I believe that’s not the law though. The law outlines the conditions under which a person has an “expectation of privacy.” If you’re inside your house, you have an expectation of privacy and so should not be filmed. If you’re on the sidewalk in public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you’re in a private establishment (restaurant or store for instance), the owner or their representatives can ask you not to record and you have to comply.

All of street photography depends on this kind of legal framework.

Are the Indian soldiers a UN unit or is that their regular uniform?

I had a sociologist once tell me that one of the reasons people will say that a baby looks like their father so often is that it is a social affirmation of paternity. Eventually the kid will (probably) start to resemble their relatives, but early on I think it’s mostly just being social.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

I have never seen a chain letter referred to as “chainmail” and I don’t know how to feel about it.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

The Kids Who Lived.

It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

There’s a tsunami of layoffs in the gaming community, and in tech in general. A lot of the time, it’s entirely unjustified as the positions being laid off are often quickly put on the market again, and it’s usually not the top engineering talent (the most expensive) because they’re harder to replace. It’s often focused on lower tier jobs/support teams, and the cost of re-filling a position (sourcing, interviewing, hiring, training) would far offset any kind of salary reduction. It’s like the tech management version of a Michael Scott vasectomy.

I wish someone would compile a list of companies acting in extraordinary bad faith so I could consider that when making purchase decisions.

Archie, gopher, wais, Usenet, Telnet, and ftp were the internet at that point. The www was basically a guy with a fan page for the hobbit and someone who gave a virtual tour of MIT.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

There’s entire branches of research on this, but I think one of the easiest ways to approach it for starting out is to think of the word “womanly.”

having or denoting qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with or expected of women.

I would strike the word “traditionally” from that definition since we’re talking about a comparative and differential analysis and concentrate on the “qualities and characteristics” part. Although most people in the US today wouldn’t think of it this way, imagine the perception of a woman army officer commanding male troops in 1845. You can take the same approach when looking through history or across cultures. What roles, qualities, and characteristics are associated with “women” and how do they differ and evolve?

There’s some complexity when you get into the details - indigenous cultures change when they come into contact with, say, colonialism, and the people who studied them might themselves be observing through their own prejudices. History is replete with examples of British colonialists being unable to properly deal with things like the egalitarian democracies of the northern indigenous peoples or the matriarchal social structures. Picture the used car dealership where the salesman still insists on engaging with the man even though it’s the woman buying the car.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, and semiotics is the study of symbology. When we’re talking about these things, we’re talking about how the ideas and symbols associated with the idea-token “woman” differ.

The reason why this is important is that this is the crux of the transphobic argument. Their argument is cultural, not biological (although like I said, even their biology is sketchy).

I think a great study that includes cross cultural anthropological analysis of the role of women, as well as politics and economics, is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.

That makes perfect sense.

At one point, many years ago, I read that earth’s water cycle is such that, at some point, you’ve drunk Napoleon’s urine. The author didn’t show their math, but let’s assume it’s true. We can take the same approach to holy water.

We might make the assumption that all water on earth has holy water mixed in with it, like cosmic background radiation. Now, obviously it doesn’t have sufficient holiness to be considered fully holy water - it doesn’t damage such creatures as vampires, possessed children, or Jews - but it’s necessarily present in at least trace amounts. And it would increase as a function of time.

So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

Lemmy is small enough that “brigading” doesn’t feel entirely appropriate. Maybe “platooning?”

In any case, we know from other sites that downvotes increase the probability of getting more downvotes, and nasty comments increase the probability of getting more nasty comments. The same goes for upvotes and positive comments. It’s just social dynamics. Some subs on reddit existed almost exclusively to call out other subs, but I think that Lemmy’s user base is small and spread out enough that it’s not a major contributing factor in voting.

I think it’s mostly just people scrolling along, running across a hot take, and interpreting it according to the voting.

In any case, I would suspect that people would be more impacted by hurtful comments than downvotes.