Notices by Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life), page 2

@glynmoody

"Gattaca" - 1997.
"Orphan Black" - 2013-2017

(among MANY others)

More people should at least watch science-fiction. :welp:

@youronlyone
The recent usage is a contraction of "suspicious", with basically the same meaning. Not sure how old that is, but I don't think I'd heard it 20 years ago in the USA.

There's also "suss", which I understand is a British expression for coming to understand something or figuring something out. That usage goes back to the 1980s or earlier (I just know it from TV, it's not really US usage).

Capitalism tends to optimize for what we might call "best overall performance".

It's the kind of design principle that goes into the scheduler for Windows desktop O/S. It tends to do the right thing most of the time, and the exceptions don't kill you.

You do NOT want that design philosophy in your brakes or life-support equipment.

What you want there is "guaranteed minimum performance". This is what "real time" operating systems are about.

We need that for critical parts of society, too.

A lot of the chatter on my feed reminds me of this JFK quote:

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -- John F. Kennedy

Yeah. That. :welp: :dumpsterfire:

@evan

See, if I told you, it wouldn't be a secret anymore, would it..? :raccoon_cool:

@liztai
Wow. So they've done subtitles, face-replacement, and dubbing. Pretty nifty fan work. Thanks!

@liztai
Interesting. :raccoon_cool:
Does the speech match the subtitles, or is this like the "Downfall" memes where it really works better if you don't understand the language?

Ah. Daughter has borrowed my old HTML and CSS books. I'm going to give her some space on my static webserver to play with.

Craft web design lives on!
:raccoon_cool:

So I'm having a little trouble with the headlights on my car, and I decide to look up how to remove the headlight module on YouTube, because that seems like the easiest way to get to this stuff.

I'm five minutes in, and this guy starts taking the wheel off.

WTAF?! :welp:

Is this a joke? SURELY this is not a necessary step? 🤦

@forteller
FediLab does that.

@n8
But the original copyright is listed as 1961, so the term would not have run out before 1978, when the law changed to conform to the Berne Convention.

As far as I knew, anything under copyright in 1978 was automatically extended at that point.

There WAS another way you could fall out of copyright in the 1960s -- which was to publish w/o notice. That's what happened to "Night of the Living Dead".

Or it could've been explicitly disclaimed.

Why would "The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison be in the US Public Domain now? 🤔

I mean, I'd be happy about it, but I don't understand it.

Published 1961. UK Copyright. Harrison died in 2012.

Did Harrison himself dedicate it to the PD or something?

It'd be nice to have an explanation, as well as this claim.

"Is believed..." -- by whom, exactly?

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/harry-harrison/the-stainless-steel-rat/text/uncopyright

#Copyright #PublicDomain #Book

@slothrop @djsundog

I have long argued that a plain reading of the 2nd Amendment includes strategic nuclear ICBMs.

It says *ARMS*, not "guns".

I had a military guy go into rage hair-splitting, claiming that those aren't "arms" by some abstruse technical definition.

But I think it makes sense, and I argue this is the reason why a direct plain-reading absolutely does NOT make sense (which would be why they invented whatever sophistry he was attempting).

@atomicpoet

Huh. I had an Amstrad in the 80s. It was basically an IBM-PC clone. Had a choice of DR-DOS or MS-DOS, and this weird "Gem" window system.

Is that the same system? I believe we got it from a local store in Fort Worth, Texas.

@HauntedOwlbear
Well, as for possible negative associations, it might be mistaken for III, which is used by the right wing "Three Percenters". I don't know if the confusion is actually that likely, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters

@evan

The accounts I find most trustworthy seem to have cartoon or abstracted faces.

(Part of why I changed to that)

@evan

I believe that as a matter of history, there WERE stories about audiences being shocked and frightened by the realism, as if a real train were heading right for them.

But I have my doubts about the accuracy of these reports. There might've been just a smidge of sensational storytelling going on.

Dick Cheney endorsing the first Black woman Democratic candidate for president of the United States is just not a thing I would have EVER imagined happening.

Let alone endorsing Colin Allred against Ted Cruz.

Don't get me wrong. I still think he's a jerk. But I am impressed, and I respect this move.

We are in such a weird time.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/06/dick-cheney-kamala-harris-liz-cheney-colin-allred/

Watched "Prometheus" again. It's still bad.

Actually, what's so frustrating about this movie is how much of it is good -- art design, photography, even acting.

But the writing just undermines it all. The premise is awkward. The script has major structural issues, but the worst offense is deeply-contradictory characterization and bad dialog that derives from that.

It's just such a disappointment, because you know it *could* have been a really good movie with a better screenwriter.

In the first movie, "Alien", the characters are all basically blue-collar freight haulers. They have no reason to be knowledgeable about first-contact problems, and so when they make mistakes, it's completely understandable.

And when they actually show insight and rationality, it stands out as heroic.

But in "Prometheus", these are supposed to be hand-picked experts.

And they're just BAD at their jobs.