K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@Shayman As I understand it, they signed up to play in a conference (the GNAC) spanning Oregon, Washington, BC, and Alaska, but that one ended up dumping football a couple years back so the football teams got folded into the Texan conference. To play football in USports, all your other athletic stuff has to go through them too, so when their membership in the Texan conference expired, they had three options:
1. Join another NCAA conference as an affiliate for football only
2. Join USports or another NCAA conference for all sports
3. End the football program
I think they tried number 1 and couldn't find a conference that'd let them join on acceptable terms, and they decided (probably correctly) that it'd be a worse outcome to lose NCAA competition for soccer, basketball, etc. if they went with number 2. So they wound up losing the team for lack of a conference to play in.

@msprout at first glance I thought this was a temple construction photo - the base looks awfully like a nine-pointed star.

@msprout can you share what the final result looks like? "Subsect" doesn't return any useful results, and I'm an Inkscape guy so I can't just follow the Adobe-specific directions to see what you meant.

@stonebear randomly coming across well-wishes during the Fast is always such a nice surprise!

@peterdrake wangdaye.com.geometricweather has excellent home screen widgets for a quick overview, and I saved the NWS meteogram as a browser bookmark for more detailed info.

@nomi I think "profitable" is less the benchmark than "the most effective use of the transit dollars". Where do you put a railroad that couldn't be more cheaply served by a bus route on existing infrastructure? Setting aside a lane for buses during rush hour, like we have on 670, gets you most of the benefits of a grade-separated railway.

Apart from the expense of buying up the right-of-way and constructing the tracks, bridges, etc., trains have a few inefficiencies relative to buses:
- They can't make temporary detours. If a storm damages the line (freezing rain on the catenaries, for instance), the trains are stuck until repairs are made.
- It's extremely expensive to permanently reroute the line when needed. The greyhound station was recently relocated a couple blocks over, and COTA just adapted the bus lines to the new transit centre. They couldn't have done that with trains.
- The space can't be used for anything else. On off-peak hours, the bus lane can be designated a carpool lane, emergency vehicles can bypass traffic to reach an accident, etc. Train tracks just sit empty.

@lapingvino They operate in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina

@lapingvino Baron's

@realcaseyrollins I haven't used any but TestDisk looks to be recommended in a couple places

@realcaseyrollins maybe try getting a clean bitwise copy first using ddrescue? It's saved a couple failing hard disks for me over the years and might be able to do the same for optical media.

@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.