I love this fact so much. MN is based. Long live l’Etoile du Nord!

Trademark law addresses confusion in commerce. So if someone boarded a flight based in part on the flag of the destination, hoping to reach the sunny shores of San Diego but instead landed at the cold shores at Duluth, then perhaps whoever drew up the ad for that flight might be liable for something closer to fraud rather than trademark violations. Maybe the Visit California department could raise a trademark challenge, but that’s an uphill battle because it’s not disallowed to use a state flag in other situations.

Texas Roadhouse, a chain of BBQ restaurants, flies the Texas flag on their buildings. And while they do heavily lean into the whole Texan thing, no one is under the impression that Texas Roadhouse is an official arm of the State of Texas, to proselytize the BBQ religion to people far and wide, or some such.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m willing to have some fun with this idea.

A cursory review of the relevant California Government Code section 420 – blaze it! – provides a description of the California state flag, and also a picture of it. Or it would in the print version of the code. While there doesn’t appear to be a specific bit of law which authorizes the state to retain the copyright on the flag, there is case law which disallows the state from retaining copyright for “government documents”, with exceptions which wouldn’t apply here. So it’s reasonable to assume that California doesn’t have the copyright on its state flag, with it likely being in the public domain.

This would suggest that Minnesota could indeed use the flag to mean something else, the same way anyone can with public domain material. Now, if this occurs outside of California, that state could not enforce any sort of rules pertaining to how the flag is used. Even within the state, California’s authority to control how public domain material – or more broadly, any material at all – is circumscribed by the First Amendment in any case. The exception would be for those agencies and subdivisions of the state itself, which it can and does control. See Gov Code section 435, which disallows cities from having confusingly similar flags. The other exception would be uses of the flag which perpetuate fraud or some other related crime, since then it’s not the speech being punished but the conduct, which happens to involve a flag-related expression. But neither of these really speak to the flag being used by another sovereign entity within the state.

Supposing for a second – and this is where we’re really departing from reality – the several states had embassies at each other’s state capitals, but without the equivalent protections afforded by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationships. And by that, I mean each state buys land in other states, without creating sovereignty issues, owning that land as any other individual or corporation could. In such a case, if the Minnesota Embassy in Sacramento were to fly the flag of California as its own, what could California do? If they drafted a law like section 435 that applies to individuals, the First Amendment would present a barrier. If the law applies to out-of-state entities, it might run against the Dormant Commerce Clause, in a very broad interpretation of interstate commerce. If they apply it to all sovereign entities operating within the state – which would include the Minnesota Embassy, since the State of Minnesota owns it – then the thorny question of state sovereign immunity in state court would arise.

In a California state court, would the State of Minnesota have sovereign immunity? If instead of Minnesota, it were a foreign country like Scotland, the answer would be a resounding yes. But here is a state vs state issue. The proper venue would be a court with original jurisdiction over states, and there’s only one of those: the US Supreme Court.

As to what the state of California would assert as a cause of action? I suppose they could raise a criminal violation of their freshly-drafted law, with the risk of devolving into whether a US State has its own rights of free speech, which other states must respect. Alternatively, they could raise an action in equity, such as a tort (MN’s use of the flag is costing CA somehow) or defamation (MN’s use of the flag asserts falsehoods about CA).

At this point, we’re deep into legal fanfiction and it’s time to stop haha. Needless to say, I think the situation in real life would be messy if it were to happen.

With the way that the BitTorrent v2 protocol works, each file of the original, underlying torrents wouldn’t have to be re-seeded, but rather would reuse each file’s individual hash and thus incorporate those files into the meta torrent without necessarily having to download or even upload any part of the meta torrent.

That said, the .bittorrent file would be massive and might run up against certain limits in the current protocol.

HDDs also support ATA Secure Erase, although it will take a few hours rather than the few minutes it would wirh an SSD.

There will always be some instructors that are more dogmatic than pragmatic. All the same, there will be instructors that have pearls of wisdom to offer. Regarding the “break” and “continue” keywords, this lays somewhere in the middle.

One of the purposes of higher-level programming language is to remove from the low-level, machine-specific language of assembly, by offering other, more descriptive constructs, like “while”, “for”, and “switch”. In the C language, “break” is almost mandatory in a “switch” statement but only occasionally shows up in a “for” loop, excepting drivers. In Python, “break” only exists in loops, but there are lots of loops which can be replaced more efficiently with comprehensions, so “break” can be a sign of poorly organized logic.

If you can specify which programming language you’re learning, it would help to understand what your instructor might have meant to teach.

jiggery pokery

+1 just because I love seeing this phrase in the wild

without comments

Oof

This is a good point. Franchises are less likely to have a recognizable corporate name, if they even own the property at all. But for more established companies or long-time small businesses, the owner entity’s name might be a good giveaway as to what they did.

Recent history would be reflected in Google Street View, but that only goes back to maybe 2011 and only for some parts of the USA.

Going further back, you can try property ownership records, or even just searching for the address online, setting the time window to before the current business came to be.

I would guess that High Street in the (mostly British?) commercial shopping area sense would have evolved from “highway”, meaning a principal or main road, which in turn evolved from “high way”, being those roads constructed above grade, so that water would drain off the road into the adjacent ditches. The Romans [citation needed] tended to build all-weather roads like this.

In American English, “highway” would be an odd term to apply to a shopping district – usually referring to a higher-speed road – but in some contexts, highway is understood to be any improved road. The California Vehicle Code uses this definition, so that “highway” basically means any public road.

At least in California, roads named High Street do exist, but don’t necessarily corespondent to being physically tall over its surroundings or other steets. If anything, a typical High Street is often the same in character as another town’s Main Street, which sort-of returns to the British meaning of shopping area again, at least in small towns.

I think you asked about how to improve a few days ago, so I’ll answer now about how to start learning programming. In a lot of ways, programming is describing what you want the computer to do, but in a language it understands. So half the effort is building an intuition of how to break down a task into individual parts which the computer can work on, and the other half is to actually write the instructions for the computer.

The first part is common to all the engineering fields, but shows up elsewhere like in art (eg deconstructing a human face into drawable geometric shapes), daily life (eg navigating a car or public transit by making various left and right turns in a certain order) and other fields; familiarity with any of these will put you a step forward. Basic programming tutorials are useful in developing an awareness of what a computer can easily work on, and by exception, what it cannot.

The second part requires learning the programming language and its grammar, which I think the general curriculum for programming courses or online tutorials mostly has covered. If you’re already familiar with an existing programming language, then a new language can be framed as a translation from the first, mostly. Some features don’t translate at all – eg explaining Rust memory ownership to a C programmer – so those will have to be rote learned.

My town has previously distributed tape dispensers specifically to tape up battery ends, for exactly the scenario of tossing them loosely into bags. It’s a good idea, although they seemed to have stopped distributing for some reason. It was simple cellophane tape, like for mending paper, but wider than normal.

In the US, Home Depot and Lowes have drop-off bins for rechargeable batteries by the front door.

Try to tape up at least one end of the battery or one lead from the battery, to prevent discharge fires.

I find that reading a lot of code helps. From the bad code, take note of what to avoid. From the good code, take note of what to emulate.

To be clear, it’s often more useful to read code within your specialization than to read any ol piece of code on the Internet. That said, drawing from other programming languages and across a rich variety can be useful into itself.

Borrowing some of the points from that video, a high-end bicycle – let’s say a road bike – is very close to what could actually be used in competitive road cycling, with all the technological and material sciences advances included. Whereas a standard car like a Toyota Corolla would need substantial further investment to bring it to competition grade (eg rallying). And a high-end, track-inspired road-legal car would be exceeding $100,000 easily.

Certainly, in the average quality range, the price of your average road bike and your average automobile will be a chasm away. But I figured your question is focusing on the high end of bicycles.

Although this YouTube video is about motorbikes and high-end mountain bikes, much of the context is applicable to bicycles at large. And is also within the ballpark of an automobile down payment.

https://youtu.be/BS9ugdl1FZc

This was an interesting read, so thanks for writing!

My background: I am an embedded software engineer by trade, and a tinkerer as one of my hobbies. I’ve played around with microcontrollers (MSP430, AtMega328p on the Arduino) and microprocessors (STM32, ARM64 on RPi) and have done a small amount of board design with KiCAD.

After reading your post, I thought about what platform is my “go to” for particular applications, and why. And what I arrived at is that it’s not as important what each platform offers, but how it fits into what I want to build. That is, how integrable it is.

When I have a hobby project that just needs a SPI bus and a programmed sequence, I might reach for an MSP430 in DIP form-factor, or the Arduino with the intent to program the 328p and then extricate it to use alone for my project. The DIP format is what makes me lump these two chips together, as both are reasonably comparable but have their own unique features, like low power consumption or 5v input.

Similarly, if my project needs networking, I would definitely lean into microprocessors, but now I have to settle on the format before proceeding. Specifically, if I want to use the RPi, then perhaps my design will take the shape of a Hat. If instead I want to build around an STM32 chip, then I need to provision its support hardware. The latter is fine, but I don’t exactly trust my EE skills to do this every time lol

As a result, what I would like – as an embedded engineer – is a common microprocessor platform which can be swapped out, with a common pinout and connector. I know in the industrial space, they have standards like COM Express to do exactly this, but I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right direction to go, since those tend to be x86 based. Maybe something like the RPi Compute Module, but FOSS.

To go with it, I’d also want a common module format, same as how RPi has Hats and Arduino has Shields. Again, industry has the OCP Standard, which conveniently breaks out a PCIe interface, but there isn’t a lot of PCIe used in hobbyist work. But maybe it’s time to change that? IDK

Thanks again for writing this; it’s given me a chance to think about what I’d really like to have in the proverbial toolbox.

There’s a Texas Hold’em Poker joke somewhere in here

As a fairly-new ham radio operator, I need to improve my numbers pronunciation so maybe I’ll start reading the time like that and see how other people react.

Already, I get a number of confused-then-resigned looks when saying “sixteen o’clock” haha

Here in California, I’ve heard both “military time” and “24 hour time” used interchangeably for writing the time as “03:45” or “16:20”. That said, I’ve heard – citation needed – that proper military time does not use the colon, such as “1600”, pronounced as “sixteen hundred hours”.

As for why the public might refer to this generally as “military time”, it may just be that that’s the most common, well-known use-case in the States, outside of the sciences. I personally use 24 hour time on all my devices, but I’ve come across many people who prefer clockfaces or AM/PM, probably out of habit.