[-] [email protected] 46 points 6 hours ago

The last major American privacy law, the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 by Reagan. The only reason it happened is that politicians realized that their privacy was affected. Robert Bork was going through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and someone got a hold of the tapes he had rented and published them.

Politicians were worried about their own personal privacy, so they passed a new law to protect the privacy of people's video tape rentals.

Maybe the fact that the targets here were politicians will mean that something will happen with data privacy, for once.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

like tundra on a dime

Um, wut?

Physics says it does not care of civilized countries

Civilized countries don't have trucks going through areas where people live. In North America there are far too many "stroads".

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

with a family member killed by a car

Killed by a driver.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

There is probably also money wasted because they're using old tech. Not that upgrading is free, but often upgrades have far more features and maintaining them is much cheaper than maintaining something that was obsolete decades ago.

But, you can't just parachute in a contractor or a "whiz kid" to upgrade the social security or internal revenue systems. The upgrades will take a decade, and that's not because government is inefficient. It's because people's lives are literally on the line. If you "move fast and break things" then Grannie Jones doesn't get her check and she can't afford food.

I do wish governments put more of an effort into staying up to date on computer systems. It would make hiring people easier. And, ideally, governments could be part of the open source / free software ecosystem. I think it would take a few decades of pain to become more modern. But, once it was done I think hiring would be easier and the software would be more efficient and easier to run. Most of the time when a government publishes something, it immediately enters the public domain. So, you could potentially have the government running Kubernetes clusters and adding features to Kubernetes itself. I think you'd also find a lot of open source / free software devs would like to work for the government, getting a steady paycheck and good benefits while contributing good code to open source projects. Right now those people don't want to work for the government because having to work on decades-old stacks is soul destroying.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

[Citation Needed]

Where is the 8,647 number coming from? I don't believe it was 250k, but I don't believe 8,647 either.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

You're the only person who mentioned the window.

An efficient way to drain dishware is great, but looking out the window when you're in the kitchen brings much joy.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

put together a small super squad of people who actually know what they're doing

From what I vaguely remember, you also want all the best marchers on the left most of the time, since you line up with the person on your left most of the time, and the very best at the front left. This was decades ago for me, but I know that there were tricks like that to make it look good.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Yeah, I did basic training decades ago, and could probably do it right with maybe an hour-long refresher course. Even without that I'd probably be be fine just marching, it's more the "eyes left", "present arms", handling turns, etc. that would need work.

That said, you tend to follow someone's lead. From what I remember, they declare it like "by the left, quick march" and that means you're marching at a standard "quick" pace and you're lining up with whoever's to your left, and the left column follows the person in front of them, so basically led by whoever's in the front-left position of the formation. That means if people to your left, or people on the left-most column are out of step, it will have a cascading effect through the ranks.

But yeah, it's pretty standard to call out the march, and they'd definitely do that if they cared.

What's also funny is that at one point as the soldiers were marching past, they were playing "Fortunate Son" on the PA system. Now, that's massively ironic given that the song is basically about Vietnam-era draft dodgers who used their family's wealth to get out of Vietnam service like Trump.

But, making it worse is that the song has a slightly faster pace than your typical rock song at 135ish BPM. The US military generally marches at 120 BPM. It's actually really hard to hear a song at 135 BPM and march at 120 BPM. That's why generally marching music is at 120 BPM so you march to the beat. The result is that some soldiers kept marching at 120 BPM, others adjusted to match the song, and it all generally looked like shit.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Q: Is that a WWII tank?

A: Sure, man.

Q: Cool, what kind of tank is it?

A: Sure, man.

Q: Um, I'm just trying to find out what kind of tank it is.

A: And I'm telling you. Sure, man.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

That's true, but it's very hard to come up with a system that can't be gamed. The fact that you're not aware of Australia's system works means it's probably even more vulnerable to exploitation because nobody in Australia is paying attention.

Really, all political systems are based to some extent on people acting honourably and acting in the best interest of the country rather than themselves or their political party. Eventually that always breaks down.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago

It's like it just gives up after about 8 results. "These 8 results don't contain what you want? I give up. Here, just watch one of these videos instead."

Screw you, just show me the rest of the results, I swear it's in the top 30 results.

14
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
  • At least 200 people have died
  • The plane crashed into a doctor's hostel, injuring many people on the ground
  • One passenger survived, with injuries minor enough he was able to walk away
  • The plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner
142
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1:20 AM EST

210/266 polls reporting

| Name | Party | Votes | % | |


|


|


|


| | Bruce Fanjoy | Liberal | 27,220 | 50.4 | | Pierre Poilievre | Conservative | 24,927 | 46.1|

58
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Stocks have almost returned to where they were 5 days ago after his latest change to the tariffs.

35
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I need some new earbuds, and live in a place with severe winters. I want to be able to access the controls using gloves or mittens if possible.

The online reviews I've seen all assume that you can just touch the earbuds with bare hands, but when it's well below freezing, that sometimes isn't possible. If I have to take off a mitt to use my earbuds my hand might not warm up until I can get back indoors again. Earbuds that work with touchscreen-capable gloves aren't good enough either. I've never seen touchscreen-capable gloves that keep your hands warm at -40C.

Any suggestions?

3
New shirt (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
180
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they're buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.

Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won't have any effect for people buying used homes.

45
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Currently the PM doesn't have a seat in the house. If he visited the house, he'd have to go to the visitor's gallery.

It's an interesting situation. The PM is the leader of the federal liberal party, but he's not a member of parliament. But, does he need to be? Is the PM sitting in the house of commons just a tradition that nobody has challenged yet? Could the PM delegate things inside the house of commons to their deputy-PM and then do things like give speeches, attend diplomatic functions, etc.?

The US has a very different system where the president isn't part of the legislative branch at all. But, typically presidents don't twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to do. Being the head of state keeps most presidents busy. It makes me wonder if technically Carney could choose not to run for office, and just spend his time doing head-of-state things rather than legislative things.

40
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

"Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release."

7
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

This sounds like a disaster.

For those who don't know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to "scout" them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.

By releasing in March 2025, they're going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they're giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won't be much remaining interest in playing a game that's almost out of date.

They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they've done it before. They could have called "Football Manager 25" something like "Football Manager Next Gen" and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there's a FM 26 coming out so soon?

8
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It's amazing to me that they can even measure a 0.01 XG shot. This comes from James Benge's twitter account.

The XG graph is also interesting. Tottenham has a continuous stream of very low quality shots, resulting in the graph going up in tiny increments. Arsenal has a series of decent chances near minute 17, and then the one high-quality shot resulting in Gabriel's goal.

Arsenal vs. Tottenham XG graph

https://understat.com/match/26640

I'm sure part of it is Arsenal defending in a low block after scoring. But, it also smacks of desperation on Tottenham's part. If you're taking a shot that has a 1% chance of going in, rather than passing and waiting for a better opportunity, you don't believe that you're going to get a better opportunity.

134
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Maybe the "great" America that Donald wants to take us back to is the 1860s?

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merc

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