Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
As Dave Barry famously observed, the box a Water Pik comes in bears the warning, “Do not use while sleeping.”
Guns already have lengthy safety warnings etched into them. Unfortunately, there definitely isn’t enough space to describe every moronic thing people could do with them.
Granted, but if moonlight level is all you want I can already illuminate my surroundings to that benchmark with the flashlight in my pocket. We don’t need to park shit in space to accomplish that. And as a matter of fact, we already tried the “illuminate the entire town like the moon” model in the past as well. It turned out that even on a terrestrial scale it wasn’t actually a great idea because, you know, people in the vicinity who want to maybe turn it off… can’t. (Except in the latter case, maybe with the aid of a rifle.)
I am positive this is just an investor scam of some kind. If anyone is actually stupid enough to launch anything towards this end, it’s a mathematical certainty that they will be murdered in the street by either an amateur astronomer or a chiropterologist. It’ll be a toss-up who gets to him first.
This right here. Never mind the dystopian Mr. Burns style subscription based sunlight control bullshit that’s inherent to the very idea. That’s just to sucker in the investors who won’t know any better. Not enough people are talking about this.
I guess they could try to put the thing into some kind of geosynchronous orbit, but essentially the surface area of their mirrors will have to be equivalent to the area on the ground they plan to illuminate in order to achieve “sunlight” levels of illumination. There’s no way around that. So motherfuckers are going to start spouting off about “parabolic dishes” and “lenses” and shit any minute now. This is a red herring. No amount of optics can overcome the fact that the amount of light you can reflect will never be more than the amount of light that hits the mirror. Period. You cannot, now or ever, defy the laws of physics.
The International Space Station is basically the biggest thing we’ve ever managed to permanently put into orbit, yeah? And you can barely see it with the naked eye in the night sky, let alone measure any meaningful amount of light reflected off of it hitting any square inch of ground anywhere, with any instrument you can come up with. And it’s covered in reflective shit already – in fact, most manmade orbital objects are, in order to prevent the direct sunlight baking the fuck out of them in the vacuum of space where they can’t rely on the atmosphere to carry the heat away.
At best, even if they manage to deploy a massive Mylar foldable mirror in orbit that’s hundreds of feet across, they’re only going to be able to light up a small patch of dirt like wussy old moonlight, and even then they’ll only be able to do it in one place. Adding more targets will by necessity divide the light output in a linear fashion even if they somehow make it work like a huge DLP mirror array.
This simply can’t work.
I guarantee you the bibles in question are provided by some local (private) fundamentalist organization. There’s no way the prison is spending its own money on that. So then you’ve got to look at who is the biggest group of religion-peddlers to find your most likely source.
In America at present, the various Christianity-adjacent sects are basically the only religious groups out proselytizing in any significant numbers. I suspect that compared to the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Aventists, and assorted Evangelical/Baptist types, everyone else is basically just a rounding error.
If experience is any judge, plenty of dudes go into prison and come out Muslim. So Allah must still find them somehow.
I’m at 7 at the moment…
Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.
If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.
He can order it all he wants, but that doesn’t mean any branch of the military has to actually carry out an obviously illegal order. All it means is that he theoretically “can’t” get prosecuted for trying.
Retailer who offers one of those 0% financing schemes, here. TL;DR: It’s from processing fees paid by the retailer and punitive interest after the 0% promotional period lapses.
The lender makes money in two ways. One, a percentage fee is charged on the financed amount, but it’s not paid by the customer. It’s paid by the retailer. For us it is a little under 2%, similar to the fees most credit card processors charge. So as soon as you make your purchase, the bank instantly skims 1-point-whatever percent off the top. You don’t see this, though. It affects the retailer’s bottom line, not yours.
Two, the 0% interest rate is a promotion which provides specified limited time in which to pay off the balance. If you do not pay the outstanding balance in full by the end of the promotional term, the bank whacks you for a monstrous interest rate on the entire original transaction amount – not just the remaining outstanding balance. In our case this is damn near 30%. Look carefully at the promotional signage and literature. It will always say “0% INTEREST FINANCING!!! for 12 months.” That 12 months is important. That’s the end of the promotional terms, after which you pay aforementioned buttload of interest.
And then, the minimum payments on the bills they send you are obviously deliberately structured to trick you into failing to pay the entirety of the balance by the deadline at the end of the promotional period.
If you’re talking 0% introductory rates for general purpose credit cards, the answer is right there in the name. Those are introductory rates designed to entice you into signing up and using the card, but they’re never permanent. Eventually that introductory rate will expire and you will be left with an interest bearing credit card. Possibly a lot of interest. Even if you pay your bill 100% on time every month without fail, the bank still makes money in percentages and processing fees taken on every transaction from every single retailer where you’ve swiped that card. The bank issuing the credit card can continue to comfortably make money even if no one pays any interest, ever.
The Doctor.
We get it. You wish a dashing eccentric gentleman with an English accent will appear out of the blue and whisk you away from your situation to a life of adventure. But it’s not going to happen, sweetheart.
It doesn’t help that Doctor Who has always been crap sci-fi, but gets a free ride due to having such a long history stretching back to before anyone knew any better. The series as a whole is one of those I find also dragged down by a subsection of rabid insufferable fans, at least the modern incarnations, right up there with Rick and Morty and Supernatural. (I see I already kicked the beehive.)
“Homeopathic” does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.
It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.
Ah, I see. So it’s cool when we do it (fossil fuel and ag subsidies, the auto industry bailout in 2008, etc.) but not when they do it.
Got it.
undermining regional carmakers
I think the word they’re looking for is in fact “outcompeting.”
Yutaro-Katori-with-butterfly-meme: Is this capitalism?
They’re for sharpening razor blades. I mean, duh.
That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.
Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.
Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.
The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.
Mostly the second point. I would wager from experience that the majority of small man-portable conveyances that wind up at the bottom of lakes and rivers are there because they were stolen and thrown there. Bikes, motorcycles, rental scooters, shopping carts, etc. The reason is hooliganism, and the contributing factors are alcohol and teenagerhood.
Me, I’m all about the 3rd.
I better not catch the king trying to quarter troops in my house. Whoop his ass, is what I’ll do…
And it’s an equally amusing parallel that there are, depending on how you count, 17 or 18 commandments in the bible but everyone goes around acting like there are only 10. And then, there are 27 constitutional amendments but people go around acting like there are only 10…
People are going to see this, so here’s the answer.
Logitech’s web UI is crap. See that tiny, unlabled triangle on the list on the left?
Click it and pick your OS version.
Then you get the download.