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Colorado teen shot in the face by town councilman after going to home to ask permission to take homecoming photos
  • Depends on their wealth.

    The kid was driving an Audi S4. I suspect they have some spare $$$ available. (assuming they haven't spent it all on repairs)

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    Colorado teen shot in the face by town councilman after going to home to ask permission to take homecoming photos
  • Hard to say. The kid was driving an Audi S4 so they likely have money.

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    Colorado teen shot in the face by town councilman after going to home to ask permission to take homecoming photos
  • This has absolutely nothing to do with "Stand Your Ground". SYG only applies when you or someone else are in real and imminent danger of serious bodily harm or death, neither of which were true in this case. That's why the guy was arrested and has been charged with a number of serious offenses. He's going to end up in prison.

    Since you aren't from the United States I should also tell you that SYG isn't a National thing, its only legal in the States in that have passed laws allowing it.

    I keep wondering if a legal framework like the US where you weren’t legally punished by attacking a thief in your house wouldn’t be fairer but then there’s news like this.

    That's called "Castle Doctrine" and like SYG it isn't National. It only exists in the States that have passed a law to allow it.

    It CAN work but there's at least a few States that have Castle Doctrine and a Duty to Retreat so you end up having to flee a home invader until or unless you have no other choice.

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    Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
  • We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering.

    The outsized effect of the EC and Gerrymandering have a very simple fix. I wonder why Democrats never talk about it?

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    Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
  • It’s sad you have no third strong grassroots movement,

    One of the few things that both Democrats and Republicans work together on is making sure that there are no viable third parties. They make it extraordinarily difficult to get ballot access at any level whenever possible and on the odd occasion that a 3rd party candidate does make it into office they pull out all the stops to make sure they lose the next election.

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    UPS is laying off more employees amid effort to boost profitability
  • One was supposedly delayed from CA to OR because of “weather” which is odd as it has been sun and mostly mild temps over the last week.

    Not to defend UPS too much but enormous wildfires probably go in as "weather".

    California.

    Oregon.

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    Republicans dismayed by Trump’s ‘bad’ and ‘unprepared’ debate performance
  • 2nd best is a turn of phrase, an old one. It’s an insult. You must not be very well read.

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    We don't know Kristi didn't eat it...
  • Tiedrich? Blech, tired old has-been who, like Trump, should have disappeared years ago.

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    Russian soldiers posted a video testing their bulletproof vests. All five bullets penetrated the armor plate completely. "Just f*cking great. Thank you, Ministry of Defense."
  • It’s what the US always does. Russia claims to have this or that so the US builds something to defeat it. It’s happening with China now too.

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    Malaysia to redirect DNS traffic to ISP DNS servers
  • Okay that I'm aware of but I've never heard of it referred to as "bootstrapping". Thanks for the explanation.

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    Some basic info about USB
  • Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn't require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don't notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.

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    Malaysia to redirect DNS traffic to ISP DNS servers
  • My internet being bootstrapped by ISP...

    Seriously, what does "bootstrapped" mean in this context?

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    Malaysia to redirect DNS traffic to ISP DNS servers
  • Edit: if you are going to downvote at least explain if you got a counter point, otherwise it seems y’all just butthurt haha

    Okay.

    How is this different from US ISP bootstrapping peasant grade internet?

    1. Whatabout-ism is annoying AF.
    2. How is nationwide re-configuring of DNS to enable censorship different than "bootstrapping peasant grade internet" is a dumb question on it's face.
    3. I'm sitting in the middle of Wyoming sending this comment via a 2Gb/s fiber optic connection. This is not "peasant grade".

    So basically you are getting downvoted because your comment is irrelevant 'Murica bashing.

    Now you know.

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    Germany blames Russian GRU unit for EU, NATO cyberattacks
  • You think the people who brought us Stuxnet aren't fucking with Russia?

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    U.S. Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance says school shootings are a "fact of life"
  • would it surprise you if these are still the only two instances of parents being held accountable?

    Yes it would. Adults, including parents, are increasingly being charged in other types of shootings such as when one child is playing with a firearm and accidentally shoots someone else. It's not happening often enough yet but it's growing in popularity. If you can remember long enough, I know I won't, check back in a year and lets see what happened. :)

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    U.S. Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance says school shootings are a "fact of life"
  • The psychology that causes school shootings...

    The United States generally has a violent culture. If you removed every shooting of any type (school, mass, crime of passion, etc) from the crime statistics the US would still have a higher rate of violent crime than any other industrialized Western nation.

    Aside from that it's time to stop blaming Reagan for the mental health crisis in this country. Aside from the fact that our mental health system was a horror show when Reagan ended it the guy hasn't been President for over three decades. That's plenty of time for individual States and / or the Federal Government to have reversed course.

    Plenty of countries with more guns per capita than the U.S. that don’t have school shootings.

    There is no country with more firearms per capita than the United States.

    Even if you go by household, to reduce the effect of people who have more than one firearm, the U.S. still ahead of any other nation.

    To be clear we can and should do more to reduce gun violence in the United States and small things like prosecuting adults who are accessories to shootings are a good thing.

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  • As originally conceived, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. George Washington spoke just once at the Constitutional Convention — and on its final day — to endorse an amendment lowering the ratio of constituents to members to 30,000.

    Today, House members represent roughly 762,000 people each. That number is on track to reach 1 million by mid-century.

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    One of my computers is an HP Elitebook X360 1040 G8 (convertible) and I'm happy to report that in Laptop Mode both LM21 and LM22 work perfectly. There's full control of the normal hardware including the touch screen, good performance, and good battery life.

    With a couple of exceptions Mint also handles the shift to tablet mode pretty damn well. The keyboard and trackpad are disabled, the keyboard backlight shuts off, and the screen easily changes orientation with rotation.

    The exceptions though are so fundamental to touch screen use in general though that I feel like I must be missing something?!

    First and foremost is an on screen keyboard. I know it can be enabled under accessibility settings but when I do that it splashes up a keyboard that permanently fills half the screen. If I close the keyboard window it goes away but I can't find a way to get it to come back except to unfold the machine and re-enable it again.

    It may not be possible to make it launch predicatively, although Gnome itself does. but why isn't there an icon at the top or bottom of the screen that I can tap to bring it back on demand?

    The second one is scrolling, especially in Firefox. I know that Grab and Drag is possible because you can do it with the regular Firefox scroll bar but the scroll bar can be difficult to get on because of it's size and even then the scrolling action is backwards of both iOS and Android. This should be fixable be enabling gestures but surprisingly gestures don't have any assignable scroll functionality.

    I'm really confused by these two issues. They seem so fundamental to how a touchscreen is used, especially the on screen keyboard, that it seems impossible they weren't addressed year ago. It's far more probably that I'm missing something obvious, but what?

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    I've had at least one computer with regular Mint + Cinnamon installed since V19 and it's always worked well for me. I somehow only learned about LMDE last month and since I've previously run Debian I figured I'd give it a shot.

    I took the drive with my LM22 installation out and installed a brand new 1TB NVME, put LMDE "Faye" on it and YIKES.

    I'd forgotten how "raw" regular Debian is in nearly everything from Grub to package management and even Cinnamon is somehow less sharp and sort of lackluster on LMDE.

    The first boot up went okay but trying to swap the nouveau drivers for the Nvidia drivers did not go well at all and somehow ended up with all the fonts and icons broken.

    I couldn't figure out how to fix it and decided to simply re-install LMDE from scratch, no big deal.

    On the 2nd install I started getting AER errors on boot and every time I rebooted I got more of them. At one point the DE locked up entirely and I had to manually power cycle the machine. I couldn't get to the desktop after because of an endless string of AER errors.

    In between reboots, while I could still get into the desktop, I was installing updates and while that process was pretty much the same as regular Mint it was also slower, even after changing over to the fastest repositories available. The update manager also didn't work as well. For instance the first update run said it was complete and wanted a reboot but before I could do that the update manager automatically ran again and it showed me all the updates it had just installed as needing installed again. WTF?

    After frustrations with the Nvidia drivers, the weirdness of updating, broken desktop environment, and the AER errors I decided to see what would happen if I installed regular LM22.

    With LM22 on that exact same hardware, including the new NVME, everything works perfectly. No errors, Nvidia drivers installed without issue, updates worked as expected and Cinnamon looks and behaves just like you'd expect.

    Swapped out the NVME for the original drive that had LM22 on it and it too works just like I'd expect.

    I'm not running weird-o hardware either; it's a Gigabyte motherboard and an Intel i5 10700k with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 2060. No overclocking or performance tweaks.

    I have no idea what I did wrong, if anything, or why LMDE seems to hate my hardware but for me on that system LMDE is not at parity with regular Linux Mint.

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    New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

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    I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

    I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

    Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

    Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

    That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

    At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

    Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

    Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

    While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

    So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

    So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

    Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

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    Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

    This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

    Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

    This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

    First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

    Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

    Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

    It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

    I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

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    Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

    Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

    So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

    So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

    You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

    I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

    If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

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    I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

    According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

    My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

    Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

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    I have an automation that turns my driveway lights on when motion is detected. It normally works fairly well but it was windy last night and that caused the automation to trip endlessly as my trees and bushes were whipping around. Lights would come on, shut off 10 minutes later, then turn right back on again. It basically did this all night until I disabled the automation.

    I'll do some fine tuning of the motion sensors which will help and I'm considering adding a condition to the automation where it won't trip if the wind speed is above a certain level but how can I add some kind of cool down timer to the automation to prevent it from endlessly engaging?

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    First the layout. My garage is setup similar to this one, although mine is attached, has three light fixtures, and my driveway is 4 cars wide.

    The wife wants me to replace the three basic on / off fixtures that we have (they're getting rusty) and keep them all matching. If I'm going to do this I want to add a camera to the setup.

    Functionally I'd like the lights to have or work like they have dual bright capability where they come on full bright at sunset then after a couple of hours they dim down unless they detect motion. If they detect motion then they come back to full bright for a period of time then dim back down again. They do this for a set period of hours, say 4, then they turn off completely unless they detect motion.

    My current lights are already automated for on / off (but not dimming or motion) through the use of HA and a z-wave switch.

    Where I'm getting stuck is that I can see at least three ways to do this but none of them are perfect.

    1. Replace my dumb carriage fixtures with new dumb fixtures then change the switch to a dimming version plus add a motion sensor and camera out front. Then setup HA for the functionality I want. The upside of doing it this way is that it's very easy to get matching fixtures. The downside is that the motion sensor and camera will not be well integrated visually.

    2. Replace my dumb fixtures with ones that have dual bright built in. It's easy to do, and I could even keep the HA Automation I have setup now, but again the camera setup is not going to integrate well visually. I'm also concerned that three motion sensors controlling three lights will cause trouble for the camera (or each other) because they will react to different things and turn themselves on and off independently.

    3. Replace my dumb fixtures with smarter ones. In the center position I'd use one that has an integrated motion sensor and camera. This Reolink seems like it would work pretty well. However RL doesn't make any fixtures that match it, which means my center fixture would look different than the other two.

    I may just have to deal with mismatched fixtures but does anyone have any suggestions? Am I missing an option?

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    www.pewresearch.org U.S. population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era

    The U.S. House of Representatives has one member for every 747,000 or so Americans – by far the highest population-to-representatives ratio of any developed democracy.

    The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history.

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    washingtonmonthly.com To Fix Congress, Make It Bigger. Much Bigger. | Washington Monthly

    Radically expanding the House of Representatives would help solve some of the biggest problems facing Congress and, by extension, the country.

    Radically expanding the House of Representatives would help solve some of the biggest problems facing Congress and, by extension, the country.

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    The next step in my HA journey is adding cameras; indoor, outdoor, and doorbell so I've been exploring my options. I had originally intended to do a Frigate setup, I even have a Coral module and PC to do it with, but then I discovered Reolink.

    Without having any experience with them they look nearly ideal. They seem to have tight integration with HA 2023.3 or later and their pricing and functionality look good.

    They seem like a no brainer but I've noticed that they're often NOT the first recommendation in the HA Community. Why is that and why shouldn't I use them?

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