At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.

The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.

Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).

I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).

It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.

Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.

I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.

This the order in which you should try to access papers:

1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

If you start college (assuming you’re an American) do not under any circumstances drop out. This goes double for grad school. What will happen is the at you’ll still owe money on your student loan, but will not have whatever advantages you might have accumulated as a result of having a degree.

It’s a genre called magical realism.

I never read the books, but this sounds like what they mean.

I think he meant “SECDEE!”

Not only is this just about the only deadnaming I support, I think we should all use the Spanish rolled “R.”

Also it’s the only time I’d be comfortable saying “No, where are you really from?”

People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

Um, yes?

I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.

In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”

Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?

Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.

Not the OP, but since the post is a picture I’m going to make a guess that the meant they couldn’t shoot pictures, not shoot a firearm. Given the fact they’re calling the vehicle a ute and it has non-US plates, I think I’d go further and say that it’s extremely unlikely that the person is armed with a firearm.

From America’s wang to Vera Wang in one easy step.

They weren’t countries. They became countries when the colonizers (and I’m using that term as accurately as possible) lumped together into managed regions and then told them they were countries with their own governments and flags. It was all “We’re going to conquer these people and these people and these people, then put Governor Fitzroy, nephew to the Prince, in charge of all of it with a big army to back him up.” Then they wrote laws and made flags and all the happy crappy stuff they do. Then they lost WWII (because pretty much everyone except for the US lost WWII), and said “you’re on your own.”

They turned former colonies into artificial countries with governments that all but guaranteed factionalism.

There was always war, and there always will be war. But the specific type of war we’re seeing in former colonies is because of the post-colonial situation.

Also that whole India/Pakistan thing. And I seem to remember some stuff happening in Africa.