jcrawfordor

ABQ Fire charges $300/call for false alarms after the first three. It steps up to $500 after number ten. There is, of course, also the $25 annual permit fee for a reporting alarm system. Failure to comply with these fees is a misdemeanor. Just in case some local precedent will help advocate :)

Honestly it's remarkable to me to think that anyone ever gets to that $500 "excessive" tier, I've had one false alarm where the fire department attended in years of having an alarm system and I was mortified. felt like the biggest idiot in the world.

The decision to publish the ledger is one made by the election administrator in the interest of transparency - there is no requirement to do so, but it is believed to increase public trust in the process. Unfortunately these types of transparency measures haven't necessarily been rigorously evaluated and the tradeoffs with ballot secrecy may not be favorable. that is the real significance of this research to me, not really anything about the use of machines.

Some states do quite the opposite, e.g. seal ballots after the election and only allow inspection by court order. This has obvious benefits for secrecy, but then creates a lot of objections when people/organizations that doubt the election outcome are told that they cannot review the actual ballots (without meeting some threshold to justify such an order, which can be quite high since these rules were often put in place to try to counter pay-to-vote or voter intimidation schemes).

The existence of such a ledger isn't even required, but it makes it radically easier to audit the count process to detect errors. US election administrators demand a very high level of accuracy in vote counts (higher than what is typical in a lot of other countries), so in hand-count processes it's common to tabulate each ballot multiple times, and with machine tabulation there is usually some kind of automatic recount or risk limiting audit, either by retabulating with separate machines or hand-counting a sample. All of these are much easier processes when you can correlate a ballot to the previous time it was counted, so that errors discovered in auditing can be tracked to the specific ballot that was miscounted and corrected. Otherwise, if you count a batch of ballots twice and get different results (which is virtually guaranteed with hand counting), you will have to recount the entire batch over and over until you get satisfactory convergence. There are several different methods of doing this: some jurisdictions serialize ballots when they are printed so that tabulation can be tracked by that serial number. Other jurisdictions avoid this potential secrecy hazard by only serializing ballots after initial tabulation (e.g. ballots pulled for a sample audit have sequence numbers added on stickers or hand-written). Some tabulating machines can add sequence numbers as they run. All of these have different considerations as far as reliability and secrecy, but unfortunately there is next to zero funding or political interest in researching these issues and applying the resulting knowledge. The result is that everything is highly variable from state to state and some states continue to use processes that are known to have significant defects, most famously Louisiana with its ongoing use of non-auditable DRE machines (the only state that continues to do so).

They are using paper ballots. GA for example has since 2020. Several methods of auditing the counts of paper ballots require some tabular record of the contents of the ballots (so that it's practical to perform risk limiting audits on random samples), and the problem here originates from the process by which that tabular record is produced and the way it is made public. The same problem could exist in a hand counting process with risk limiting audits.

They are using paper ballots. The problem identified here comes from the counting process, and hand counting with similar audit records could end up having the exact same problem if the count audit ledgers were shuffled by similar means. The ballots are shuffled in the audit logs because it is known that a time/order correlation problem exists (ballots tend to be counted in the order they are cast), but the reason that Dominion uses a poor method of randomization, and that some (but not all!) election administrators include count sequence numbers in their publicly released records at all, seem to come down to a lack of care.

AI generated with all the attendant quality problems - worst of all the data. There are a lot of non-lighthouses listed on the map, and I can easily come up with a couple of real lighthouses that aren't present.

I really hate all these vibecoded map projects, because the (debatably) slick looking UI implies that the real work of getting the data has been done. But it hasn't, whoever made this just made a bare minimum effort to slap in some plausible looking (if you don't look too close) data and then walked away. The fact that a lot of it is wrong doesn't matter if it looks good, right?

the Ettus USRP SDRs predate RTL-SDR by almost (not quite) a decade.

The FAA contracts virtually all of its communication infrastructure now, so they probably don't even know much about these details. L3Harris has the contract for microwave radio but the fiber stuff seems scattered depending on when it was built.

I would expect this system to ultimately be used under a commercial HF license rather than an amateur license, given the feature set and that it seems to have much more in common with military systems like ALE than amateur practice. That said, because of the scarce supply of HF bandwidth, commercial HF licenses are quite restrictive in the US. For the most part, you are only allowed to apply for one if you are an infrastructure operator that needs a contingency communications capability for disaster response. That said, the FCC has permitted experimental licenses for some commercial applications like high frequency trading, so perhaps the situation will become less restrictive over time.

That said, commercial licenses are not per-operator like amateur licenses, so you would potentially only need one to cover the entire network. Some of this is ultimately negotiated.

There are definitely factors beyond IP being used. A week ago I found that all requests from Chrome-like browsers got a 429 across more than a half dozen networks and several machines, while Firefox reliably worked. I assume this was an overzealous policy on UAs.

Yesterday I discovered that WayBackMachine appears to be serving 429s to all Chrome-based browsers, across all network connections. Using Firefox (or a firefox UA) fixes it. I assume this is a temporary situation, or even by mistake, but underscores that archive.org is getting creaky and hard to actually use.

This article is just an over length summary of a very short preliminary notice published by NRC. Since it is non-emergency there will not necessarily be much follow up either, plants are just required to report any abnormality to NRC which publishes the reports online. Most of these reports are, like, procedural problems in employee drug testing.

Control rods are designed as fail safe so lots of scenarios can cause them to drop, could be a mechanical failure but probably more likely it was triggered by an electrical fault or intentionally by a safety system due to some condition they haven't quite worked out yet. Since having control rods in puts the reactor out of it's approved operating envelope it will lead to a trip out of an excess of caution. The fact that the trip wasn't triggered automatically suggests to me that the rods probably weren't inserted by a safety system but due to some fault.

this was already hitting 200% of its original intended length, so there were some things where I said "just not going to get into the details." Naturally I have come to regret these. Another is the brief mention of party line practice which is more applicable to GTE than AT&T (harmonic ringing), and in general mentioning that GTE and other independents continued leasing post-1982 as well but not going into any detail. The fate of the leased telephones of independents appears to be far more along the lines you would expect, with many of the independents quietly wrapping up leasing programs in the 1990s and letting people keep the phones. That said there were lots of exceptions and odd details.

And that's all stuff that they bring in out of state contractors for. I know, it sounds odd, but this is pretty normal for any large industrial site.

For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.

I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.

What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.