It makes me wonder if politicians, celebrities, etc. have their plate numbers already entered into Flock as a whitelist of people not to pull over.

The story makes it pretty clear that the cops are, as usual, not doing any independent thinking. The system says to pull that car over, so they do what the system wants. They don’t double-check to see if what the system is telling them to do is reasonable. If someone fat-fingers some data entry and the plate for the governor of California gets added to the system, the cops might charge up and box him in and jump out with their guns drawn. That might result in someone with actual power getting mad about Flock. So, maybe they prevent that by pre-loading the system with a whitelist of plates that are assumed to be in the clear.

four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.

So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.

Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.

At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.

The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:

“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

And the guy considers himself lucky too:

And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.

If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.

The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.

Reading the decision live to viewers on Friday, a tearful King was resigned to now serving time behind bars … “You got what you wanted, so to all those who were people crying about how we disrupted you, you got it, congratulations,”

Um… thanks?

But, dude. We didn’t come after you. You came after us. You’re not the victim here.

That’s a very different meaning though.

Race traitor?

Yes?

These are all lemmy-related. What brought me to the fediverse was Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

I was using Mastodon long before I started using Lemmy.

Just convince Ireland to enforce it… and thereby piss off the tech companies that are the basis for their economy because they pretend to be Irish. Or, convince the tech companies to move from their safe haven of Ireland to somewhere else in the EU where the GDPR is actually enforced… something they’d gain nothing from doing.

Good point.

I heard a podcast recently (99% invisible) that talked about how the “60 degree” screw became standard in the world. Before that, there were many competing types of screw, which meant that there were all kinds of incompatibilities.

What they mentioned only in passing was that the British Empire already had a standard at 55 degrees. At that point, the British empire was huge. The smart thing to do would have been to simply adopt the British standard and make it the worldwide standard. Instead, the US forced the rest of the world, including the whole British Empire to adopt the new standard.

I imagine if the US hadn’t entered WWII the world might be using German standards, or it might be using British Empire standards, or maybe even Soviet standards, but it definitely wouldn’t be using American standards.

US stays isolationist

…

US takes Canada

Which one is it?

Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that’s having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I’ve never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn’t sound like a normal problem, and if it’s not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.

I can’t help you, but I gotta say that is a cool effect. Some game should do that intentionally for a character who’s on mushrooms.

Robertson wanted to be paid for his good design. Henry Ford didn’t want to pay, even if it was a tiny amount.

Ford was willing to use an inferior screw design that could cause production issues rather than pay a license to use the superior design. And, even though the patent expired a long time ago, these decisions have momentum.

I would bet that Torx is more popular than Robertson even though it’s a much newer design. Is it a better design? To me, Robertson seems to have the edge when it comes to simplicity, but Torx could be better for industrial applications because multiple lobes that have a surface perpendicular to the direction of torque probably gives it more control. Also, thanks to Ikea, I’d bet that hex-head bolts are incredibly common. They share most of the benefits of Robertson. I suspect they’re a little less efficient though because the closer you are to a circle shape, the less the faces of the screwdriver tip align with the direction of torque. I wonder if there are advantages of hex over square, since you see hex so much more often.

It wasn’t an intentional feature. But, when they realized it happened it became a feature that they thought was useful.

There are a lot of things like that, where something has a design quirk that people come to rely on. The quirk is so useful that people assume it was designed to work that way intentionally, but sometimes it was just coincidence.

You were wearing it wrong.

If that escapes the bowl, you’re doing it wrong.

Oh, so you don’t poop standing up?

So, don’t piss on other people’s floors. Aim better. You can still do that while standing up.

the acceptable amount for one to pee on their own floor willfully is none

Nobody’s talking about willfully peeing on the floor, we’re only talking about microscopic amounts of pee mist that could drift away from the stream when you’re peeing from 50 cm from the bowl instead of 10 cm from the bowl.

Every toilet I’ve seen has a big air gap under the seat even when the seat is down.