape despite federal demand for perimeter at ICE facility, report says

Which I think even the most die-hard MAGA fan is going to have a hard time getting too worked up over.

And it did accomplish some of the goals that a protest in that it helped build make visible that there were people who did object to what was going on.

I’m not sure that it was the absolute, optimal thing to do, but it might have been reasonably-canny.

I’ve used them happily from a policy standpoint, but in past months, they’ve had some real load problems, where the instances has been unresponsive. I’m pretty sure that a lot of it is due to scraper-bots pulling material for AI training — I understand that this has been a serious problem for the Web as a whole, and particularly for forum sites, including the Threadiverse, and is why many Threadiverse instances have stopped allowing anonymous login in past months. Lemmy.today was a holdout, but finally also disabled anonymous login. However, I just tried it today and while it seemed fine for a while, I also saw an unresponsive episode, so I don’t know if they may still have other load issues to iron out.

This photo is part of a collection of early color photographs done with three shots through colored filters throughout pre-revolutionary Russia commissioned by the tsar from some engineer, IIRC.

The Smithsonian or Library of Congress had them on display a while back, IIRC. They’re really interesting to look through.

kagis

Library of Congress. Looks like they still have the shots online into the Russo-Ukraine War era (I dunno if Russia can ask them to take it down or if Russia just hasn’t bothered or doesn’t want to).

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html

The photographer’s name was Prokudin-Gorskii.

There’s not a lot of color photography from that era, and a lot of Imperial Russia from that era wasn’t all that developed, so it’s some of the earliest color photography you can get of humans living in an an environment that we can mostly only see in black-and-white photos or paintings now.

I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.

I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.

EDIT: Sorry, via the open-source OpenMW engine. GemRB was for the Infinity Engine, and I also did those games.

EDIT2: I’ve also never played Elder Scrolls Online, as I wasn’t really interested in an online experience. I did play Fallout 76, which is online, but that was only because Fallout 5 wasn’t coming out any time soon, and the most that was going to be available for a long time was Fallout 76.

This shit should really be illegal.

I suspect that if you mandated human support for unpaid services that the Threadiverse wouldn’t exist.

It typically doesn’t. But some instances do defederate with some others, though it’s rare. Lemmygrad.ml, for example, is a “tankie”-oriented instance. A lot of instances don’t get along with it and have defederated from it. Your home instance is lemmy.world, and if you look here:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Click on the “Blocked Instances” tab to see a list of instances that lemmy.world has defederated from.

You’ll notive that lemmygrad.ml is on that list, so you won’t see any content from that instance.

Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal

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

The Goiânia accident [ɡoˈjɐ̃njə] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.[1][2]

The radiation source in the Goiânia accident was a small capsule containing about 93 grams (3.3 oz) of highly radioactive caesium chloride (a caesium salt) made with the radioactive isotope caesium-137, and encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.

On September 13, 1987, the guard tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site.[7] They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly in a wheelbarrow to later take to Roberto’s home. They thought they might get some scrap value for the unit.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident

A radioactive contamination incident occurred in 1984 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, originating from a radiation therapy unit purchased by a private medical company and subsequently dismantled for lack of personnel to operate it. The radioactive material, cobalt-60, ended up in a junkyard, where it was sold to foundries that inadvertently melted it with other metals and produced about 6,000 tons of contaminated rebar.[1] These were distributed in 17 Mexican states and several cities in the United States. It is estimated that 4,000 people were exposed to radiation as a result of this incident.[1]

Detection of radioactive material

On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went on because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory’s LAMPF technical area.

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

A radiation accident occurred in Samut Prakan Province, Thailand in January–February 2000. The accident happened when an insecurely stored unlicensed cobalt-60 radiation source was recovered by scrap metal collectors who, together with a scrapyard worker, subsequently dismantled the container, unknowingly exposing themselves and others nearby to ionizing radiation. Over the following weeks, those exposed developed symptoms of radiation sickness and eventually sought medical attention. The Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), Thailand’s nuclear regulatory agency, was notified when doctors came to suspect radiation injury, some 17 days after the initial exposure. The OAEP sent an emergency response team to locate and contain the radiation source, which was estimated to have an activity of 15.7 terabecquerels (420 Ci), and was eventually traced to its owner. Investigations found failure to ensure secure storage of the radiation source to be the root cause of the accident, which resulted in ten people being hospitalized for radiation injury, three of whom died, as well as the potentially significant exposure of 1,872 people.[1]

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

The theft of radioactive material in Tammiku, often called the Tammiku nuclear accident, took place in 1994. Three brothers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish (Harju County), Estonia, who were scrap metal scavengers, entered a fenced area in the woods and broke into a small shed that was seemingly abandoned (after having had no success with entering a larger building inside the area), with stairs leading to an underground hall. The brothers did not know that the buildings were nuclear waste storage facilities (although there were signs at the gate, they did not see them because they had climbed over the fence elsewhere). One of the brothers, Ivan, suffered a crush injury when a drum fell onto him. The brothers placed some pieces of metal into their pockets and went home, planning to return later. Ivan placed a metal cylinder in his pocket, not knowing that it was a strong caesium-137 radioactive source that was released from a container broken by the falling drum.[1] He received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days later.[2] Only after Ivan’s family’s dog died, and Ivan’s stepson showed radiation burn of his hands (as a result of briefly touching the cylinder), was the cause of Ivan’s death identified. The delay in information was due to the brothers’ reluctance to admitting to the break-in.[3]

While we’ve often — not always — managed to label radiation sources, in general, people scrapping metal stuff, often stealing it, haven’t done the best job of understanding or following related rules.

There’s no (well, at the level relevant here) constraint on how detailed a reflection can be. I mean, pull out a mirror and look in it.

The pharmaceutical variant has a strictly controlled presence of DEG, if any, unlike the cheaper commercial kind, which has far higher levels of the compound, making it unfit for human consumption. Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

Known as the “pharmacy of the world”, India accounted for 3 per cent of the world’s total pharmaceutical exports in 2023. It is particularly known for exporting affordable drugs, especially to Africa and other developing regions.

In May 2023, following the scandals abroad, the CDSCO mandated a testing protocol for cough syrups in designated Indian laboratories before export.

But no such testing was mandated for the domestic market, which has many small manufacturers producing low-cost medicines. It has now asked all state governments to submit a list of cough syrup manufacturers, while initiating a joint audit of these companies.

The failure to prevent repeated cough syrup scandals has also brought up a whiff of alleged corruption. Mr Sukesh Khajuria, a public health activist who has been helping families of the 2019-20 victims in and around Jammu seek justice, alleged that the Indian government had failed to rein in corruption within the country’s drug regulatory set-up.

“Pharma companies have hidden partnerships with the party in power,” he claimed.

A 2024 report published on Scroll, an Indian online news website, said that 35 pharmaceutical companies in India had contributed nearly 10 billion rupees (S$146.4 million) to political parties. Of these, at least seven companies were being investigated for poor-quality drugs when they made their contributions.

Well. If the state doesn’t fix it from a licensing side, I guess it’d be possible for a company to fill the gap. Like, certify drug manufacturers.

The difference between certification and licensing is that a certifier can’t prohibit a company from doing business if it isn’t certified. But…it does mean that a purchaser, at least as long as they know what certification to look for, can look for a given certification.

You can make a certification company that places any restrictions it wants to certify a product or company, so that eliminates roadblocks to getting that side of things moving. 'course, the certifier has to build reputation for the certification to mean much.

I can’t imagine that it’d help stability unless the alternative is standing on a lion or something.

I’d guess that you’re probably right on vantage point, but I’m having a hard time trying to imagine a scenario where this would apply. If you had some kind of hard cover, it seems like you could probably also hang from it one way or another.

thinks

There have been some cases where people have fought in things like grain fields. Standing up in something like that seems kind of suicidal to me — you’re a very big target with no hard cover — but maybe in some scenarios, it’d make sense. Like, okay, say you have a another side trying to retreat, using a field of grain as concealment. You ride up to the field, stand up, and now you have a clear line of sight towards soldiers that are maybe in an open field on the other side, and probably aren’t doing much of anything by way of shooting back, especially before semi-automatic rifles were common. That’d be a pretty specialized case, but I could imagine it being worthwhile to have in the toolbox.

EDIT: Tineye turns up this:

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-cavalry-horses-1935/

German cavalry firing from the standing saddle position during maneuvers on the Karshorter Racecourse, Berlin.

The cavalry was trained to “fire from the saddle” in this way at that time. It is very doubtful whether this method featured much, once the action started.

It did nothing to reduce the vulnerability of the horsemen to counter-fire from opposing infantry and machine-gunners; indeed, it increased such vulnerability. World War 2 was the end of massive cavalry use.

EDIT2: I see a Reddit comment from seven years back saying that he remembered someone else on Reddit saying that the standing position was used for reconaissance, not for shooting, which sounds reasonable, but then I don’t really understand why they’d have their rifles out. I even wondered if maybe it’d make sense to use a rifle scope as a low-magnification telescope, but those rifles don’t appear to be scoped.

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

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

I mean, yelling at UPS seems kind of unreasonable. Trump put the new system into place without a lead time for getting shippers to set up a system to handle all this, and I saw plenty of parties saying that this was going to lead to chaos. Sure enough…

I remember reading some articles about people waiting for their Framework Desktop machines shipped via Fedex getting frustrated at them being held up in customs too.

I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2

The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.

Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.

And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:

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

…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.

tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this

I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.

When I tried making the “hello world” apk I was astonished to see how hard it is compared to Linux dev.

I mean, to be fair, if you’re doing the APK, you’re also doing the packaging. If you compare that to building and packaging for all the Linux distros out there, especially considering all the different packaging systems, doing up a single APK is probably a lot easier.

I’m pretty sure that you can use something like a YubiKey as a PKCS#11 certificate store, if the issue is just the card reader form factor.

kagis

Yeah:

https://developers.yubico.com/yubico-piv-tool/YKCS11/

This is a PKCS#11 module that allows external applications to communicate with the PIV application running on a YubiKey.

Starfield was very stable for me.

Fallout: New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.

My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.

The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.

As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,

I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.

I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release Fallout 5 in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be Fallout 4, 2015, and before that, Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 and Fallout 3 from 2008. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series. If you rewind a comparable 15 years from Fallout 3, you’re at 1993. That’s the original Doom release. That’s a pretty enormous gap.

Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.