🌞 Tiny engine runs hotter than the sun to probe the frontiers of thermodynamics
#physics

Tiny engine runs hotter than the sun to probe the frontiers of thermodynamics
Scientists have created the world's hottest engine running at temperatures hotter than those reached in the sun's core. The team from King's College London and collaborators believe their platform could provide an unparalleled understanding of the laws of thermodynamics on a small scale, and provide the foundation for a new, efficient way to compute how proteins fold—the subject of last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

I'm trying to play through the implications of some software I've been thinking about maybe designing.
It's legal to make a digital copy of the media that you own (videos, audio) physical copies of. It's legal to give a physical copy of your media to someone else or loan it out, which transfers your viewing license while they have It. Then it should also be legal to let someone else use a digital copy of your media given that you don't also use it at the same time. So as long as you keep track of your license, you should be able to let exactly one person stream some media you own.
If someone else then "steals" that content and views it without a license then that has to be legally on them, otherwise streaming platforms would be liable whenever someone cracks some DRM.
So then, it should be completely legal to set up a local community media library streaming service where you can share content you own licenses to as long as you track your license count and don't let more people stream at any given time than there are licenses available.
Is there something obvious I'm missing (aside from the MPAA and RIAA don't care about the law and will just sue anyone they can just to make an example)?

Comedian Sean Collins describing some common Canadian linguistic subtleties.
@StandUpComedy #SeanCollins
https://www.biglaughboutique.com/talent/sean-collins-bio…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Yndling:
🎵 Time Time Time (I'm in the Palm of Your Hand)
#NowPlaying #Yndling
https://yndling.bandcamp.com/album/time-time-time-im-in-the-palm-of-your-hand

More than 600 government files released under 20-year rule https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/more-than-600-government-files-released-under-20-year-rule/

More than 600 government files released under 20-year rule - The National Archives
More than 600 documents have been released by the Cabinet Office today under the 20-year rule. Most are correspondence and work on government policies during Sir Tony Blair’s Labour administration 2004-2005. They include a file about Kim Philby’s archive and another relating to the successful Olympics 2012 bid. There is material relating to the tsunami […]

Plan on a glorious extra hour of sleep as most of America “falls back” into standard time.
But make sure to get outside for some morning sun too — it’ll help your body clock reset faster.
Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. local time Sunday, which means you should set your clock back an hour before you go to bed.
Standard time will last until March 8, when we will again “spring forward” with the return of daylight saving time.

Urban Flexitarians Are Driving Japan’s Vegan Tuna Boom, Says New Report https://plantbasednews.org/news/alternative-protein/urban-flexitarians-japan-vegan-tuna-boom/

Urban Flexitarians Are Driving Japan's Vegan Tuna Boom, Says New Report
According to a new in-depth report by Future Market Insights, Japan’s vegan tuna boom is driven primarily by urban flexitarians

Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

@…
Quoting Colin Percival (FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead):
"… I'd love to talk to them about providing them with images as part of the release process rather than them only getting images a random time after the release when someone remembers they exist."
@…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol