litchralee

I've already bemoaned the non-existent journalism that exists with Ecoticias before, and my only regret is that because that prior post to Ecoticias three months ago was deleted, I cannot properly link to my earlier comment, which reads as follows:

Can we please stop linking to ecoticias? These articles are either AI-written, or have terrible copyeditors. Even just the title already shows a poor understanding of ebike terminology, as well as units. 180 Wh is a unit of energy that might describe a battery’s capacity. Whereas motors are rated in Watts (a unit of power) or horsepower for Americans.

Also, this particular topic is somewhat old, with a much better link showing up in this community last year: https://lemmy.world/post/12008344

In a nutshell, voices are not eligible for copyright protection under USA law, whose hegemony results in most of the world conforming to the same. The principal idea for copyright is that it only protects the rendition of some work or act. A writer's manuscript, an artist's early sketches, a software engineer's source code, and a vocalist's audition recording, are all things that imbue their creator with a valid copyright, but only for that particular product of their efforts.

It is not permissible to copyright the idea of a space opera, nor a style of painting, nor an algorithm for a computer routine, nor one's own voice. Basically, pure thoughts cannot be copyrighted, nor things which are insufficiently creative like a copyright on the number 42, nor natural traits or phenomenon.

If we did change the law to allow the copyright of a human voice, then any satire or mockery that involves doing a good impression of someone speaking would suddenly be a copyright violation. This is nuts, because it would also deny someone else who -- by no fault of their own -- happens to have an identical voice. Would they just not be allowed to speak ever? Although intellectual property rights stem from the USA Constitution, so too do First Amendment speech rights, and the direct collision of the two would have strange and unusual contours.

For when ideas can be protected by law, see patents. And for when voices can be protected, see soundmarks/trademarks and brand rights, the latter stemming from rights of association. Such protections generally only hold when the voice or sound in question is an artificial product, like the sound of Ronald McDonald, and the protection only limits direct competitors from using the voice or sound improperly; everyone else is free to do impressions if they want.

So for the titular questions, the hypothesis posed simply will not occur under current law, and it's hard to see how it would be practical if the law did permit it.

If I understand correctly, the proposal would:

• terminate the Southwest Chief and Pennsylvanian service
• add a train with mixed consist of passenger cars and flat cars that will transport whole 18-wheelers, cab plus trailer, or charter buses
• will aim to do NYC to LA in 72 hours, or an average speed of at least 40 MPH (64 kph)
• introduce renovated or new bilevel passenger cars
• does not propose where or what facilities would be needed to drive vehicles onto the flat cars
• and somehow this can all be done by May 2026

What planet has this company been inhabiting that they think this is a reasonable proposal?

Just from the freight perspective, surely it would be simpler and easier to send intermodal freight by rail and then have short-haul trucking at the bookends, rather than what seems to be a boneheaded plan to put long-haul trucking on rails.

The shrinking interest in working long-haul truck routes will not be alleviated by spending rest time on a train, since the root complaint about the job is how much time is spent away from home and family. And I can't see why the host railroads would be fine with Amtrak -- aka the National Railroad Passenger Corporation -- carrying freight.

I sense something deeply amiss or even quite possibly scammy about this.

Once again, the editor fails to capture in the headline what nuance the author so painstakingly wrote into the article:

A two-wheel machine without pedals IS NOT an ebike. Those are motorcycles (aka motorbikes).

Even the police got it right, with both Irvine and Desert Hot Springs PD referring to the arrests as involving an electric dirt bike and a minibike, respectively, which are types of motorcycles. The author even goes through pains to describe how such electric motorbikes exist outside the three regulated classes of actual e-bikes.

To be abundantly clear, I'm not a fan of unfettered spying by police drones, nor am I a fan of disincentives to electric mobility. But here, the editor is pulling a stunt out of Orwell's 1984 by diluting the meaning of commonly understood words. I am not having this.

Link to the blog post with the background on why this was made : https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/

I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

Was? I'm not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it's hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.

(this is entirely tangential to the OP's question, but I feel like hams deserve a good word every so often. Also, I understand that last weekend was ARRL Field Day in the USA)

It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:

• feet for vertical distances -- such as 1000 ft overhead separation for aircraft heading towards each other
• meters for horizontal distances, such as 1.3 km between two aircraft going for landings on separate, parallel runways of the same airport
• statute miles for visibility ahead of the aircraft, such as when fog is ahead
• nautical miles for distances to waypoints and navigational aids

The bizarre thing is that these are all conventions that stemmed from good rationale, at least initially. Using meters for horizontal distances means it's hard to confuse it with vertical distance, when speaking over rough radio comms. Statute miles is what the meteorological agency in the USA would report, and ATC provides that information to pilots. And nautical miles, as the name suggests, has a rich seafaring tradition, which aviation adopted wholesale.

It's why aircraft have the red (left) and green (right) navigational lights, same as ships do. It's also why the "rule of the road" for two intersecting aircraft is for the right-hand aircraft to go first, since their pilot sees the other's green light, while showing a red light to the halting aircraft.

TL;DR: everything boils down to: "it's how we've always done it"

When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn't be too surprising.

Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it's just a straight conversion of the trade destination.

Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it's ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.

I'm no expert in New York City governance; I'm not even on the same coast as New York. West Coast, Best Coast.

With that said, NYC's size and structure is not too dissimilar to that of a US State, save for a unicameral legislative body (New York City Council). Matching that, the Mayor of NYC is the head of the executive, with powers to appoint commissioners to various agencies and civil/criminal courts, as well as executive functions like administering city services like fire departments, police, and tax collection.

Meanwhile, the 51-member Council is headed by the Speaker, who presides over the body and controls the order that legislation is considered. So far as I can tell, the members are elected by district, every four years, so that each district has roughly the same population. So far, these procedures parallel those of US State governments.

As for the interplay between the Mayor and the Council, the defining criteria of any government is how it achieves its policy objectives, in passing the budget. Like with the California Governor, the Mayor's office will propose -- and later execute once duly-passed -- the budget and the Council will consider and approve or reject it. The final budget is sent to the Mayor for ratification, but can also be vetoed. In this case, the Council can vote to override a mayoral veto.

So for the titular question, with regards to only the structure of the government of NYC, yes, the Council could very much block much of what a future Mayor Mamdani wants to achieve. The Council could do this by passing laws that mandate minimum fares for transit, forcing tax breaks for the wealthy, and anything else that directly counters his policies. But he could veto such laws, and the Council would have to muster some 2/3 of the votes to push it through.

In turn, though, a future Mayor Mamdani could potentially use his executive control to direct the transit system to vary (read: change) the tariff structure so that bus routes in less well-off neighborhoods become free. Within the parameters of existing law, the Mayor could also instruct the Police Chief to do (or not do) certain things, and this wouldn't be within the Council's direct control except that they could have a Council committee do an investigation and raise new legislation. But that goes back to what the Council can and can't do.

Essentially, there's a fair amount of ground for a progressive NYC Mayor to deliver campaign promises, except that the budget and existing laws will require working with the Council. But as a practical matter, if a future mayor wins a substantial fraction of the city-wide vote, it would be strange that 2/3 of the Council could be in staunch opposition.

And that budget vulnerability can actually be a negotiating tactic. Here in California, setting aside any broader opinions about the policies and wisdom of the currently second-term Governor of California, he managed to negotiate a bill to cut red-tape for housing (or roll-back environmental laws, depending on who you ask) and tie it to the state budget, due end of June. So when push comes to shove, when the budget is coming due, there would suddenly be room to negotiate, even with bitter enemies. No one respects a government that cannot pass a budget on-time.

I personally am of the opinion that when a legislative body wishes to obstruct, or when an executive wants to pursue a policy, then neither should half-arse it. A future Mayor Mamdani should force the Council to publicly reject what he wants to put forward, each and every time. Let the people of NYC see who is actually fighting for the citizenry, and who is kowtowing to monied interests. Commentators often talk about "spending political capital" when doggedly pursuing a policy, but that's kinda the job: do it right, or step aside and let someone else do it. NYC deserves the best mayor they can get.

Although most Americans don't tend to refer to Social Security as a "pension", it does function very similarly to a "public pension", insofar as providing income during old-age as well as disability and survivorship benefits. And outside the context of government workers (eg state employees or teachers) who still have actually public pensions, I don't see it as confusing to refer to the publicly-administered Social Security system as the national pension system, even if not as extensive as other systems abroad.

This is especially true when comparing to "private pensions", which in the past might have referred to pensions operated by a private company and with whom a worker might have been a lifelong employee. But with that model mostly disappearing except for maybe railroads and certain other industries, the term can now reasonably refer to 401(k) plans, which are managed by the individual, and is more common than actual pensions from a private company.

So yeah, it's not colloquial American English, but I think personal finance circles would understand that "pension" can encompass a wide range of things.

Setting aside the cryptographic merits (and concerns) of designing your own encryption, can you explain how a URL redirector requiring a key would provide plausible deniability?

The very fact that a key is required -- and that there's an option for adding decoy targets -- means that any adversary could guess with reasonable certainty that the sender or recipient of such an obfuscated link does in-fact have something to hide.

And this isn't something like with encrypted messaging apps where the payload needs to be saved offline and brute-forced later. Rather, an adversary would simply start sniffing the recipient's network immediately after seeing the obfuscated link pass by in plain text. What their traffic logs would show is the subsequent connection to the real link, and even if that's something protected with HTTPS -- perhaps https://ddosecrets.com/ -- then the game is up because the adversary can correctly deduce the destination from only the IP address, without breaking TLS/SSL.

This is almost akin to why encrypted email doesn't substantially protect the sender: all it takes is someone to do a non-encryted reply-all and the entire email thread is sent in plain text. Use PGP or GPG to encrypt attachments to email if you must, or just use Signal which Just Works (tm) for messaging. We need not reinvent the wheel when it's already been built. But for learning, that's fine. Just don't use it in production or ask others to trust it.

Riders are not permanently affixed to a bike, so I'm struggling to see how a tuned mass damper could actually be tuned in this case. The very act of lifting off the saddle would briefly change the required tuning, and it's illogical to tune to just the bike's resonant frequency when the rider would change that value.

If this were touted as a simple "mass damper", that might be alright. Though static mass dampers -- and tuned mass dampers that are improperly tuned -- can exacerbate oscillations under the wrong circumstances.

For more about tuned mass dampers, Practical Engineering just released a video on Nebula available now (and free on YT soon) about liquid mass dampers, which is a type of tuned mass damper.