fubo
@fubo@lemmy.world
No relation to the sports channel.
- Comment on What's the point of the "Airport Security" (aka: TSA) in the USA? Does the "Airport Security" ever actually scare away potential terrorists? 2 days ago:
They certainly do miss some dangerous items, including weapons; but they also do catch thousands of people per year trying to take firearms on planes.
How many of these people intended political violence against civilians (i.e. terrorism) is not determined. Some may intend ordinary nonpolitical violent crime. Some may be really stupid hunters who don’t read the signs that are all over airports telling hunters not to try to carry on firearms. Some may have just forgotten which backpack they put their handgun in.
- Comment on What happens when a prominent person is assassinated and the perpetrator cannot be identified? 2 weeks ago:
“… and he was aiming for John Connally.”
- Comment on Don't know if this is possible but why don't they get the people who worked out the PLA and Israel deal under Clinton and the Irish Britain agreement to come for a solution to Ukraine? 2 weeks ago:
Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.
- Comment on Has anyone ever come up with what a Palestinian State would look like without wiping Israel of the map? If so have both sides ever been presented the offer? If not why? 3 weeks ago:
There was the original 1947 UN plan for the partition of British Palestine, for one.
- Comment on Did "Party time! Excellent!" come from Wayne's World or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? Did one copy the other? 4 weeks ago:
Bill & Ted is “Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!”
- Comment on why do our noses & anuses think different types of paper are softest? 1 month ago:
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog … until you tell them.
- Comment on have you ever been given a warning or suspension for using profane language at work? 1 month ago:
If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment.
In one of my better workplaces, the expression was “you can cuss the hardware, you can cuss the software, but don’t cuss your teammate.”
- Comment on I just opened an overpriced can of fancy soup and on the label, along with the expected stuff like 'gluten-free' and 'GMO-free,' was 'mustard free' and 'celery free.' Is that a thing now? 2 months ago:
I know folks with autism-related sensory sensitivities who really can’t stand celery and have trouble with a lot of canned soups and broths because of it.
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 3 months ago:
Three knights can ride it; tri-sir-atop.
- Comment on Who or what is Jerma? 4 months ago:
If ya balls are jerma you should disinfectha.
- Comment on How common of a name is Ghislaine? 5 months ago:
It’s a saint’s name; the original is Ghislain which is the masculine form.
- Comment on When creating a story, how many black characters can I create without them calling the story woke? 5 months ago:
Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.
- Comment on Would it have made sense in the 80s to believe there were dinosaurs 40 million years ago ? 5 months ago:
One of the writers has said it was about nuclear armageddon, so there’s that.
To be clear, it was the '80s. Everything was about nuclear Armageddon.
- Comment on Would it have made sense in the 80s to believe there were dinosaurs 40 million years ago ? 5 months ago:
While you’re fact-checking Was (Not Was), be aware that some of the historical events alleged in “I Feel Better Than James Brown” may not have occurred literally as described.
I was attending Mardi Gras with Fidel Castro
Buxom cross-dressers threw fake gold coins at our feet
As we discussed the fate of the Revolution
Suddenly, CIA men dressed in bikinis
Tried to stab us with fountain pens
But Fidel blew mustard gas through his cigar
And immobilized the lot of them.
Nineteen tequilas later, we had a deal:
Havana goes back to the Mob,
And Fidel and I open up a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken shops. - Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 5 months ago:
For that matter, immunity from criminal charges for attempting to pardon oneself is not the same as the pardon being valid.
- Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 5 months ago:
Better do it in DC. Murder can be charged under state law, and the presidential pardon power only applies to federal charges.
- Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 5 months ago:
Supreme Court judges must be confirmed by a majority of the Senate before being seated.
- Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 5 months ago:
The immunity from criminal prosecution has to do with official acts, not personal acts. It wouldn’t apply to Biden personally shooting Trump.
It would apply to a military proclamation as commander-in-chief that the Trump movement is a domestic insurrectionist movement that carried out an armed attack on the US Congress, and directing the US Army to decapitate the movement by capturing or killing its leaders, taking all enemy combatants as prisoners of war, etc. (Now consider that the Army is only obliged to follow constitutional orders, and would have Significant Questions about the constitutionality of such an order.)
Further, the immunity is only from criminal prosecution and would not protect Biden from impeachment and removal from office by Congress.
- Comment on Does Instagram or YouTube Shorts get you? 7 months ago:
They should take down their shorts.
- Comment on Is there a standard/preferred list order for non-alphanumeric characters? 8 months ago:
If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.
But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°
(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)
Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.
- Comment on Where do guns go when people are done using them? 1 year ago:
The modern notion of “interchangeable parts” was developed for guns; they’re made to be maintained and repaired. Parts that wear out can be replaced. You can still get new replacement parts for guns made over a hundred years ago.
- Comment on Why do people want games that are just stories without any gameplay, these days? Why not just watch a movie for that? 1 year ago:
There’s lots of kinds of games.
You want chess? There’s chess. Like, no other game has better software than chess. Lichess is maybe the cleanest goddamn game experience that anyone’s ever written in code. There’s no bullshit whatsoever. You can just run it and play chess, with the computer or with a human. It’s just a game.
The best Go game I can point you to is KGS and it’s not as good as Lichess.
You want to play a run-around-and-whack-stuff-with-a-sword game? Yeah, buy yourself a Nintendo and play the latest Zelda game. They’re good at that. Especially if you have a strong stomach and don’t get all pukey when your guy goes flying in the air.
Or you want to play a Dungeons & Dragons game with factions and fights and gnolls and hot drow ladies? Yeah, you go install Steam and play Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s okay if you didn’t play Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2.
- Comment on Assuming a button that, every time you push it, your intelligence goes up. The obvious and sane thing to do is to push the button all day. Yes? No? Maybe? Is there something that I'm missing here? 1 year ago:
Well, if you keep pushing the button eventually you will be smart enough to figure out something even better to do with your time. Then push it once more to check. Then if the idea still seems like a good plan, go do it.
- Comment on Attention is required for thinking. Advertisers fight for attention. The Buddhists say that attention is the axis of reality. Attention might even be LOVE. But what exactly is attention? 1 year ago:
Going much more speculative here:
Some of the parameters for attention seem to include:
- Speed and rhythm of attention shifts. Am I focusing solidly on one thing? Or am I switching back and forth between several things, like a student driver who must keep track of their feet and their hands and other cars and pedestrians and signals? When I am distracted, how reliably do I return to an intended object of attention? (I say “rhythm”, but “melody, meter, and rhyme” might be a better analogy.)
- The ratios between attention on different sorts of targets: external (senses, objects in the world, people saying words at me), bodily (stuff my body is doing: motions, itches, weird inner ear noises, gait, hunger), and reflective (stuff my mind is doing: inner voice, memory recall, making plans, worrying about that weird inner ear noise).
- The strength of episodic memory formation; and the subjective passage of time. Short-term memory is how we perceive time passing; people who are not forming short-term memories (e.g. alcoholic blackout, senile dementia, high psychedelic doses) don’t notice time passing, experience frequent deja vu, repeat the same “discovery” over and over, etc.; they may have extended attentional focus on a single object because they’re just having the same thought repeatedly without forming memories.
- Comment on Attention is required for thinking. Advertisers fight for attention. The Buddhists say that attention is the axis of reality. Attention might even be LOVE. But what exactly is attention? 1 year ago:
I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.
The usual computer analogy is multitasking, in which the kernel rapidly switches from one process to another. A single CPU core may switch between running code for my browser, my chat program, the temperature monitoring process, and the wifi driver; this happens so quickly that it appears to me that all of them are running “at the same time”.
Attention also shifts quickly. When you are doing two things “at the same time”, attention is switching back and forth between them! You’re not really constantly attending to the music and the road; ideally you switch back to the road often enough that if something surprising happens there, you can respond to it in time.
We know from experiment that when people have more distractions going on while driving, they actually do respond slower to surprises on the road. Eating a bagel with the radio on and your kids in the back seat is actually hard, and really does slow down noticing the dog that just ran out into the road.
- Comment on Attention is required for thinking. Advertisers fight for attention. The Buddhists say that attention is the axis of reality. Attention might even be LOVE. But what exactly is attention? 1 year ago:
Attention is a feature of minds, wherein a mind can have awareness of lots of inputs (senses, internal thoughts, emotions, etc.) but dedicate most of its “thinking power” to only one or a few things from its awareness at a time.
(“Attention” is narrow; “awareness” is broad. You can be aware of the color of the wall next to you, even if you are not attending to it.)
What does attention do? Attention selects; attention shifts. You can switch from focusing on this sentence, to your breathing, a sound in the distance, the taste of your coffee, your plans for the day, the texture of your socks.
Shifting is not a bug; it is what attention is for. That is why we have it.
There is a rhythm to attention shifts. They can happen quicker or slower; and more or less suddenly. This rhythm differs from person to person, activity to activity, and with emotional and hormonal changes.
Some people are more aware of their attention shifts than others. Some people feel more control over their attention shifts than others. Some people’s attention shifts are more or less in tune with classrooms or offices or other environments that expect certain sorts of tight control.
Meditation allows us to notice and gently alter the parameters of attention.
Spontaneous attention shifts are important! If a loud bang and the smell of sulfur happen from the closet next to you, your attention will probably no longer be on reading this message. If a loved one bursts into the room weeping in despair, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. If the smell of baking pies drifts into the room, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. (At least, if you’re like me. Mmm, pies.)
Focus is also important. When someone “gets in the zone” they may not notice many things that otherwise would grab their attention. They might even fail to attend to the smell of pies; and the weeping loved one would take a little longer to grab them than otherwise.
Attention works along with self-awareness. Attention does the shifting; self-awareness creates the sense of continuity: even though you are sometimes reading and sometimes thinking about pie, you still have the sense that you are the same person. Even though there is not really any such thing as “a self” (q.v. anatta), it is pretty useful to remember that “you” have a body and that it is pretty similar to the body “you” had yesterday.
- Comment on How do poor people in the states give birth without money? 1 year ago:
I don’t have a credit score, and have never had a problem renting. It’s getting a mortgage that I can’t do without a partner who’s been consistently paying off a credit card for decades.
- Comment on How should I handle an ex friend who feels like he needs to bully me to raise his own self esteem? (We're adults) 1 year ago:
Last year, he reported me to the college because I was doing students’ homework for them for some extra cash. He said that what I was doing was depreciating his Diploma. I guess I get it, but what kind of friend would try to get me in trouble for something as harmless as doing people’s homework?
One who believed that you had already betrayed him, apparently. That’s not an excuse for ongoing harassment, though.
In many academic institutions, including some of the highest reputed engineering schools, your former friend would have been considered equally guilty if he failed to report your academic dishonesty. Asking you to quit cheating would not be an acceptable alternative; that would be concealing your violation.
Dude is still being a harasser, which is also unacceptable conduct. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But you’re still pretending you did nothing wrong. That’s not super great either.
- Comment on Will people respond better if you say you're teetotal, or straight edge? 1 year ago:
If “no, thanks” is not treated as a complete sentence, you’re in a bad crowd. Doesn’t matter if it’s beer with the coworkers or MDMA at a trippy cuddle party. “No” requires no further elaboration.
- Comment on I'm watching Wargames(1983), could local people have heard the missile doors opening during a test? 1 year ago:
My impression is that US missile silos are located mostly in sparsely populated areas of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, where there are not a lot of locals to overhear the garage door opening.