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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • The problem is conceptual.

    There are two types of tracker devices.

    AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.

    The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.


  • Exactly. The protocol was written by somebody with no medical training. So the first drug knocks the person out, the second drug paralyzes them, and the third drug stops the heart. Problem is, the third drug if given to a conscious person is incredibly painful. This created situations where the first drug was dosed wrong, so the person woke up but was unable to move.

    Lethal injection could be much better done with a single drug system, like a massive overdose of barbiturates, but I think there is an unspoken desire to avoid any death that might be considered 'pleasant". Which to be honest is completely barbaric in my opinion.


  • I think this applies more widely than just doctors. As a pilot, I could design an execution protocol using nitrogen that would be dirt cheap and totally painless. Any other pilot could write the same one. But I wouldn’t do it, not if you paid me a million dollars. There are too many cases of innocent people getting executed, so I want nothing to do with any of it. Our judicial system is good, but it is not good enough to be relied on for taking life. So I would do nothing to help justify or condone or make tolerable the act of executing prisoners.

    Also, this execution is a perfect example. Three bullets to the heart should kill someone dead in seconds. But the article mentions him crying out and flexing for the better part of a minute. That makes me think all three executioners missed the heart, perhaps on purpose.









  • Nope. There are a great many species of mosquitoes. The only one that bites humans is the female of one specific species. Those little fuckers have killed more humans than any other cause of death, second only to being killed by other humans.

    There has been some fairly extensive studies and it has been conclusion that even if we extincted that specific species, it would not cause major ecological changes.

    Currently the best way we have of eradicating them large scale is by genetically modifying and releasing huge numbers of them that are non-fertile. If this is able to specifically target that species and not kill others, it could be a more effective answer.


  • DMs are exactly what you expect, like private email. Every service has some form of this.

    Reddit chat is real time, designed for shorter messages and real-time communication.

    The other difference is that everybody uses Reddit DMs and nobody uses Reddit chat. I have my chat turned off as do most others that I talk to.

    So this is yet again another example of Reddit management not reading the room and forcing the use of a system people generally don’t want.


  • Sad but true. And they are taking some good stuff with them.

    Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason. Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.

    I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.