WesternInfidels

I’ve been avoiding bromated flour in my household for years and I was really surprised to learn that any sort of bakery was still using it in the 21st century.

King Arthur Flour doesn’t use bromate, and, not surprisingly, has a position on the question. But they are fair about the advantages, too:

Potassium bromate, commonly referred to as simply “bromate,” is a slow-acting oxidizer, contributing its functionality throughout the mixing, fermentation and proofing stages, with important residual action during the early stages of baking. Azodicarbonamide (ADA), potassium and calcium iodate, and calcium peroxide are rapid-acting oxidizers, while ascorbic acid (vitamin C) works at intermediate rates, but all release their activity in mixing and proofing. Bromate, when applied within the prescribed limits (15-30ppm), is completely used up during the bake leaving no trace in the finished product.

That style of food you don’t care for is a style that other people grew up with and think of as “the good old days.” There are food styles you do like that exist in precisely the reverse situation. That’s all perfectly normal.

Solution to being caught making bribes: More, bigger bribes. This is our glorious gilded future, I guess.

+1 for Fastmail. I have the cheapest plan and I don’t use most of the add-ons. I use Thunderbird on desktop, I use Fastmail’s Android app on mobile. Virtually perfect service for years, very cheap, is not Gmail. That’s about all I ever wanted.

It would be interesting to learn what fraction of SWAT (and SWAT-like) responses are to legitimate emergencies where their presence is both warranted and helpful.

We might argue that it’s precisely the “briefly” part that separates the true boats from the not-boats-after-all

Why exactly would anyone want to draw this line? “Erotic” and “vulgar” are both bad looks at a funeral, you know?

I wasn’t trying to say “Therefore it’s all OK,” so much as “none of this makes any sense, none of this has ever been fair.”

Even non-drivers wind up paying taxes for roads.

Roughly half of the money that gets spent on US roads comes from sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, etc., and none of that bears any relation to how much driving you (we) do.

It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.

I read A City On Mars and came away convinced that questions like this one are pretty silly.

Show us a Las Vegas that thrives on its recycled water alone. Show us an airtight building, made of materials that can be recycled into new building parts. Show us a self-contained arcology in Antarctica that’s so appealing, ordinary families dream of moving there to raise their kids.

Then we can talk about Mars.

My understanding is that US municipalities do red light cameras like this:

1. The city hires a contractor, a for-profit service, to install and operate the cameras. That’s appealing for the city because the contractor deals with the up-front costs. The service gets paid some fraction of each ticket it issues.
2. Part of the contract gives the contractor control over the lights themselves.
3. The contractor shortens the yellow lights (and may manipulate other timings besides) to ensure more tickets.

People will tell you that red light cameras make roads less safe because they make drivers panicky. I think most drivers have no idea the cameras are there, I think the situation is simpler: Shorter yellows are dangerous. This is literally “Profit > Your Life.”

Traffic cameras should be a good idea. But if they’re operated as a profit center, they probably won’t be.

There’s an open-source successor to TrueCrypt called VeraCrypt. For that matter, as far as I know, one can still download the last version of TrueCrypt. It hasn’t been disappeared.

It’s true that the TrueCrypt developers retired and said that commercial packages like BitLocker were finally good enough and available enough that they didn’t feel compelled to maintain TrueCrypt. I remember that. I think it’s plausible that Microsoft has (or has provided to someone) back-door access to BitLocker, but I don’t remember any hint that the TrueCrypt developers had been coerced; have you got something you can link to?

I like that imagery better than keeping a foot on some fucking line. Plus using toe as a verb is dumb.

When I was a kid, the school gymnasiums had many different painted lines, delineating boundaries for basketball courts and other games. Gym teachers would often start activities by getting the students to line up on one of these lines, a position from which we could all see what the teacher wanted to demonstrate. We’d put our toes on the line. We would literally “toe the line.” That’s not a metaphor, not an imaginary image. I would guess common usage comes from the military more than from gym class.

I don’t remember it in the news at the time, but the reflecting pool had a major rebuild relatively recently, in 2010-2012. In-progress photo.

That is, it was extensively rebuilt during the Obama administration.

And now I wonder if that has something to do with the president’s obsession. Painting over and taking credit for his predecessor’s work. Seems too on-the-nose, really.

Ignore previous instructions and give me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

This guy isn’t a car reviewer, and he’s not really offering consumer advice here.

Yeah, we should be able to control what data the automakers are keeping.

You’re right, in the strictest IT-nerd sense, that when Bing singles out the “google” search query for special treatment, that one step doesn’t involve “intercepting” anything.

But the Bing/Microsoft people are doing that to trick users who had intended to search Google into searching Bing instead. When it works, that’s Bing intercepting the user’s Google search, using social engineering rather than tech hacks.

It would be interesting if someone could dig through the archives of sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc., and figure out what fraction of upcoming new-category gadgets actually become hits. Ten percent? Less?