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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • This doesn’t invalidate my earlier statement that citizens are still subject to city ordinances.

    There are around 20,000 cities and municipalities in the United States, most of them have public-nudity/indecent-exposure laws.

    You successfully made the point that the legality of city ordinances can be challenged in higher courts (and even sometimes overturned) but the reality is that most people have neither the funding nor the time nor the expertise to take that up…which means ultimately you’re still subject to a city/municipality ordinances as well as state and federal.

    In 2017, Tagami v City of Chicago, the US Court of appeals for 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 that the city’s public nudity ordinance did not violate the complainant’s rights and upheld the lower court decisions (which meant that City of Chicago’s ordinance remained intact and validated as enforceable by the city).

    At the end of the day, yes you do have to be cognizant of the ordinances/codes of the city in question and cannot rely on State/Federal law alone.


  • krayj@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldPrinters
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    1 year ago

    I would NEVER recommend a modern HP printer, but…I have a HP Laserjet 4000 (Circa 1997) that I ‘acquired’ from the company I worked for that went bankrupt.

    This thing refuses to die. current impression count is over 500,000 prints. All its patents expired over a decade ago, and it’s still easy to find parts and toner (originals, and now even 3rd party knockoffs). It’s old enough now that modern generic drivers have built in support for it. The only parts I’ve ever had to replace are the rubber sheet feeder rollers which dry out and stop working correctly after 12-15 years.

    So, I guess the point here is that some really solid printers were made a couple decades ago, back when manufacturers still took pride in their products, and they are old enough that the hardware is no longer protected by patents (so practically open) and robust driver support without all the bullshit. Picking up something from this era and cleaning it up would come close to satisfying a lot of your requirements.






  • Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

    It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

    For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn’t use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn’t even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.


  • It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. Take the city of Seattle, for example (I know this because I planned an executed a nude photo shoot in public view inside the city limits and sought legal council ahead of time to ensure I wan’t risking being charged with any crimes). The general rule for Seattle hinges on whether the activity is intended to tittilate or sexually arouse observers - and if that is obviously not the intent, then even full nudity is not illegal. Many other large cities have very similar ordinances.

    The smaller the town, and the more conservative the region, the stricter and less flexible the ordinances. There are beaches in South Carolina, for example, where they even regulate the minimum amount of coverage for bikinis and beachware.





  • Some were produced that were claimed to be dimmable - and I wasted my money on a few and was still unhappy with them. The other problem I forgot to mention earlier was the startup time: the earlier bulbs (and the cheaper ones) wouldn’t just ‘turn on’ when the power was turned on…they took some time to start making light, and the colder it was the longer it took - this is an aspect where LEDs are amazing - maximum brightness within milliseconds of getting energized.


  • One problem is that CFL bulbs is that they contain small amounts of mercury (about 4mg per bulb). Because of that, disposing of them responsibly requires going through big hassles rather than just throwing them in the trash. Also, because of that mercury, accidentally breaking one means contamination of the environment around the break.

    Flickering - always was a big problem for these things.

    Longevity: They were very sensitive to heat, which meant that they loved to burn themselves up in a lot of applications.

    Dimming: CFLs were NEVER good at being dimmable.

    CFL was just a very poor technology detour on the way to the vastly superior LED lights.




  • Maybe I am in the minority but I’ll never need an aux jack again

    There is still significant lag for bluetooth audio on both ios and android platforms. It’s doesn’t really impact calling, and it doesn’t really impact watching video content (because they figured out how to measure that latency in real time and inject artificial delay into the video stream so that audio and video sync). But what they haven’t figured out yet is the answer for bluetooth audio for gaming. When gaming, you can’t arbitrarily delay the video feed so that it lines up with audio, so the bluetooth audio experience is complete dogshit for any gaming scenario. If you game, you have to use the physical cable or the constant audio lag will drive you mad.

    Also, there used to be (still are) a fair number of accessories designed to work through the aux port. Examples: mobile credit card readers that connect through aux jack (like square/paypal) that are used heavily by small vendors (especially for shows/events); also things like selfie sticks that use a cable plugged into the aux jack connected to a length of wire running inside the selfie stick to a button on the end of it.

    The market is starting to come up with wireless versions of these things, but the modern wireless versions now require unique ios and android versions of them when the aux-jack solution used to be platform independent.

    Also, the audio quality of an aux jack is an order of magnitude superior to anything that can be piped through bluetooth…still.

    I very much appreciate devices still throwing traditional aux jacks onto mobile devices. Ideally, there will be a wireless technical solution that eventually is superior, but that technology is definitely not bluetooth and we’re still waiting for it to be invented and hit consumer availability.