A bug which was later fixed by Raymond Chen.

The pinball game itself was licensed from Cinematronics/Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball, which had two additional tables as well as a sequel, both of which I still have on CD somewhere because I am a gigantic nerd.

Just like how Hydrox are just knockoff Oreos!

I mean, that’s a valid assessment of the yard as well if you’re looking at it from a comedy perspective.

The problem is, everyone has this fantasy storyboard in their heads of the cops showing up going door-to-door with their MP5s and riot shields in a nice neat line loudly announcing their intentions. That is absolutely not how gun confiscation is going to work.

Instead, once they’ve declared that trans people or Democrats or whoever else are now blanket banned from owning guns, any time you interact with the police, let’s just say during a (probably spurious) traffic stop, your name will come up on their little computer as a “person prohibited” and they’ll put you in handcuffs and stuff you in the back of a police car right then. And then go break into your house and toss it looking for guns when you’re not there to stop them. There will be no fight. You’ll already be under arrest for something else. They’ll find (or plant) whatever they want, and charge you with an additional nine hundred crimes that are all rewordings of the same thing, and put you in jail. When they come up to you they’re not going to be talking about guns, they’re going to start off with some low-grade bullshit you think you can talk yourself out of but use that as a pretext to lock you up for your guns.

There will be no headlines of jack booted thugs going around systematically kicking in innocent people’s doors and garnering a bunch of negative press for themselves that people can rally themselves around. There will be individual local little news articles, one at a time, all along the lines of “Arsenal Of Illegal Weapons Found in [town name] Man’s Home/Car By Brave Policemen After Conducting Traffic Stop, One Of Which Was a High Capacity Black Semiautomatic AR Glock Assault Child-Shooter,” with an article underneath carefully spin-doctored to slander the individual in question as a mentally unstable transgendered pot smoking child grooming terrorist. They’ll do this one at a time, forever, even long after they’ve gotten everyone the think they wanted to get.

The only defense against that is to assume that any time a cop looks in your direction you need to lock and load right then and there and initiate a fight for your life. Even if you win, you’ll automatically be the bad guy.

Are you ready for that?

Is anyone ready for that?

That talk about substitutes happened when it was initially handed over to said data miner, and anybody concerned should have switched back then. I did, moving to Lawnchair, and never looked back. Oodles of other options are doubtlessly available.

I had a client who wound up with one of those not realizing what it was, which caused him no end of problems until I ultimately figured it out confiscated it from him. He got a regular US inch one in exchange. I had to look it up at the time, too, because the notion of there being a Chinese knockoff inch that’s subtly inaccurate is one of those things that just seems so ridiculous on its face that it simply can’t be true, right? Except it totally is.

None of the above is true, or at least isn’t the full answer for why today a “2x4” is missing an entire half an inch all the way around. The shrinkage due to drying is around 5% (and the real math there is more complicated, as wood shrinks different amounts in different directions relative to the grain), which would only account for 1/10" of difference in the thickness of a 2x4. With some species of pine it’s as low as 2%.

No, the lumber industry has consistently shaved boards in order to fit more into rail cars for transport and make more money and spend less per plank on transportation costs. Various lumber consortiums determined via internal testing that the smaller board sizes are still “sufficient” for their intended purpose vis-a-vis structural integrity of stick framed residential buildings.

Well, good news!

The raid was authorized by a judge-issued search warrant following a monthslong investigation of the facility, Schrank said. The investigation of the worksite remains active, he added, but no charges of wrongdoing have been filed.

…Oh.

Standing right here. I’d also like to know what part of due process this is, exactly.

I’ll take an 8k computer monitor though. In fact, send two. Kthnx.

And also weed out models that are clearly impossible to print.

FWIW I always make my headline image a printed instance of whatever it is. I figure nobody’s interested in anything else.

Re: Lemmings.

How about Magpies?

But it’s still fun to shake the jar and watch 'em fight!

Here’s another vote for the X-Max 3. Mine has been quite solid.

If anyone is interested in multi color support, though, it seems that the Qidi “Box” filament changer deal will never be made compatible with the Max series, and will only work with the new/current Plus 4. There is at least one third party solution for this in the CoPrint ChromaSet thingy, but this engenders some pretty significant compromises and also locks you into using their nozzles, in addition to reducing the print volume significantly which kind of defeats the purpose of the X-Max 3.

If you have any AMS-ish aspirations, the X-Plus 3 and X-Max 3 are probably out of the running.

I did alright with mine. I figure a modern one would have modern hardware in it. People forget how dire the performance on the first couple of iPhone generations was, too. The N900’s contemporary was the iPhone 3GS, I think, which was an objectively terrible device in every metric except sales.

Oh, and the N900’s inbuilt phone dialer was also kind of ass. But I found its performance more than acceptable, and it could run full fat Firefox including the Flash plugin, which was still a big deal at the time, whereas its competitors could barely render a web page.

Bring back the Nokia N900!

I said it in the last thread and I’ll say it again here: I do not give a single flying fuck about any political motivation behind the changing nor changing back of the Cracker Barrel logo, either real or simply perceived, but their new logo was objectively terrible. It was so bland and unmemorable that whoever designed it should have their Macbook confiscated and be catapulted into the ocean. That is, the both of them. But preferably one each into different oceans. I don’t know how much that braindead rebrand cost them in consultancy fees but I hope they can ask for a refund.

This would become quite a thorny constitutional issue very quickly. The 14th amendment explicitly specifies that one state can’t try to prosecute someone for something done in another state that was legal there but is illegal here. This has further been interpreted to mean that interstate travel as a whole is a protected right, and any form of checkpoint or other hassle-station on a border between states would surely also be a 4th amendment violation.

That’s not to say some idiot won’t try it eventually, especially given the current political climate, but up until now it’s not done as a matter of course.

A state neighboring mine got in big time hot water a decade or so ago for stationing their own cops in our state and tailing people out of liquor store parking lots with the aim of harassing them over the minutiae of the differences in liquor laws between the two. Obviously that didn’t fly, because that state does not have jurisdiction here which means they have no grounds for a stop or search. Likewise, entering another state is not legal grounds for a stop and search unless that state’s law enforcement already has some manner of articulable probable cause.

Major roads have a “welcome to wherever” sign but minor ones won’t. They’re always a clear delineation in the pavement, though, because neither state is going to pave one single molecule of distance further than they have to. And they never seem to be able to arrange it so that there isn’t a noticeable bump at the junction.

One of my neighboring states also has some kind of pathological aversion to putting complete and legible signs for the names of roads at intersections, too. So the disappearance of all useful street signs is therefore usually also a clue.

Fortunately Del Taco have kept themselves off of my naughty list thanks to their highly recognizable sawblade sun logo, which they even managed to retain in their most recent rebranding. Ditto with Taco Time and their cactus.