K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@Shayman solution nobody asked for: roller-coaster-style seats with over-the-shoulder restraints instead. Solves lots of problems:
- easy to find, just reach up
- everyone's in his seat while the seatbelt sign's on because the stewardess won't unlock him
- no more lawsuits over the seatbelt buckle just saying LIFT and not LEVER

@msprout It's been heavily covered in our local news media - OTOH, this is in fact the first I've seen of it on social media from outside Ohio. Probably not too surprising with the earthquake doing a better job satisfying global demand for disaster news. I'm mildly surprised to discover that people elsewhere know or care about it. @demarko

@MeroFromVero or, for something slightly less apocryphal: https://eu.dispatch.com/story/news/weird-news/2013/10/10/judge-tells-ohio-man-he/23537926007/

@Shayman eh I get some people who complain the other way: "Hi X, it's Kyle -" "Yeah, I know; it shows your name on my phone." I don't think you'll please everyone, and it might have to do with when you learned phone etiquette relative to the proliferation of smartphones.

On the other hand, one calling tactic I really despise is calling me and asking, "Who is this?" If there's someone specific you want to talk to, you can ask if I'm that person or ask to speak to them. By name. If you're dialling random numbers, the next one on your list is just as random as mine; try it instead. I'm not giving you any more information about me than you already have.

@Pat
> Part of the problem is that people don’t realize that they aren’t voting for president, they never have

A bit pedantic, surely? Your ballot says it's for President, the names on it are those of the candidates... people realise as much as they need to get on with the business of voting. Maybe it's not precise enough for a detailed discussion of electoral mechanics like we're having here, but for casting one's ballot it's a perfectly sufficient mental model. I only made the distinction to try and explain the context to our curious friend :)

> A huge problem with a popular vote is that California and New York will essential pick the president because of their out-sized populations.

No. If we're going to be pedantic, under a popular vote system the states have nothing to do with picking the president; only the individual voters do. The fact that a sizable number of them live in this state or that is incidental, really.

@trinsec @peterdrake @sojournTime

@realcaseyrollins ah well pan-and-scan (i.e. cropping) used to be much more common, because CRT screens already had relatively few scan lines (i.e. low vertical resolution) and were physically small. So cutting the frame down to its most-interesting 4:3 rectangle was considered a better tradeoff than shrinking everything down. I wonder if your movies were older, or at least had older editors whose judgement was based on outdated cost models.

Even later on, early DVD players had to be backwards compatible with old tech, which usually didn't have a way to advertise its capabilities to the video source. So if you were lucky you'd have a setting for if you had a widescreen or fullscreen monitor, and another for what to do in case you got the other kind of input: letterbox it, crop it, or distort the aspect ratio to fill the screen. If you were unlucky the manufacturer only implemented one choice and that's what you got. Sometimes this could lead to double letterboxing, if you had a cinematic film with baked-in letterboxing top and bottom for fullscreen, and then your fancy new widescreen TV automatically "pillarboxed" the sides; or the reverse where the home-release editor cut the sides off to fit fullscreen and then your TV went ahead and trimmed off the top and bottom.

@realcaseyrollins what are you ripping them from? Even if the original's in a cinematic aspect ratio, it often gets adjusted for home release to better fit consumer equipment. It was pretty typical in the CRT era to have a message saying, "The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen."

@trinsec
To offer a bit more background: the US Constitution was written in the late 1700s. It could take weeks to communicate down the length of the country, which presented challenges we don't see today - organising a single nationwide vote of the general public was logistically impractical. So the framers laid out a multi-step process:
1. The general public casts their votes for Electors
2. Electors meet at the state capital to cast their votes for President
3. Each state sends its Electors' totals to Congress, who adds them up and determines the winner.

Conventional campaigning is about convincing people to vote a certain way at step 1, a "faithless Elector" who votes for someone other than his pledged candidate would do so at step 2, and the events of 6 January a couple years ago were an attempt to influence Congress's determination of the winner in step 3.

Each state has a number of Electors equal to the total number of its Representatives (proportional to population) and Senators (two per state regardless of size), so the framers might have expected the states to use the existing ridings with a couple at-large statewide races for the two Electors corresponding to the Senators, but this isn't codified and the details are left to the states. Two small states still do things this way, but most now award the whole slate of Electors to the candidate with the plurality at the state level.

There's some disagreement as to why most states are winner-take-all. I take the view that it's self-interest: for swing states, this increases the payoff for winning and means candidates spend more effort and money to win its citizens' approval; for stronghold states it means the dominant party assures itself of that many more Electors on its side. But there are others who see this as a purposeful choice by the framers to avoid mob rule, and see this as an invention of great wisdom (or even Divine inspiration) on their part.

Now that we have the ability to conduct a single nationwide election, it would make a certain amount of sense to implement this - but amending the Constitution is really hard. There's a sizable cohort of Americans who revere the framers as religious prophets and consider any suggestion of modifying their writings akin to sacrilege. On top of that, the current system gives a small but durable advantage to less-populous states, who would actively oppose any attempt to weaken their position.

So instead the workaround is that if a group of states which collectively comprise more than half the Electoral College all sign onto this compact, they'll each award their slates to whichever candidate wins the *national* rather than statewide vote, guaranteeing him a majority. As @Pat points out, the legality of the plan to have Congress approve the compact after the states agree is unclear, and circumventing the normal amendment process this way is controversial.

@peterdrake @sojournTime

@fdroidorg when I refresh in F-Droid, I get a message saying no files were found for the KDE repository but all others updated without error.

@msprout reminds me of the Uncyclopedia parody article about the Faith:

> The status of Báhá’í as a major religion is evident from all of those thingies it has over the vowels. Residents of the fiftieth U.S. state who insist on spelling it Hawai'i should love Báhá’í, if only based on all the things it gives them to do with their writing hand.

@msprout idea: a circular hue-value picker, but hue is scaled to the traditional "colour wheel" so yellow is equidistant from red and blue, not red and green. To get some more room in the orange tones I'd gladly give up the acres of cyan the normal picker has.

@realcaseyrollins it's a hard problem to modify anything in the Bill of Rights. The founding fathers are held in such high esteem that people react almost as if you're proposing to repeal and replace a chapter of the Bible. I think we might get there at some point, especially now that there's a greater awareness of some of the less praiseworthy aspects of their lives, but it's not imminent.

@realcaseyrollins

> What is the difference between a weapon, an "arm", and a destructive device?

This is defined in legislation, I think from the thirties, probably amended since.

> There isn't really a valid case to make that states that preventing people from buying guns doesn't prevent them from owning and possessing them.

Right, but AFAIK there isn't a legal precedent that such workarounds are covered by the amendment in the same way that e.g. poll taxes and literacy tests are covered by the enfranchisement amendments. It does have some effect though in that the government cannot make you give up a gun you currently own (contrast with Canada, where it's mandatory to surrender guns added to the prohibited list) or stop you from walking about with them.

> We know this, and this is the point of my post; what is the constitutional basis for this notion

I think generally the "constitutional basis" is taken to be the combination of preceding clause about the well-regulated militia, the general welfare clause, and the elastic clause; but that's more of an excuse and the underlying basis is really the acknowledgement that an absolutist interpretation isn't such a good idea any more. Compare Japan's constitutional prohibition on having a military: once they had two nuclear-armed communist neighbours, they began to interpret the rule so they could have this "it's not really a military, honest" self defence force.

@realcaseyrollins various reasons. Off the top of my head I can think of:
- Some types of weapons aren't legally recognised as "arms" but rather "destructive devices" and thus not protected by the amendment
- The amendment only guarantees ownership and possession rights, so the government is allowed to ban manufacture, import, sale, etc.
- Some restrictions aren't viewed by the courts as infringement in the same way that defamation/incitement/obscenity laws don't abridge your speech rights

@markmccaughrean Can you elaborate on this? It would seem that if you launch from the equator and want to hit a polar orbit, you have to not only get up to orbital velocity in the north or south direction, but also get 460m/s worth of westward delta V to shed the initial eastward velocity you had from the earth's rotation. If you didn't do this, you wouldn't be aimed directly at the pole in the inertial frame.

There's probably something I'm missing, so I'm happy to be corrected here.

@grandmaBates

@realcaseyrollins it introduces other dependencies, i.e. possible failure modes. Remember that a conventional telephone doesn't even plug into the mains. If you switch to VoIP, you depend on not only the online telephony provider, but also your ISP, and also the power grid; if you have POTS you only depend on the telephony provider. In turn that makes it less useful as an emergency means of communication.