Others have tried to evade the spirit of the ban, using other digital devices sich as older iPods, or bringing walkie-talkies to school.

I'm not an advocate of smartphone bans, but necessity is the mother of invention, and I suppose that if some kids start cobbling together packet radio solutions to talk with their friends and reach the Internet, it'll probably be an educational experience.

My kneejerk reaction was "it's not going to do much" too, but I've kind of mulled it over and I'm kind of inclined to feel more charitable towards the Portland stuff.

What did the Trump administration want when it was sending National Guard out? Images of conflict, material that they could use to show that there was some dire threat and dangerous criminality that the administration was handling. They got footage of a frog air-humping and some nude bicyclists that's basically useless for that.

Looking at Fox News's front page, they have:

• Emergency flights diverted from Portland hospital amid 'laser party' threats at ICE facility: report

and

• Portland mayor orders removal of police tape despite federal demand for perimeter at ICE facility, report says

Which I think even the most die-hard MAGA fan is going to have a hard time getting too worked up over.

And it did accomplish some of the goals that a protest in that it helped build make visible that there were people who did object to what was going on.

I'm not sure that it was the absolute, optimal thing to do, but it might have been reasonably-canny.

I've used them happily from a policy standpoint, but in past months, they've had some real load problems, where the instances has been unresponsive. I'm pretty sure that a lot of it is due to scraper-bots pulling material for AI training

I understand that this has been a serious problem for the Web as a whole, and particularly for forum sites, including the Threadiverse, and is why many Threadiverse instances have stopped allowing anonymous login in past months. Lemmy.today was a holdout, but finally also disabled anonymous login. However, I just tried it today and while it seemed fine for a while, I also saw an unresponsive episode, so I don't know if they may still have other load issues to iron out.

I've never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.

I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.

EDIT: Sorry, via the open-source OpenMW engine. GemRB was for the Infinity Engine, and I also did those games.

EDIT2: I've also never played Elder Scrolls Online, as I wasn't really interested in an online experience. I did play Fallout 76, which is online, but that was only because Fallout 5 wasn't coming out any time soon, and the most that was going to be available for a long time was Fallout 76.

This shit should really be illegal.

I suspect that if you mandated human support for unpaid services that the Threadiverse wouldn't exist.

It typically doesn't. But some instances do defederate with some others, though it's rare. Lemmygrad.ml, for example, is a "tankie"-oriented instance. A lot of instances don't get along with it and have defederated from it. Your home instance is lemmy.world, and if you look here:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Click on the "Blocked Instances" tab to see a list of instances that lemmy.world has defederated from.

You'll notive that lemmygrad.ml is on that list, so you won't see any content from that instance.

Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

The Goiânia accident [ɡoˈjɐ̃njə] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.[1][2]

The radiation source in the Goiânia accident was a small capsule containing about 93 grams (3.3 oz) of highly radioactive caesium chloride (a caesium salt) made with the radioactive isotope caesium-137, and encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.

On September 13, 1987, the guard tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site.[7] They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly in a wheelbarrow to later take to Roberto's home. They thought they might get some scrap value for the unit.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident

A radioactive contamination incident occurred in 1984 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, originating from a radiation therapy unit purchased by a private medical company and subsequently dismantled for lack of personnel to operate it. The radioactive material, cobalt-60, ended up in a junkyard, where it was sold to foundries that inadvertently melted it with other metals and produced about 6,000 tons of contaminated rebar.[1] These were distributed in 17 Mexican states and several cities in the United States. It is estimated that 4,000 people were exposed to radiation as a result of this incident.[1]

Detection of radioactive material

On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went on because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory's LAMPF technical area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident

A radiation accident occurred in Samut Prakan Province, Thailand in January–February 2000. The accident happened when an insecurely stored unlicensed cobalt-60 radiation source was recovered by scrap metal collectors who, together with a scrapyard worker, subsequently dismantled the container, unknowingly exposing themselves and others nearby to ionizing radiation. Over the following weeks, those exposed developed symptoms of radiation sickness and eventually sought medical attention. The Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), Thailand's nuclear regulatory agency, was notified when doctors came to suspect radiation injury, some 17 days after the initial exposure. The OAEP sent an emergency response team to locate and contain the radiation source, which was estimated to have an activity of 15.7 terabecquerels (420 Ci), and was eventually traced to its owner. Investigations found failure to ensure secure storage of the radiation source to be the root cause of the accident, which resulted in ten people being hospitalized for radiation injury, three of whom died, as well as the potentially significant exposure of 1,872 people.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_radioactive_material_in_Tammiku

The theft of radioactive material in Tammiku, often called the Tammiku nuclear accident, took place in 1994. Three brothers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish (Harju County), Estonia, who were scrap metal scavengers, entered a fenced area in the woods and broke into a small shed that was seemingly abandoned (after having had no success with entering a larger building inside the area), with stairs leading to an underground hall. The brothers did not know that the buildings were nuclear waste storage facilities (although there were signs at the gate, they did not see them because they had climbed over the fence elsewhere). One of the brothers, Ivan, suffered a crush injury when a drum fell onto him. The brothers placed some pieces of metal into their pockets and went home, planning to return later. Ivan placed a metal cylinder in his pocket, not knowing that it was a strong caesium-137 radioactive source that was released from a container broken by the falling drum.[1] He received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days later.[2] Only after Ivan's family's dog died, and Ivan's stepson showed radiation burn of his hands (as a result of briefly touching the cylinder), was the cause of Ivan's death identified. The delay in information was due to the brothers' reluctance to admitting to the break-in.[3]

While we've often

not always

managed to label radiation sources, in general, people scrapping metal stuff, often stealing it, haven't done the best job of understanding or following related rules.

There's no (well, at the level relevant here) constraint on how detailed a reflection can be. I mean, pull out a mirror and look in it.

The pharmaceutical variant has a strictly controlled presence of DEG, if any, unlike the cheaper commercial kind, which has far higher levels of the compound, making it unfit for human consumption. Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

Known as the “pharmacy of the world”, India accounted for 3 per cent of the world’s total pharmaceutical exports in 2023. It is particularly known for exporting affordable drugs, especially to Africa and other developing regions.

In May 2023, following the scandals abroad, the CDSCO mandated a testing protocol for cough syrups in designated Indian laboratories before export.

But no such testing was mandated for the domestic market, which has many small manufacturers producing low-cost medicines. It has now asked all state governments to submit a list of cough syrup manufacturers, while initiating a joint audit of these companies.

The failure to prevent repeated cough syrup scandals has also brought up a whiff of alleged corruption. Mr Sukesh Khajuria, a public health activist who has been helping families of the 2019-20 victims in and around Jammu seek justice, alleged that the Indian government had failed to rein in corruption within the country’s drug regulatory set-up.

“Pharma companies have hidden partnerships with the party in power,” he claimed.

A 2024 report published on Scroll, an Indian online news website, said that 35 pharmaceutical companies in India had contributed nearly 10 billion rupees (S$146.4 million) to political parties. Of these, at least seven companies were being investigated for poor-quality drugs when they made their contributions.

Well. If the state doesn't fix it from a licensing side, I guess it'd be possible for a company to fill the gap. Like, certify drug manufacturers.

The difference between certification and licensing is that a certifier can't prohibit a company from doing business if it isn't certified. But...it does mean that a purchaser, at least as long as they know what certification to look for, can look for a given certification.

You can make a certification company that places any restrictions it wants to certify a product or company, so that eliminates roadblocks to getting that side of things moving. 'course, the certifier has to build reputation for the certification to mean much.

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is "video" as in "moving images". Photoshop isn't a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it'd be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up

not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise

to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don't think that this is the "end of truth". There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we'd have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera

as on a cell phone

that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn't stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

I mean, yelling at UPS seems kind of unreasonable. Trump put the new system into place without a lead time for getting shippers to set up a system to handle all this, and I saw plenty of parties saying that this was going to lead to chaos. Sure enough...

I remember reading some articles about people waiting for their Framework Desktop machines shipped via Fedex getting frustrated at them being held up in customs too.