Because the toxins your body is reacting to are already in your bloodstream. It’ll take time for those to get metabolized by your liver, and how much or little you vomit won’t change how much work your liver has to do.

I haven’t actually tried the new ones, I probably should do that before I slander them. The Harvest Cheddar ones were so good though. I haven’t seen them in at least a few years, unfortunately.

I noticed that Miss Vickie’s has a new sour cream something or other flavour in a bag that’s the same colour, or nearly so. Every time I go through the chip aisle I get very excited for a second, then I realize it’s not actually the Harvest Cheddar and my hopes are dashed. I’m developing an irrational hatred of those impostor chips.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica

Looks like you can read the article, without a paywall, here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/am-radio-is-a-lifeline-lawmakers-say-tech-and-auto-industries-disagree/

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

There is a Unicode Technical Standard for this, called the Unicode Collation Algorithm. Whether everyone uses it, I can’t say. As it says on the linked page:

Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.

So in other words it’s possible to conform to the Unicode Standard without adhering to the Unicode Collation Algorithm.

whatever this is: ¦

That is the pipe symbol, or vertical bar. When it has a gap in the middle it may be known as the broken pipe symbol or broken bar. It’s considered the same symbol with or without the gap. Early terminals displayed it with a gap to make it distinguishable from lower-case L characters.

Hardly the first time. I’d argue the US made the same mistake in Afghanistan in 2003, diverting resources to Iraq because Bush Jr. had such a hard-on for Saddam.

Guy Gavriel Kay. First book published in 1984, part of a trilogy that was Tolkien-esque, quite decent, but not exactly ground-breaking. He’s since gone on to something a little more unique, which he describes as “historical fiction with a quarter-turn to the fantastic.” Impeccably researched but set an alternate world that’s a close but not exact mirror of our own. This allows him to take a few small liberties with historical accuracy in service of telling a better story. Personally I think he really hit his stride in 1995 with The Lions of Al-Rassan, and almost everything he’s written since then has been exceptional.

Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.

A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north. We have huge problems with cost of living, especially housing, which our current government is failing to address. We have a multi-party system but in my lifetime the national power only ever oscillated between two parties, Liberal (roughly equivalent to US Democrats) and Conservative (roughly equivalent to US Republicans pre-MAGA, or maybe even pre-Reagan). Based on current polling, Canadian discontent looks set to sweep out the incumbent Liberals and sweep in the opposition Conservatives sometime between now and Oct. 2025. I don’t think the Conservatives are going to do any better at addressing cost of living, but fear that they’ll bring in a bunch of regressive crap while they continue to fail in the same way the Liberals have failed. There are lots of other areas where Canada has room for improvement, but within the very narrow scope of how Canada runs its elections, that I will claim we got right.

It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it.

First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.

What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering?

That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.

Or maybe a worldwide pandemic?

We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.

There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count.

Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.

Why not machine certify and hand-count verify?

Because the manual system works well and costs little.

Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term.

Canada already has hand-counted and verified results the same day the election occurs, in a country with a population roughly equivalent to the state of California. Adding machine counting would only add complexity and cost while producing no additional benefits.

Have the voting machine

Canada doesn’t have voting machines, nor do we want them. Our ballot system is a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s it. That’s our whole voting “machine.”

The real genius is in how the vote counting process works. Every candidate is allowed to provide a representative, often called a scrutineer, to oversee the counting process at each polling station. Scrutineers are allowed to challenge a ballot if they feel it has been attributed to the wrong candidate or should have been considered a spoiled ballot. The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.

Under the Canadian system, for all practical purposes it would be impossible to perpetrate election fraud. A candidate would need to somehow induce Elections Canada employees and/or volunteers at multiple polling stations to miscount ballots. They would also need to convince multiple scrutineers to turn a blind eye, scrutineers who were nominated by their opponents. Each riding typically has 4+ candidates (at minimum Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, and Green party candidates, plus often some independent or fringe party candidates), and every single one of those candidates is allowed to provide a scrutineer at each polling station. There will be many polling stations across a single riding, so that’s potentially dozens or hundreds of people that would need to be coerced or convinced to contribute to the election fraud. And that’s just for one single riding.

No, because that would be silly.

When a tech is new and cool but still not evolved to practical.

My friend, there is nothing “new” about this technology. It has been around for ages. As a child I lived in a home with a heat pump, and that was in the late 80s. I’m gettin’ pretty old here, and heat pumps are even older than me. Heat pumps are just air conditioners with one extra part: a reversing valve that allows the direction of flow to be switched so the hot side of the system can be inside in the winter and outside in the summer.

Heat pumps don’t require further evolution to become practical, they’re already practical. Beyond practical! It’s a heating technology capable of efficiency greater than 100%. It’s called a “heat pump” because the system doesn’t create heat, it moves heat. From outside to inside in winter, and inside to outside in summer. Since a heat pump is not creating heat, instead moving energy that already exists, it’s possible to get more energy out (in the form of heat) than the energy you put in (in the form of electricity). Generative heating technologies (natural gas or oil furnace, resistive electric heat) cannot match that as they will always be below 100% efficiency.

I live in Canada, I have a heat pump, and it is great. If you think heat pumps are bad, or not suited to northern climates, or not yet practical… I’m sorry, but you’re misinformed.

Summing a balance column is never correct. Take any example that doesn’t end in a zero balance and it’s easy to see that the balance column’s sum is meaningless:

Every time there’s a bad-news dip in Boeing’s stock price, traders are treating that as a discount to buy the stock because they don’t think the US government would ever allow Boeing to fail. Sadly, they’re probably not wrong. If Boeing’s financials get into deep trouble the US government would likely bail them out because they’re a large employer and a strategic component of US economic hegemony.

Depends on the color of the wall, but likely no. A matte black wall would absorb a lot of light, a matte white wall would reflect most of the light. Other colours would fall somewhere in the middle, reflecting some wavelengths and absorbing others. The only difference with a mirror is that it reflects light in a uniform fashion, whereas a painted wall will generally scatter reflected light. But scattered light still contributes to total light output! The only scenario where a mirror behind a lamp would come close to doubling light output would be if the wall we’re comparing against is painted with Vantablack or some other ultrablack paint that absorbs 99%+ of the light from the lamp.

The generation that came of age in the peak of the “greed is good” era?

I can’t speak for all of Gen X, but speaking for myself and everyone I personally know from my generation: we never liked that shit. That was our parents’ bullshit. We just couldn’t do anything about it, politically speaking, when we came of age because we were firmly outnumbered by boomers. We still are actually, except now we’re also outnumbered by millennials. That’s why all the media discussions of this topic are framed as “boomers vs. millennials.” Gen X is rendered politically invisible by its comparatively small size.

Same playbook the IDF ran during the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Cordon off an area and let some militia do the dirty work. Bet they’ll investigate themselves after the fact and conclude they had no “direct responsibility”, just like they did previously.

There are some viruses that have targeted Linux, but they’re rare compared to other platforms and their ability to spread is relatively low. One of the main reasons is just down to how software tends to be installed on each platform. Viruses have an easier time spreading on Windows or OSX where users are more accustomed to downloading an executable and running it. Once there’s a malicious running process, it has a comparatively high chance to spread because it can attempt to escalate its privileges either by exploiting a bug or socially engineering the user to click through a privilege escalation prompt. That entire workflow is practically nonexistent on Linux, users just don’t tend to download and execute random binaries. Instead most Linux software gets delivered in one of these ways, each of which has impediments that reduce the chance a virus could spread:

• through an OS repo; it would be difficult for a malicious actor to get a virus through the release process and into a trusted repo
• through a public source like Github; again it would be difficult for a malicious actor to get a virus into public source code without someone noticing
• through a container image from an image library like DockerHub; I believe a malicious container would be sandboxed, making it hard if not impossible for that container to take over the host system
• through an application image like a snap, flatpak or appimage; again, I believe these run in their own sandbox from which they would have difficulty breaking out

There are some exceptions, for example some companies like Hashicorp will distribute their stuff as precompiled binaries. Even in that case you’re probably fine as long as you don’t run the downloaded binary as root. Users in the habit of downloading strange binaries from sketchy places and running them as root just aren’t very common among the Linux userbase. I’m sure there are some (and they should really stop doing that), but there aren’t enough of them to allow a virus to spread unchecked.