tal

Additionally, South Korean media said on Friday, citing anonymous sources, that Pyongyang has decided to dispatch a total of 12,000 troops, formed into four brigades, to Russia. The NIS did not immediately confirm these reports.

The statements come a day after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country had intelligence reports that 10,000 North Korean soldiers were preparing to enter the war

Mark Rutte, the (new) NATO Secretary General, said in some article I read that NATO does not yet have confirmation, but that "this may change".

kagis

Here's the transcript on NATO's website of a followup:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_229585.htm

Binna Chung, Yonhap

Thank you. Binna from Yonhap News Agency. Secretary General, the South Korean Spy Agency today announced that North Korea has decided to send large scale troops to Russia and including special forces. I know that yesterday, you said you have no evidence, but since the situation has changed overnight, I want to ask you this question again. Thank you.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte

Well again, obviously, we are in close contact with all our partners, particularly, of course, the Republic of Korea. And yesterday, we have been meeting here with the IP4 partners, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. So we will certainly have that conversation with them to get all the evidence on the table. So at this moment, our official position is that we cannot confirm reports that North Koreans are actively now as soldiers engaged in the war effort. But this, of course, might change. And anyway, even if North Korea is not physically there at the battlefield, then still they are helping to fuel Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine in every way they can. And together with others like Iran, China's playing a role here, obviously, and of course, Russia itself.

That's from today.

I suspect that title is wrong, and the US Department of Justice's press release person made a mistake in writing the title from the article, but I don't know if we should correct on our end -- I mean, the post as-submitted accurately reflects the title that they're putting out. Like, I don't think that we should claim that the USDOJ is saying something other than what they are.

It's also not impossible that there's some kind of error on our end -- I mean, I'm not a doctor -- or possibly that the error is elsewhere in the press release (like, maybe the pill count is in error). Maybe they actually have a gram measurement, rather than a kilogram measurement, and it's that the unit is wrong.

Maybe edit the post body text to indicate that the title might be in error and see the comments for discussion?

I don't think that we have a great way of dealing with cargo hold fires today, which is why you have to carry laptops as carry-on, rather than as checked luggage in the cargo hold.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/one-overheated-laptop-battery-in-cargo-hold-could-down-airliner-study-says/

One overheated laptop battery in cargo hold could down airliner, study says

A single personal electronic device that overheats and catches fire in checked luggage on an airliner can overpower the aircraft’s fire-suppression system, potentially creating a fire that could rage uncontrolled, according to new government research.

Regulators had thought that single lithium-battery fires would be knocked down by the flame-retardant gas required in passenger airliner cargo holds. But tests conducted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration found the suppression systems can’t extinguish a battery fire that combines with other highly flammable material, such as the gas in an aerosol can or cosmetics commonly carried by travelers.

The research highlights the growing risks of lithium batteries, which are increasingly used to power everything from mobile phones to gaming devices. Bulk shipments of rechargeable lithium batteries have been banned on passenger planes.

It sounds like it's a long-running practice that they just temporarily suspended, so I imagine that it'll look basically the way things do today.

The outlet noted that the move is a revival of the practice, which was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic over safety concerns.

But a Reuters investigation found that the WFP was aware food aid was being stolen in Ethiopia for several years, and repeatedly failed to act. Aid was being funneled to the Ethiopian and Tigrayan armies as well as to the black market, according to an internal USAID slide presentation viewed by Reuters.

USAID plans to phase out the WFP as its food distributor in Tigray and the rest of northern Ethiopia over the next nine months or so, turning to other aid groups instead, USAID officials told Reuters.

Um.

Why just locally? Is there some reason to believe that the UN World Food Program is more trustworthy in other countries? If we have access to other aid groups in Ethiopia, there have to be other aid groups elsewhere.

If the UN WFP were the only option, okay, fine, give them another chance. But if there are other options, how about giving those other organizations a chance, and if we run out of options for organizations that haven't screwed it up, then the WFP gets another chance?

3 years

Strictly speaking, 2 years, 8 months, and 24 days, or 998 days. We're just under the 1000 day mark, though.

Yeah, wait a minute.

Mexican national admits attempted distribution of 1.4 million pills containing nearly 153 kilograms of fentanyl

So...what, does each pill have like 50 times the potentially-fatal level? That'd have to be 109mg/pill.

"potentially fatal" is vague. What's the LD50, the dosage that's lethal to 50% of dosed individuals?

kagis

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43126-0

Compared to monkeys, humans are somewhat more sensitive to opioids (the monkey OIRD ED50 of ~0.02 mg/kg fentanyl is similar to the fentanyl LD50 in humans)35,47,48

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm

Average weight of a man in the US is 200 lbs, so 91kg.

So that has an LD50 for an average man in the US of 1.82mg. If anything, the "potentially fatal" level is pretty generous; I'd expect that to be rather below the LD50.

And it's presumably lower for women and children.

And I'm just using the monkey LD50, which according to the above Nature article should be higher than that of a human, if anything.

looks puzzled

I don't understand the math here. LD50 of 1.82mg, using optimistic numbers; if anything, probably lower. And 109mg fentanyl/pill. I mean, unless you're going to kill your customers on their first pill, something seems wrong.

I can readily believe that drug distribution networks are pushing stuff that's jammed up into the quite-dangerous zone, but this seems like it'd be in "certain death" territory. Like, a suicide pill.

It remains to be seen how CIG will continue developing its games as its funds seemingly dwindle, but the studio is actively seeking additional funding

Well, there's an unexpected turn of events.

Cloud Imperium Games is set to hold its annual Citizencon on October 19th-20th, 2024, with fans planned to see a demo of Squadron 42’s Chapter 1, which was internally said to “get our community on board with the fact they are getting very close to Squadron’s full release.”

Of course, fans should also expect to see a lot more of Star Citizen. But as the past 12 years have shown us all, nothing is set in stone.

So they're working their people with no weekends to get a demo of the first chapter of a spin-off game that is intended as an interim release preceeding the actual game that they promised backers over a decade ago. Sounds peachy.

Setting aside mismanagement of the development on Star Citizen, I do think that the willingness of people to dump enormous amounts of money into Star Citizen development does demonstrate that there really is a large body of people who really would like to see a new, good, space combat game of the Wing Commander sort.

What type of encryption do you need? NTFS can natively provide encryption, but it's going to be file level. LUKS2 is block device level, so the whole filesystem looks like one encrypted blob.

EDIT: And I don't know if Linux can do encrypted NTFS. If not, that wouldn't work for the shared storage.

kagis

Nope. Looks like there's a utility, ntfsdecrypt, to do decryption on a file-by-file basis, though. Probably not what you want, though.

https://superuser.com/questions/1554798/access-files-encrypted-with-windows-efs-encrypting-file-system-on-linux

EDIT2: This guy is recommending VeraCrypt, as it works with both. I've never used it, though, and the post is eight years old, so I suppose the situation could have changed.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/306398/does-linux-work-well-with-encrypted-ntfs-drives

Linux doesn't support NTFS file-level encryption. Bitlocker using the recovery key sorta works but is still very new(look here for more info). Windows in turn can't read LUKS-encrypted devices. If you need to share your encrypted drive between Windows and Linux, I'd recommend VeraCrypt or one of the other TrueCrypt forks.

I tend to manually strip out anything random hash-looking from URLs. Not so much because I'm worried about identity being exposed, but because it just encourages data-mining and figuring out what causes people to post links places.

There's some open-source app I recall on Android in F-Droid that will do this for a set of known sites, "Link Cleaner" or something.

kagis

"Leon -- URL Cleaner". I assume that this is an allusion to the movie.

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

I also strip off the extension that the Wikipedia app adds to indicate that Wikipedia links are from the app.

I also strip off "m." leading URLs, like "m.wikipedia.org", since that, by convention, forces desktop users to see a mobile version of a site, which is not normally what they want, whereas a non-.m link will still show the mobile site to mobile users.

I use Linux, so I haven't run into this myself, but I assume that one can buy a copy of Windows 11 Pro separately from the PC itself, even if one doesn't currently have the Pro edition.

kagis

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4

Yeah. Though this says that they're currently out-of-stock of the USB installer.

I once read an article about why cats seem to gravitate towards visitors who don't like cats.

Humans who don't want to interact with people avoid making eye contact. That's human body language.

But for cat body language, the opposite is true -- if you're being friendly, you don't look at the other cat. Looking at the other cat is aggressive.

The article was arguing that people tend to follow human convention and thus inadvertently become more-appealing to the cat, which gravitates towards the only human acting friendly in cat terms in the room.

kagis

Not the article I was thinking of. This one says that while there is some reason to believe that cats interpret being looked at by a human as an unfriendly sign, there's also reason to believe that in other contexts, they can interpret human body language as different from a cat's and find it to be appealing.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.613512/full

Cats detect human gaze with head movements and accordingly change their behavior (Koyasu and Nagasawa, 2019). When a familiar human (i.e., experimenter) and a cat spent time in the same room, the cat’s behavior was observed in response to the familiar human’s gaze. Cats looked at a familiar human for a shorter duration when the cats were directed gaze than when the cats were not, suggesting that, unlike dogs, they exhibit the behavior of avoiding a familiar gaze. Cats may see a human gaze as the same thing as a cat’s gaze, which indicates a threat in a social situation with no goal or threat (Bradshaw, 2016).

However, in a study with feeding situations, cats were fed by humans who gazed at them (Ito et al., 2016). As with Gácsi et al. (2004), two humans performed differently in front of cats. Cats selected more food from humans who called their names with gazing than food from humans who called their names without gazing. Whether or not cats avoid/select gaze may depend on the experimental situation. Cats also use human signals (Miklosi et al., 2005).

I also think that it's a bit odd that humans -- at least in today's world -- bare our teeth in a smile to be friendly, whereas in many species, that's a sign of aggression.