I doubt Trump will do anything that could be perceived as encouraging more whistleblowers, at least while he’s in office.

Best case—a Democrat wins the next election, Trump gives up on trying to stop it, and pardons Snowden on his way out.

If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.

I’m not sure what the third way would be.

Take the sentence “Police accused John Doe of inciting a lynch mob to attack the alleged rapist“. The police aren’t alleging that the victim was a rapist, they’re saying the rape allegation was part of the context of their own accusation against John Doe.

If an act is described as an accusation, it’s implied that everything within the description is an allegation by the accusers. But if something within the description is itself labeled as “alleged”, that second allegation becomes part of scenario the accusers are constructing.

All of it is being alleged—that’s what an accusation is.

But they’re not accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were allegedly wearing masks, they’re accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were actually wearing them. In the sentence as it stands, the allegation is a separate act that is itself part of the accusation.

prosecutors accuse her of arranging group sex with middle and high school boys as young as 13 years old while they allegedly wore Scream masks.

Can someone re-train journalists on the use of “allegedly”? The accusation is that she did these things, not that she is alleged to have done them.

Sprinkling the word around with no logical consistency just trains people to ignore it, which defeats the purpose.

As others are pointing out, there are mass protests going on—but I think there’s more to it than that.

The general message of all protests is “listen to us or else”. In the US for the last fifty years, “or else” has been understood to mean “or else you’ll lose the next election”—but it’s becoming clear that this threat has no leverage with Trump, either because he’s confident he can manipulate elections (through whatever means) or because he intends to accomplish his goals in his current term and doesn’t care what happens after that.

So protests need to find some other goal and some other message. Right now they’re looking for other weak points (e.g., Tesla dealerships), but once it’s clear they’ve got a strategy Trump is actually afraid of, the numbers will grow.

Tesla makes limos now?

Spectral JPEG XL utilizes a technique used with human-visible images, a math trick called a discrete cosine transform (DCT), to make these massive files smaller […] it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively.

This all sounds like standard jpeg compression. Is it just jpeg with extra channels?

The same reason we capitalize peoples’ names, since a title is the proper name of a written work.

The 80s smelled like hairspray and styling gel.

“I judge the parties on their rhetoric instead of their record.”

Also, be sure to fully specify the location—one time I just put “Athens” and ended up in Athens, Georgia.

The most common theories of reincarnation hold that it is punishment for misdeeds in past lives.

Musical notes have a characteristic volume “envelope”—attack, decay, sustain, and release. The loudest part of the note is near the start, when some initial disturbance causes something to vibrate. The decay of the vibration is at least partly caused by the second law of thermodynamics: the energy of the vibration is being lost to the environment in the form of heat and sound, and the amplitude decreases with the energy.

If you play it in reverse, it sounds like the vibration is being fed energy from an external source and then abruptly cut off.

I like Molly White’s recent take, that it might be more productive to treat this as a labor issue instead of a copyright issue (at least in principle). Even if the AI corporations aren’t technically re-selling copyrighted works, they’re still profiting from the authors’ unpaid labor.

If there are a bunch of posts on a particular topic, shouldn’t it keep at least one of them? Otherwise it would tend to completely filter out the most significant or interesting topics.

I had a really good pizza topped with stinging nettle once.

Is Trump aware that ‘Ukrainian nuclear plants’ includes Chernobyl?

I’m assuming it was originally for use by the private security personnel, since they knew where it was and apparently expected to be able to access it.

Or alternately, the institute may have had a strict no-guns policy and the safe was for visitors to store their firearms in when entering.

I always insist on colors within the visible spectrum.