nyan

Some cats are gobblers, some are grazers. Currently we have two gobblers, and one obligate grazer who throws up if she eats more than a tablespoon or so of food at a time. The logistics involved in making sure she gets enough without the other two stealing her food are . . . tedious.

The gobbler tendency may show up more often in rescue cats, who are likely to have been through rough patches here and there—we've never taken in a cat who was less than eight months old, so their habits are set before they get to us. Or it may just be a genetic quirk.

The one time anyone implemented the original "Packet Transmission over Avian Carriers" RFC, 45% of the packets (= 45% of the pigeons) were lost.

Sounds about right.

Pretty sure we've known that for a while now, although I assume the article is about a new and different exploit rather than one of the ones already documented.

In which country?

I keep on remembering a line from an old anime: "An unjust peace is better than a just war." It keeps on floating through my head because it's true for most people most of the time. Things have to get really bad—really bad—or at least you have to persuade people that they are, before you start seeing organized, armed insurrection on a large scale.

So what does it take? Lots of people being killed, maimed, or raped, at random and without any recourse, usually. Stealing enough children might also do it. Or a faction deliberately whipping the less-intelligent part of the population into a frenzy. Or really poor quality of life over the course of decades that makes people think they have nothing to lose. And even then it takes time if everything was peaceful for a generation or more before that, because at first people will hunker down and claim they're dealing with "isolated incidents", and that it can't happen to them.

On the government side, what most governments want is to keep the economy running, because these days GDP is the measure of national success. For that, they need live workers and functioning civilian production equipment. That makes tear gas, handcuffs, and rubber bullets their weapons of choice and first resort.

For the government to haul out the big guns, one of two things has to happen. The first possibility is that it thinks it's losing control to a point where it no longer has enough jack-booted thugs to keep its interests protected, and starts killing people and destroying material assets to make sure that at least no one else can have them.

The other possibility is that the upper echelons go completely Nazi Germany/Khmer Rouge level batshit, and enact bizarre murderous policies founded in deranged idealism. At that point, they often cease caring how they kill. (This includes governments that define some group of the people living in their country as subhuman.)

Are we going to see heavier munitions deployed in Canada over civil insurrection in the near future? I doubt it (and if it does happen, it'll be in Alberta, not over the judiciary mistake from the original post). Is it going to happen anywhere in the world in the next decade? Possibly, because there are countries out there where people really do have nothing to lose and no way out, and governments whose grasp on power is shaky.

I decided that a game controller and antimicrox were acceptable as a supplement for the remote, and installed a full desktop OS (Gentoo/TDE, like my main system, on a Dell Optiplex box I bought off ebay last year). Works fine for my unconventional needs, although I admit I do updates, etc. over ssh because it's faster than entering one character at a time on the on-screen keyboard.

And even when you get past that, it takes some scrolling (or page-mangling with browser add-ons) to get past the sponsored garbage. They insert some of those in the actual results without telling you, too, I discovered today while doing another junk cleanup pass. I now have over thirty "kill anything matching this xpath" and two or three "set the height of this to zero pixels" directives for Amazon, making it one of the worst sites I can still be arsed to deal with at all.

The largest fully independent generalist search engines are Yandex (which is no better than Google/Bing, unless you want something that doesn't deprioritize sites for DMCA reasons) and Mojeek. You may want to read A look at search engines with their own indexes, although it's about a year out of date now.

I suggest moving to any other search engine, if anyone hasn't already. If duckduckgo isn't to your taste, startpage.com uses Google's database without pushing any of this nonsense.

They'd like to believe they have jurisdiction over the entire planet, and often pretend that they do.

You'd also have to express all the feature and dependency information. Some packages have a lot of compile flags, some of which may be mutually exclusive. Was this package compiled against, say, gnutls or openssl, if it supports either but not both at once? What if something in a package depending on it works only if it was compiled against openssl?

You can handle this by ensuring everything in the tree expects the same features (what most distros do) or recompiling the offending dependency with different switches if necessary (what Gentoo does). What you're describing here sounds like a variant DLL-hell recipe.

The "1000W/kg" figure appears to be from Wikipedia, which claims https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/sodium-ion-batteries-will-diversify-the-energy-storage-industry/30405 as a source. Wikipedia has the information in a table flagged as "Needs update".

Anyway, most of the lithium-ion chemistry variations drop off relatively fast in capacity over repeated charge cycles (the exception being LiFePo4). If the sodium-ion chemistry is better that way, and drops off less in the cold, it's still worth exploring for vehicle use even if the energy density is a little lower.

You can't stop the state from committing violence with a handgun, for crying out loud. Or even with a million handguns. The state will always have better equipment than you, most of which doesn't require anyone to get within handgun range if they don't want to. Granted, big missiles make a tremendous mess and they'd rather not use them, but the possibility is always there.

Expecting citizen violence to overthrow a modern government that's dead set on preventing it is, to put it politely, unrealistic. Unless you can convince the military to take your side or at least bow out, removing the government's ability to exert force, but you aren't going to accomplish that by directing violence at the military.