I agree with this a lot. Boyfriend or girlfriend is the person you are romantically attached to. Partner is a MUCH stronger word, it implies teamwork and shared purpose; the understanding that you have each other’s backs.

There are also plenty of people who are married for whom the word partner does not apply. It’s sad.

I think a lot of people reject the title ‘partner’ because for a very long time before gay marriage was a thing, there was only ‘civil partnerships’ or ‘civil unions’ and thus ‘partner’ was the only accurate term, ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ couldn’t apply as they weren’t legally married. So they see ‘partner’ as a sort of ‘almost as good’ runner up.

The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.

Here’s a fun one

You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

Enjoy your swim!

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.

Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

Complicating that however, is the fact that if it’s a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of ‘authors’ and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.

Here’s the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That’s it.

The ‘Winamp source license’ was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn’t actually own the rights to.

This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can’t be legally used or distributed.

Today I learned. Thanks for that!

There’s currently no way to delete an uploaded image.

That’s especially problematic since pasting any image into a reply box auto-uploads it. So if your finger slips and you upload something sensitive, or if you want to take down something you uploaded previously, there’s no way to do it.

What should happen is whenever you upload an image, the image and delete key get stored in some special part of your Lemmy account. Then from the Lemmy account management page you can see all your uploaded images and delete them individually or in bulk.

So it seems you can now do this- Profile, Uploads shows you all your uploads. Go Lemmy!

I’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.

At this point I’m really wondering if that’s the real intent. This should be so simple and so hard to fuck up. Grab an oxygen mask from the medical bay, and hook it up to a nitrogen tank at 50l/min. Prisoner will breathe in 100% N2 and whatever they exhale will just go into the room.

The human body does not react to that. There is no feeling of suffocation or panic. People who go into low oxygen environments have passed out and died without realizing they were even threatened.

The feeling of suffocation is caused by CO2 build up. If you don’t waste his exhaled air, if you make him rebreathe it, you’re going to create that reaction and a very painful execution.

Anyway there’s one of two situations happening. One is the intentionally want to create an unpleasant execution, or two they are all idiots who don’t know how to use Google, and nobody who isn’t an idiot wants to help.

That second one is I think equally possible. I know I could write a completely bulletproof execution protocol that would be 100% painless, but I wouldn’t do it even if they offered me a million dollars. I don’t believe in the death penalty, and I certainly don’t believe in the way it is often applied in the US, with people being put to death even when there is serious doubt of their guilt. I have no desire to legitimize that in any way shape or form. As such, I have no desire to remove the defense that the state cannot guarantee a painless execution.

So much for don’t be evil.

At least as the planet burns, it will be because we now have AI that tells us to superglue our pizza together or jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Whatever would we do without it?

It was worth it… Best pastrami I’ve ever had

For anyone not familiar- Katz Deli is a somewhat famous sandwich place in NYC. Their primary menu item is the pastrami on rye sandwich, and it’s like $20-$30. They slice the pastrami right in front of you, still warm.

I’ve only had it once but it was worth it.

Worst that could happen is that you get denied insurance coverage

If you end up getting a serious illness or cancer or something like that, you might reevaluate how big of a problem this is.

To give some background on this, the huge magnetic field in an MRI machine is created by a superconducting magnet. A magnetic coil submerged in liquid helium that keeps it ultra cold has virtually no resistance, so the electricity can keep going round and round and round like a racetrack without being bled off by resistance. This lets the machine maintain a very high magnetic field with very little power input.

An MRI technician can gradually ramp up or down the magnetic field power by slowly adding or removing current from the magnet. To retrieve the officer’s rifle, they could have slowly ramped down the power with a magnetic power supply while the magnet stayed cold.

When the guy slams the emergency button that does what’s called a quench. It adds resistance to the magnet, which starts turning that power into heat, and that heat boils off all the liquid helium and rapidly ramps the magnet down to zero. This should only be done if for example a patient is trapped in the machine by a metal object or similar emergency, because it damages the magnetic coil and also boils away the liquid helium, which itself is worth thousands of dollars.

LAPD (or more specifically, the California taxpayers) are in for a pricey repair bill.

Most welcome!

A little background on the NYPD and firearms
Back when most departments were transitioning from revolvers to semi-auto, NYPD held on to revolvers for quite a while. Their revolvers used double action triggers, which means pulling the trigger both rotates the cylinder and also cocks the hammer. This means the trigger pull is long and heavy, you have to pull it a long distance back and with a good amount of force.
With pistols, the longer distance you have to pull the trigger and the harder you have to pull, the less accurate you are. Pulling the trigger moves your hand and puts force on the gun itself which can throw off your aim.
Many officers would ‘pre stage’ the trigger, pulling it halfway back to an indent where the pull gets slightly harder. This is a horrible practice that no one should ever do, because it means you might unintentionally discharge if you get jostled, but it made them more accurate when it came time to actually fire so they kept doing it. NYPD didn’t train it out of the officers even though it is against virtually every firearm guideline.

So then the department switched from revolvers to semi-auto pistols, mainly for the magazine- average semi-auto pistol holds 17 rounds, revolver holds 6. But they used striker fired pistols- these guns have a shorter, lighter trigger pull as the only thing the trigger does is move a catch to release already stored spring tension into the firing pin. That can make you much more accurate because the force of pulling the trigger moves your aim off, so less force needed to pull the trigger means more accuracy.

Problem was, a lot of officers had muscle memory from years or decades of carrying the double action revolver so they would try to pre-stage the trigger. And that would of course fire the gun when they didn’t want to.

NYPD’s solution to this was to simply make the trigger on their semi-autos really really really hard to pull. They had a custom spring designed that increased the trigger force- a semi-auto usually requires about 4-6 pounds of force to pull the trigger, they put a 12 lb spring. That allowed the officers to apply pre-stage force from their revolver days without discharging the weapon. Still absolutely horrible practice, but this stopped the unintentional discharges.

This had the side effect of course of making the guns relatively inaccurate. When you have to squeeze the trigger with that much force, it throws your aim off. And especially when you are in an emergency situation and adrenaline is pumping, it’s hard to shoot accurately when you need to pull that hard. But it stopped the unintentional discharges so they went with it, since the force had a lot of old-timers.

And, for a very long time, they kept issuing these 12lb trigger guns even to new recruits, many of whom had never fired a gun before and could be easily trained to use a standard trigger with proper trigger discipline. So now THOSE officers were accustomed to 12lb triggers.

For the record, no other police department in the nation did this. Every one of them transitioned from revolvers to semi-autos without much problem, because they did not tolerate bad trigger discipline to begin with. And while some recommend a slightly stiffer trigger than the stock trigger, NYPD is literally the only one with a 12 lb trigger.

It wasn’t until 2021 that NYPD started to back off, and started issuing new recruits weapons with ‘only’ 8lb trigger springs. That is still fairly high, but those 4 lb less makes it a lot easier to shoot accurately.

Point of all this– When I hear that NYPD is shooting multiple bystanders, I’m not surprised. Unless those officers first hit the streets in the last couple of years, they are still using the 12 lb trigger and it’s not surprising they have shit accuracy and are shooting bystanders.

It’s a problem of NYPD’s own making though.