logfromblammo

I'd rather be taxed by higher list prices than by some .0875 surcharge that is inconveniently difficult to calculate in one's head.

If I pick up an item that claims to be $1.99, and plunk it down on the counter with $2, I don't want the cashier to say "That'll be $2.16, please." The label says $1.99 . They could have added the tax when they printed it. If they wanted the label price to be $1.99, they could have made the base price $1.83, and added the tax back in to make it $1.99 on the shelf.

If I go to a concession stand at a ball game, their list prices are all-taxes-included. $2 for a hot dog means if I ask for a hot dog, and pay $2 exactly, no one needs to mess around with change. Why can't other merchants do that?

It's not like consumers can just choose to stop buying things if the sales tax goes up. "What's that? Sales taxes went from 8.75% to 9.15% ? Oh, never mind, then, I'll just stop buying anything from here on out."

I used to work for a company that offered brand-protection services. The customer would grant my old employer power of attorney to send C&D letters and file takedown lawsuits on their behalf, and we would do all the monitoring and brand-defense work, then send a report to the customer justifying the exorbitant fees.

Maintaining a trademark costs time and money. You can save money by doing the work yourself, or by using backchannels, as you mentioned. You can save time by hiring someone to do the tedious work for you. Even a single-partner specialist law firm should have boilerplate templates on hand for taking down an infringing website fast, using regular channels. I imagine that most of the cases result in no answer from the main defendant and default judgment that orders the registrar to transfer the domain to the plaintiff, who can then blackhole it or redirect to the genuine site.

A higher-service firm will also proactively scour the Internet for threats to your brand--at a higher price, of course.

I would not recommend my former employer for this, as they got bought out, and the new owner arbitrarily fired the entire development team.

This also lends support to "bonk training", which is an exercise fad designed to exhaust glycogen stores and then continue working out, just as a distance runner that hits the wall continues beyond to finish the marathon, or a cyclist that bonks keeps pedaling to finish the leg.

I think the point is to get your body to make the glycogen to ketone switch more smoothly, and after the bonk every calorie you burn comes directly from fat stores. For most people, exercising in ketone-mode is absolute misery, you physically can't perform at more than about 80% of what you could do with glycogen, and you can't pass your lactate threshold. So bonk trainers do that. On purpose.

The USDA food pyramid favored grains because that is what the US farming could produce in greatest quantity at the time it was developed, thanks to machine-assisted farming tasks. Grains had enormous combine harvesters that could be operated by one person and harvest the whole field within a day. Produce like tomatoes were limited by the number of Mexicans and Central Americans that could be admitted by the guest worker program and could carry filled harvest bags to the collection point, for a few weeks at the right time of year.

Now machine harvesting and factory-style farming has expanded to some fruits and vegetables, using things like hydroponic lettuce tracks, horizontal trunk-shakers, vertical limb-shakers, and flexible-fingered robot arms. Or even when hand-harvested, the human pickers can follow behind a processing rig that trims, washes, sorts, and packs right there while rolling over the field, and transports the product out via portable conveyor belt.

Cauliflower, muskmelons, lettuces, culinary herbs, cabbages, and tree nuts have all benefited from harvest mechanization. Farms can even, at minimum, use a fleet of golf-cart-like vehicles, so that human harvesters can gather the crop from a seated position, rather than, standing, stooped, or crouched, and allow the vehicle carry the weight of the produce, thus making each human harvester more productive, even when the harvest still requires hands, eyes, and blades.

The machines, of course, represent a hefty barrier to entry from the capital investment, and favor mega-agribusinesses. Farms that can't hire enough cheap transient laborers or buy the specialized machinery are priced out of the industry.

But it does bring cheaper lower-carbohydrate foods to the consumer in greater quantity.

Trademarks are restricted to a specific type of business. Any of those sites could operate as anything other than software or computer services, which are the likely trademark classes for Facebook. (I didn't look up their mark.)

If one of those similar names puts up a website mimicking Facebook's sites, Facebook can then sue the operators as an unnamed party, and ask the court to order the registrar to reveal the unnamed party's identity, by convincing the judge that it's the only way to reasonably serve the defendants with the complaint.

They cannot preemptively unmask the domain owner with trademark--not until after the trademark infringement occurs.

Facebook is skipping steps, and somehow requiring registrars to determine or presume the intent for the use of a domain while registering the name. That's not how DNS works. It associates names with numbers, so that the Internet can be made out of words. Making the registrar the defendant is abusing the system, and if the court allows it, we all might as well sue Facebook for anything and everything that any of its users do to us on its platform, arguing that they should have known what evils those people would do back when they created their accounts.

Also, "conflating" is not the correct word for the intent I presumed for your sentence. I am dissociating DNS registration from trademarks. This is valid, as DNS is run by ICANN, not the USPTO, or by any other international trademark registration agency. If ICANN chose, it could create top-level domains that correspond to international trademark categories, and automatically tie registered trademarks to those TLDs. It has not. So for now, there is no implicit connection between DNS and trademark. If I register something like coke.etc, and then put up an informational website about carbon fuel, Coca-Cola can't do anything to that domain on the basis of trademark. I have to infringe first.

This is without merit.

Facebook is free to register as many domains as may please it, paying the fee for each. Those registrations are for exact strings. They do not include any strings visually or phonetically or typographically similar to the registered string. Registering facebook.com does not automatically confer the rights to facebook-cdn.com, or facebook-images.com, or any other nearby string. The remedy for potential phishing domain names is to either register all those text-adjacent names first (unlikely), or to install measures on the registered domains that make it harder for phishers to fool the users, and limit the possible damage when those ruses succeed.

You can't break the whole DNS system to protect one company. Do your own danged phishing defense instead of trying to turf it off onto others as an externality.

I doubt that the 17% who quit were working in jobs that they liked.

If a employer's job requires a "work or die" sword of Damocles dangling over laborers' heads to be filled, perhaps it shouldn't exist.

The New Testament Bible aphorism from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," has been used by many to incentivize work, including John Smith of Jamestown colony and V.I. Lenin of the Soviet Union. It is an aphorism borne by a world of scarcity, where all available labor is not only required, but must also be allocated wisely. It isn't just "work or die", but "if you won't help, we all might die."

In a world of excess, wherein machines supply most of the labor required to produce the necessities, that becomes counterproductive. If everyone must work to eat, but no person can work as efficiently as a machine, and there isn't enough discretionary work to go around, then that game of economic musical chairs ends when someone starves because someone didn't want their hedges trimmed into topiary, or they didn't want to upgrade to the fused basalt railings on their luxury yacht. If the machine-owners can't spend the profits from their machines fast enough, people cannot afford to buy what the machines produce.

Hemp is an oilseed plant, the press cake is edible, and may may also be used as livestock feed.

Marijuana cultivation attempts to grow mainly seedless female plants, but hemp fiber farmers won't starve.

Oh, I forgot about the consulting angle, where one could potentially get paid to come in and help fight the malware that they wrote. No one better qualified, really. They ought to remember to charge more for the consult than it would have cost to pay them off to unlock the ransomware, too.

In case anyone needs a Poe's Law check, this was all insincere. I was just trying to draw attention to the fact that Maersk is essentially drawing a huge target on their back for aspiring malware authors, by firing the people that pulled them through their last crippling encounter with malware. It is extremely unlikely, when they get hit next, that any of their former employees will be involved. (And even less likely that any of those people will still be around to pull their asses out of the fire again.)

Six week task list:

- Train my replacement.

- Register down at the jobs office.

- Lie on the floor and cry. Have a nice cuppa tea.

- Write ransomware targeting Maersk, using insider knowledge of networks and procedures.

- Short Maersk stock or buy put options.

- Release malware.

Hello, chain of ancestor posters, each saying the same shocking thing. I have been making things that work, and getting paid for them, for more than 20 years now, and I would like some advice on how to transition my career into making things that do not work, for which the customer has specifically been informed that they will not work, and still get paid for them--preferably paid more than I am currently getting for working things.

Is this just customer management? How do I find stupider, richer customers and convince them to trade the non-working thing they are currently overpaying on, for a non-working thing that I haven't even made yet, and then charge more for it? It seems very alien to my brain that anyone can function in this manner, but it is very important to me that I get some of this money that is apparently controlled by idiots, so that I can do sensible things with it, such as pay for food and housing. I am aware that this is somewhat hypocritical to take a fool's money and spend it wisely, but I promise that if I ever get enough, I will do something incredibly stupid with the excess. Please help.

You think that everyone always obeys the law?

Please tell me how you expect to enforce such laws without intrusive surveillance on everyone's networks and storage that would entirely defeat the purpose of having them.

"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

Even if Alice sends a file to Bob that is entirely safe from Eve while in transit, Alice has no recourse whatsoever from within the channel if Bob then turns around and just hands it over to Eve once he recovers the plaintext. Facebook is an untrustworthy recipient. Once you hand over any data, you lose your absolute control over them.

They have the capability to hand over your data to untrusted third parties, there are no safeguards in place to prevent them from doing so, no surveillance in place to detect when they have done so, and no effective recourse for any individual who feels that they may have been injured by it. We have sufficient evidence to believe that Facebook has done it in the past (Cambridge Analytica being just one well-publicized example), without even needing to know whether it was intentional, accidental, or paid business. I therefore conclude that they are still doing it now, and will continue doing it in the future.

Anything you say or do or remember in front of Facebook can and will be used against you in the court of commerce. The machines will process it all to squeeze the pennies out, and your privacy is an issue only insofar as it may impede the flow of data you willingly hand over to them in the future.

The friend published on an Internet public platform and added metadata to tag ancestor poster.

Where is the reasonable expectation of privacy?

If you share anything at all over Facebook, you should expect it to be in someone's personal dossier of you, forever. It's not always going to be just the people who know you and presumably bear you good will, either.

That's exactly why I don't post photos on Facebook.

The reaction is as follows:

7-dehydrocholesterol --(UVB @ 296nm)--> previtamin-D --(thermal isomerization)--> cholecalciferol

The first step reaches equilibrium after about 15 minutes in Fitzpatrick type 1 skin in UV index 3-5 (moderate), and about 2 hours in Fitzpatrick type 6. The total amount produced is dependent on the surface area of exposed skin, and the previtamin isomerizes slowly, over about 12 days.

Time to equilibrium is about half the time to acquire sunburn at a UV index high enough to catalyze the previtamin-D reaction. At UV index 6-7 (high), time to burn is about the same as the time to reach previtamin-D equilibrium. At UV index 8 or higher (very high), you will burn faster than you make previtamin-D, and should maybe avoid being exposed during the midday hours. At UV index 11 or higher (extreme), if you are Fitzpatrick type 1, you will carbonize to a burnt matchstick the instant you step out of shadow, like a cartoon vampire, and you should not only not be outside, but should also be huddling in a dark basement waiting on the tyranny of the sun to pass.

Thanks to the equilibrium in the skin, the maximum absorbed dose from sunlight is the equivalent of about 20000 IU per day. High vitamin-D intake also requires increased vitamin-K consumption to reduce calcification of soft tissues.

You spell it out the first time, and if you intend to use it as an acronym later, you put the acronym in parentheses immediately following.

For example: images generated by convolutional neural networks (CNN) are easy to identify.

The sociological response to the ossification of civilization, brought on by excessive longevity, is murder of the immortals.

We currently have several septuagenarians duking it out to be our next elected executive leader. Imagine the political discord that would exist between generations if all the leaders were over seven hundred years old. We'd be warring constantly over the inequality.

If one stays inside, eventually the 20th-generation scion of a human family that they have been collecting rents from all that time comes in to kill them, and free his children from the yoke of their undying ownership. Inspired, of course, by an alliance with their grandchild, who wants to inherit something of their own before they turn 500.

It's not that they are cavalier with their lives, as fighting to wrest resources away from their elders, when Death refuses to help. The young have no place to call their own in which to stay. The old cannot fortify against every threat, and must project the impression that they take enough risks to die from their own activities, otherwise be murdered for calcifying local developments.

Alternately, an immortal society could have a festival every century in which all property passes to one's living heirs, and the eldest living ancestor, who would otherwise receive no inheritance, is paid some cash by all their living descendants. I recall a story in which people above a certain age were banned from all governing roles, and could only fill advisory positions. Futurama had the retirement planet, where the eldest (a.k.a. Prof. Farnsworth) were imprisoned to keep them out of the way. Even the various cultural mythologies had new gods arising to slay and replace the old gods. It's very well explored--immortals get murdered. Even the Monkey King, who was six-ways immortal, faced execution, and when the gods discovered they couldn't kill him by any of the known methods of killing immortals, they instead put a mountain on top of him to keep him from moving.

That is actually work-in-process. Biological engineers are trying to upgrade C3 plants to C4, improve rubisco efficiency, and other such performance enhancers for photosynthesis.

It's not so much driven by climate changes as by potential agricultural profits, though. If it were the former, they'd make an algae 2.0 and drop it in the ocean. But as C3 to C4 modification could make a hotter, drier rice with 20%-50% higher yield, that's worth a whole lot of money.

Of course, that work has been underway for decades--even before CRISPR/Cas9--and golden rice got stomped for no good reason, so even if someone made a super-Sitka-pine exclusively for carbon fixation, it could still get blocked by politics.

Some smartass artists have actually written their silent compositions as rhythmically structured rests. That is, something like "silence in 6/4 time, as three quarter rests and three eigthth-triplet rests". It's intentionally absurd, but as the minimum-information notation would be the full-measure rest glyph and the number of measures of duration, the deviation from this is undoubtedly creative content that is copyrightable on paper.

That kind of thing is completely unenforceable with respect to performances, but in written musical notation, copying the specific notation pattern could be infringement. If you write "4/4, tempo 80, 91-measure rest", that's maybe violating the 4'33" copyright. If you write a score for a full band or orchestra that shows rests in each measure for each instrument, with key changes and tempo changes and such, you're just retelling the same joke in a different way.

I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".

Bits of plastic smaller than the maximum diameter of beetle poop are probably not going to be recognized and removed as plastic anyway.

Just shake it all through some progressively finer screens and blow the remaining plastics off the tops of the screens with a blast of air.

Perhaps the plastics would gum up the food-shredder?

Or maybe Apple doesn't have a problem with douchey racist rich folk using their brand, per se, so long as they don't try to pin their attempted patricide (avucide?) on a servant.

They're worth $30. They sell for $550.

If you steal these wheels, and expect a fence to move them for you, expect to get laughed at. If it were good business, they would already be ordering counterfeit Apple-mimicking casters from China for $10 and selling them for $479.

The best way to prepare for COVID-19 is to already be prepared for a wide variety of civic disruptions.

Have enough food and water on hand to shelter in place for up to 2 weeks. Never let your gasoline dip below a quarter tank. Have some paperback books and candles on hand. Have some duct tape and plastic drop cloths. Keep some camping gear. Practice not panicking. Keep a bottle of plain, unscented bleach on hand, and practice diluting it to 10% of the bottle concentration.

If you don't already have supplies specific to COVID-19, the desperate and the hoarders have probably already snapped up what you might want, and the opportunists reselling it at a 400% markup.

The real question is what has Apple done to prevent people from using a $10 set of four plain black nylon casters instead of the $550 official casters with the brushed aluminum "Apple look"--that are still missing a very basic feature of a $20 set of furniture casters.

Even the fancy ball casters with faux-antique bronze finish and soft rubber treads are only about $12 each. A heavy-duty top-plate caster, with solid nylon wheel and dual ball bearings, and brake--all the bells, and all the whistles--might run $30 each.

It's so audaciously greedy that it's insulting to people who wouldn't even consider buying it.

You could even put your Mac in a top-of-the-line toddler stroller for $300, and that would be forward compatible with your next crazily-pampered desktop computer.

At the point where the Bitcoin was converted into bank account funds.

There's a reason why money laundering is a criminal specialty.

He needed to stop stealing and fencing the goods before getting caught, wait a few months or years without doing anything shady at all, then start dripping the ill-gotten gains into his account alongside an entirely legitimate cashflow, a little bit at a time.

Buying a mansion and a roadster out of the blue is an "stupid criminals get caught; all criminals are stupid" type of move.

Even if all you know of crime comes from the movie theater and television set, you'd know that after the airport job in Goodfellas, some of the guys got whacked for violating the "don't buy anything!" edict. In Breaking Bad, the car wash and the Pollos Hermanos chicken restaurants were necessary for laundering the methamphetamine revenue.

I think the mention of Bitcoin mixers was just chaff. The guy was caught because his bank tattled on him, and the IRS didn't buy his flimsy sourcing story. If he had just kept the proceeds as some variety of cryptocurrency, he might not have gotten away with it entirely, but the investigation would probably still be ongoing--the questions remaining to be answered being, of course, "how much did he steal, exactly?" and "how do we seize and forfeit those funds?" Someone might know that he was stealing something, but they wouldn't necessarily know how much.

American cops are a mix, of Bobby Peel's London metropolitan constables, and of Southern slave patrols.

But Florida, being Florida, is likely more slave patrol outside the larger cities and tourist areas.

I'd not put a demonstrated and notorious flight risk in minimum security. Low security, yes--not to be allowed freedom of movement until the extradition is decided.

That certainly should have already happened. I don't understand any legitimate reason for the delay.

A careless cook is unlikely to injure others, whereas a careless smoker could burn down the entire apartment complex.

Based on the American principle of jurisprudence commonly known as "sue the one with the most money", the families of those burnt-up people would probably go after the cigarette manufacturer.

The smoker, after all, would probably not routinely have burning embers smoldering in their home without the cigarette, would not be careless with fire without the casual familiarity with the burning cigarette, and would not be smoking at all without the addictive herbs and chemicals added to the cigarette by the manufacturer.

Imagine if a firearms manufacturer used television and movies to promote the idea that frequently firing live rounds in your own home was a fun and relaxing activity that is completely normal and acceptable (like Elvis shooting his television--free endorsement!). And occasionally someone might die from overpenetration. Gunmakers would then probably promote something like aramid or kevlar fabric wallboard sheathing, too, for more bullet-resistant walls. Arms companies have not, in fact, done anything quite that careless, yet they still get sued occasionally when gun owners are negligent. Not because they deserve the blame; because they have the most money.

If that knife manufacturer had deep pockets, you can bet your ass that eventually some clumsy cook would sue them.

Owl. Owl. Nocturnal.

If you keep going, you'll go through nocturnal and wrap back around to lark.

I assume that sleep-wake cycles plot neatly onto a population standard normal distribution. Everyone on the early-riser half of the bell curve is larkish, and everyone on the late-riser half of the bell curve is owlish. As with most things, if you live more than 2 standard deviations from the median, you may sometimes experience problems arising from your deviation from the norm.

Based on studies of people living in an actual cave with no timepieces or natural light sources, there may also be a component for the natural duration of one's cyclical body-clock. I suspect larks cycle faster than the median, and owls cycle slower, but I'm not aware of any supporting evidence for that.

If we define larks as those whose circadian cycle leads the day-night cycle, and owls as those whose circadian cycle lags the day-night cycle, it's easy to hypothesize reasons for lark dominance in the civic schedule.

Hypothetically, say local sunrise is 6 AM, and sunset 6 PM, a lark rises at 5 AM and retires at 9 PM, and an owl rises at 7 AM and retires at 11 PM.

If the lark wishes to be immediately productive on waking, they might generate noise, vibration, or odors in the owl's sleeping area, or may simply resent the owl for continuing to sleep while the lark has started working, and thus may wake the owl intentionally. If they have a task that requires cooperation, they could either wait 2 hours for the owl to wake, or go rouse them immediately. At that point, the owl has had 6 hours of sleep, and could probably function on that amount for that day. The owl, on the other hand, can work cooperative tasks immediately on waking, as the lark is already awake, and has no reason to ever awaken the lark prior to the natural conclusion of their sleep cycle.

The converse act to the lark waking the owl 2 hours early is the owl keeping the lark up 2 hours late, after which the lark will likely just wake later. Each has a 2 hour sleep deficit, but the owl would have been re-clocked by daylight all day, and thus it would be more difficult for them to retire early after being awakened early (unless the weather was gloomy and overcast). They would also desire to awaken 2 hours later than usual the next morning. But there the lark is again, waking the owl up early again. The lark can cause the owl to be chronically sleep deprived, and the owl cannot effectively retaliate.

So the owl can, at best, create rules that prohibit larks from disturbing others' sleep before "a reasonable hour". Commuting, artificial lighting, time zones, and daylight savings have all combined to make that "reasonable hour" less reasonable.

Daylight savings is a particularly execrable lark tradition. While the owl is sleeping, the lark changes all the clocks, and then wakes up the owl, waving the clock in their face, so the owl does not murder the lark immediately. And then the larks only relent when the evidence of the sunrise would reveal the ruse. Only the larks have any real incentive to redefine civil time to get the owls out of bed earlier. So when someone says, "your body-clock is messed up," the best response is, "your civil time is messed up," and then roll over for a few more zees.