To be honest, I use Organic Maps over CoMaps simply because Organic Maps is available in Accrescent (which is in turn provided by the GrapheneOS App Store), and CoMaps is not. Both Google Play and F‐Droid are just enough of a hassle (and I mildly dislike both of them) to keep me on the map app that doesn’t require either one.
I wasn’t referring to formal legal language. I was referring to language in common use by police when enforcing law, as well as some commenters on Hacker News discussing cases of police enforcing law.
Correct. But it is, sometimes, a transitive verb. One can trespass (go somewhere one is not allowed), and one can be trespassed (be banned from a property). One can even be trespassed against, which has a different meaning altogether (to be wronged by someone else).
I think you and the other commenters are confused by the usage of “trespassing someone” because it’s not an everyday usage of the term. “Trespassing someone” is essentially shorthand for “formally banning someone.” Being formally banned from someplace (and notified of it) has special legal significance: it’s basically what determines whether you get kicked out (in the case of mere trespassing) versus getting arrested (criminal trespass). That’s why this phrasing is especially common among cops and other legal personnel.
> Saying someone got trespassed is like saying you were driven when you go somewhere in your car, or that the door opened itself; you're taking the agency away from the person doing the trespassing and saying that they didn't actually do it themselves, but rather someone else did it/it something that happened to them.
It’s not like that at all. The difference between “she trespassed” and “he trespassed her” is not the same as the difference between “the vase broke” and “she broke the vase,” even though both are examples of intransitive/transitive uses of a verb. Humans discussing trespassing in a legal context found it convenient for “trespass” to gain a new meaning when used transitively. This usage has now been around for decades so it’s not particularly new anymore, but it’s still uncommon because most people don’t have a need to talk about trespassing in a legal context, and notice of trespass in particular.
Trespassing (intransitive) is different from trespassing someone (transitive). It’s not unusual for a verb to mean something different when used transitively versus when used intransitively. To “trespass” someone (transitive) means to ban that someone from a property. Wiktionary provides examples of “trespass” used in this sense as early as 1946.
> albeit sa uniquely american one? Never heard this from e.g. Brits
The NetSurf browser the author tried out has multiple frontends. Two run on OpenBSD that I know of, the “default” GTK frontend and an SDL‐based framebuffer frontend. As was pointed out, GTK has a rather sizeable number of dependencies; building the framebuffer frontend instead would save a lot of time.
This exact situation came up during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution wanted to present an image of Rittenhouse. It was materially important whether or not the picture depicted Rittenhouse with a raised gun; I looked myself and couldn’t tell because it was a dark picture from a distance (if I remember correctly, it was a still from a drone video). Since the relevant part of the image was so small, the prosecution was going to zoom the photo in on an iPad, but the defense objected on the basis that the iPad zoom algorithms could be inserting detail not present in the original image.
This seemed a plausible enough objection to me. Although a fairly techy guy, I was (and am) not familiar with the specifics of Apple image processing, but at the time I had a vague awareness that Apple had been heavily advertising its use of AI algorithms to improve the quality of images. Whether that affects zooms specifically I don’t know—but it’s not an outlandish question.
The judge did an eminently reasonable thing: he disallowed the zoomed evidence on its own, but allowed it to be re‐entered if the prosecution provided an expert witness to testify that zooming the photo didn’t meaningfully change it. For this, he was pilloried by the tech media.
Take Ars Technica, for example: they used the headline “You shall not pinch to zoom: Rittenhouse trial judge disallows basic iPad feature,” and prominently displayed the judge’s words “I know less than anyone [about technology],” as if the right thing for a judge who knows nothing about technology to do would be to determine the merits of technical evidence on his own rather than ask for an expert witness. It’s not like it would have been hard for the prosecution to find one. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/rittenhouse-tria...
Anyone who’s experimented with even non‐AI‐based upscalers knows that changing the algorithm can connect or disconnect catty‐cornered objects, introduce curves, and so on. I was shocked (well, not that shocked, given the heavily partisan interest in the case) that the tech media was so confident zooming an image couldn’t possibly meaningfully change it.
In the end, the image was displayed on a big‐screen TV (which probably used some other upscaling algorithm like bilinear, not that anyone in court was technical enough to point it out). The prosecution asked whether/asserted that Rittenhouse had raised his gun in the image, and Rittenhouse said it was not raised. So the exact details of how the small few pixels in the image got upscaled turned out to be pivotal in the end after all.
DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.
The university textbook market is pathological and unfair. At every turn the publishers , and the universities happily go along with it.
It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find.
To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out.
I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition.
At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around.
There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book.
When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated.
The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise.
One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.
100 years old, yet its copyright only expired five years ago—in the United States. In Europe and other life+70 regions, the film will remain copyrighted past 2050, even though Lotte Reiniger died nearly half a century ago!
There was a recent case in Florida where an innocent woman with no past record was falsely jailed for 13 days due to Flock imagery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA
Standard Ebooks has a database of public domain oil paintings for use as book covers. SE is strict about copyright clearance and requires either scans of a copyright‐expired publication containing the painting, or an explicit statement from a reputable museum that the work is CC0. Here’s an entry I contributed:
As someone who was public schooled six years and homeschooled six years, public school definitely made me more unhappy, and was worse for me socially.
Of course, I wouldn’t assume everyone in my shoes would have the same experience. But it definitely cemented my positive opinion about homeschooling generally.
Electrical engineer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Unix enthusiast. OpenBSD user and developer.