rudyfink's comments

African wild dogs use sneezes to "vote" to make decisions. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/284/1862/201...

Obviously, it's a great outcome that it worked. But the alternative--"it could trigger a small explosion," JPL noted--would have been interesting too. A sort of in fire or in ice outcome. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice

You are probably not overestimating.

Generally, I would guess conferring with the client on the facts, briefing, preparing for a hearing, and arguing a hearing would be north of, at least, 25k, assuming a lower-end rate estimate in the $800+ range and a lower-end work estimate of 30+ hours. If I had to bet, I'd go higher than the low-end estimate: both the rate and hours could be close to double. That said, the attorney / firm could be donating the time on this one.

What you said reminded me of this Royal Road (https://www.royalroad.com/home) website I came across. It is not physical publishing (at least I don't think so), but it is a large collection of different authors who release books / work incrementally. The work mainly seems to be fiction of different varieties.

That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could! Great work on someone seeing it through.

Also at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39727257 (48 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728973 (1 comment)

I thought of this quote from the PBS documentary Commanding Heights

LESZEK BALCEROWICZ, Finance Minister, Poland, 1989-1991: Just after breakthrough, there is a short period, a period of extraordinary politics. By definition, people are ready to accept more radical solutions because they are pretty euphoric of freshly regained freedom. One could use it only in one way, by moving forward very, very quickly.

JOSEPH STANISLAW: Poland decided to do what Bolivia did, to introduce shock therapy, cut back on government expenditure and try and introduce a market system and see if it could work.

NARRATOR: Prices almost doubled, and shortages didn't end. All Balcerowicz could do was chew his nails and wait for the law of supply and demand to kick in. But then, after a few days, farmers began to bring their produce to market.

LESZEK BALCEROWICZ: I was going for a walk, and we were looking at the prices in the shops, the prices of eggs.

NARRATOR: His aides told him to concentrate on the price of eggs. If eggs appeared, if eggs got cheaper, the market would be working. Eggs did appear. And then the price of eggs began to fall.

LESZEK BALCEROWICZ: And I remember that very important day when the prices of eggs are falling. This was one of the signals that the program, the stabilization program, is working.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/t...

Feel free, my contact information is in my profile. "Back to school" in this case would, usually, mean law school, at least in the U.S. My sense is it is not uncommon for there to be a gap between undergraduate and law school. Depending on your interests and background, there are, potentially, paths for working with / around patents (some mentioned in this branch) that would not require going back to school.

If you would like to reach out, I can probably answer some things for you. But, whether it is ultimately worth it or not, is a personal decision.

I've always thought a website with sliders for mate preferences would be really helpful for folks.

I get that it could get really complicated to do correctly, but even a fast and dirty version could be really interesting.

Perhaps, it might even encourage people to be interested in math.

1994 was still pretty early on for the web. This timeline of web browsers, which is very well done btw, illustrates the clients that were available at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers. And I'd say the timeline does not tell the full story, since many of the early browsers were on hardware that was not common (e.g., the original launch was on Next and other early browsers were on AIX).

To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc.

The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.

If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.

Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.

I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.

It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.

Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.

Preservation is one of the central problems of current copyright terms. By the time the term exhausts--in the U.S., now around 95 years for works for hire or life plus 75 years for author's works--the work may be completely lost. In my opinion, this will only get worse as we progress into the digital era. At least with physical copies, there is some chance an instance of the work might survive the needed gulf of time.

Notably, from an announcement link in the comments (https://global.sharp/corporate/news/230809-a.html), the expected production of the 25.3 inch model is _only 500 a month_.

If it isn't already a "law," one should be that the more complex a software system gets the more it tends towards control over user actions. There is probably a network-related corollary that in a networked software systems, over time, as they get more complex they tend towards more user monitoring and reporting.

If you're interested in more, this is a nice and short documentary (2014) on the Amen Break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

If anyone else was curious for more recent data, this 2021 article has the trends through 2019: https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/cops-still-take-more-stuff....

Its chart shows that burglary led from 2016-2018, but asset forfeiture was ahead again in 2023.

To save others the trip, the link simply states the term is a "[c]oordinative compound of anarcho- + tyranny."

The link also adds that the term was coined by Samuel Francis, a columnist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Francis_(writer)).

Digging deeper, I found this essay Mr. Francis wrote where he explains the term he coined in 1992: https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroni... .

I'd offer this quote of a long sentence as Mr. Francis's tl;dr of his term:

"What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny."

You can see the part where they open it up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJRWKCtKqo&t=1570s .

My speculation: I'm no expert, but it looks like there are fragments of, at least, a bowl? Earlier in the feed they discuss damage to the capsule. I'd guess the capsule was not originally empty; the last 200 years just took its toll on the contents.