Not all that surprising when you consider that New York is a tiny bit more to the south than Rome. Draw a horizontal line through Italy, Spain and New York and you’ll find similar amounts of sunshine. Draw a line through Scotland and see where you would end up in Canada, it’s probably going to be even more cold and miserable there than in Scotland ;)

Yes, many times. Historically, it seems like the very strong empires first defeated themselves and once they were sufficiently weakened for outside forces to be able to threaten them … they still kept being self sabotaged by their own elite who prioritized maneuvering against each other for temporary power/wealth grabs over working together to face the outside threats.

The late Roman empire has a bunch of good examples: blatant corruption, over taxation of the poor, many assassinations, sabotaging their peers that were trying to improve the situation, constant civil war, the battle that destroyed the military backbone of the western Roman empire was fought between romans, … And all that while the empire was being torn apart by outside invasions.

Or a more recent example: the polish Lithuanian commonwealth had a paralyzed government thanks to corrupt elites with veto powers in their parliament of nobles (sejm) and only once the nation was mostly destroyed and the nation on the cusp of final destruction, did the sejm introduce some sensible new laws, but it was too late.

With smaller regional powers you can have cases like “they were in a golden age and had never been as powerful, but then the mongols appeared”, but with hegemon empires the failure of their inner workings is always going to be instrumental in their own demise.

No, most coal comes from plants in swamps, because the water helped preserve the organic matter.

Plants in swamps die -> organic matter on the bottom of the swamp -> peat -> brown coal -> black coal.

Oil apparently comes mostly from plankton.

On the different origins: https://www.carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-science-behind-oil-coal-and-natural-gas/

I have a few decades of experience of walking (often barefoot) onto flowering lawns/meadows and I’ve never been stung by a bee. Unless you disturb their nest, which won’t be in the lawn, bees will do their best to avoid you. Well, European honey bees are harmless at least. Bumblebees are harmless as well. I have been stung a few times by wasps, but those incidents were not lawn related in any way.

If the lawn is more grown out and I’ve walked through it, then I always worry about ticks and I check my legs afterwards, because of Lyme disease.

Yep, french language class in a too large highschool class. If the class had been smaller, then the teacher would have definitely gone for more presentations by the students.

Keep up the good fight, I’m certain that many of your students appreciate what they learn from you.

Students and cheating is always going to be a thing, only the technology evolves. It’s always been an interesting cat and mouse game imo, as long as you’re not too personally affected (sorry).

I was a student when the internet started to spread and some students had internet at home, while most teachers were still oblivious. There was a french book report due and 4 kids had picked the same book because they had found a good summary online. 3 of the kids hand wrote a summary of the summary, 1 kid printed out the original summary and handed that in. 3 kids received a 0, the 4th got a warning to not let others copy his work :D

From what I’ve read, Zelensky as comedian made intelligent political and anti corruption criticism. Making jokes about the bad things in life, highlighting them, setting the stage for something being done about those problems. Broader than his on screen personality, he had middle class beginnings and on the back of his comedy work, he build a successful career as TV producer/executive. You probably know more about this than I do.

Trump as TV personality looked more like the most clueless person in the room, while all the actual work was done by others behind the scenes. No intelligence, no social commentary. Before his role in the apprentice, Trump had started his business career as a Nepo baby, and as a businessman he had failed every venture that he had tried, each time leaving a bloodbath of unpaid bills behind, a reverse Midas. And once his face was known from TV, he started with large scale scams like Trump University.

Those are 2 very different career paths.

I specifically remember that Die Linke supported Chavez and Maduro when they were already full on authoritarian. I conflate support for authoritarian regimes with being tankies/fascists.

This was years ago, so it’s possible that I’m out of date.

Sorry, I apparently had misread the map, I thought east-berlin had mostly gone afd as well. The color of Die Linke had blended in with the color of afd, so it had seemed like it was just an island of black colored west-berlin in a sea of afd.

And yes, I’m partially color blind, which isn’t an excuse, but might explain it a little.

?

I said East-Germany went fascist. On the map CDU rules the roost in West-Germany and west-berlin, so I never said that I consider CDU to be fascist.

Not a German, but I’ll try to answer:
The Left = Die Linke = commies, that have in the past been supportive of authoritarians like Chavez, Maduro, Putin, … So kinda tankies yes.
Spd = social democratic party of Germany. The actual moderate left party. Many consider them to have moved too much to the right economically, which has opened room for Die Linke to grow. Especially Schröder was a disaster when he was chancellor around 25 years ago (+ afterwards as well when he became a stooge for Putin). The exiting chancellor & leader of exiting coalition government is also from SPD. Apart from their ridiculous levels of support for Israel, I can’t think of any stand out bad things that they did. An actual German will have to fill us in on that.

It looks like it’s just West-Berlin + a suburb of West-Berlin, while the rest of old East-Germany went fascist.

Edit: I had misread the map when I made the above comment. The CDU in West-Berlin are not the only non fascists, East-Berlin has not gone fascist, but mostly went for Die Linke.

And I’m not saying that you are. I tried to show with a parable that they do not need to see their machine’s actions to know that some of it’s actions are illegal. That’s what we were disagreeing on: that they know.

I made an automaton. I set the parameters in such a way that there is a large variability of actions that my automaton can take. My parameters do not pre-empt my automaton from taking certain illegal actions. I set my automaton loose. After some time it turns out that my automaton has taken an illegal action against a specific person. Did I know that my automaton was going to commit a illegal action against that specific person? No, I did not. Did I know that my automaton was sooner or later going to commit certain illegal actions? Yes I did, because those actions are within the parameters of the automaton. I know my automaton is capable of doing illegal actions and given enough incidences there is an absolute certainty that it will do those illegal actions. I do not need to interact with my automaton in any way to know that some of it’s actions will be illegal.

You can’t create an automated machine, let it run loose without supervision and then claim to not be responsible for what the machine does.

Maybe just maybe this was the very first instance of their ai malfunctioning (which I don’t believe for a second), in which case the correct response of Brandshield would have been to announce that they would temporarily suspend the activities of this particular program & promise to implement improvements so that it would not happen again. Brandshield has done neither of these, which tells me that it’s not the first time and also that Brandshield has no intention of preventing it from happening again in the future.

If it had been phishing, then going to the registrar would have been the right call, because you want to take that down asap. But according to itch.io it wasn’t, instead it was a a real fansite that was linking to the real website of funko’s game (according to itch.io). Something which most media companies allow since it’s basically free publicity and goodwill, but if they did want it taken down for copyright reasons, then a DMCA takedown request send to itch.io would have been the correct first action.

In the response statement by Brandshield, Brandshield does not deny having send a takedown request for phishing to the registrar (confirming that they did), nor do they dispute itch.io’s statement that it wasn’t a phishing site (confirming that they know that it wasn’t), instead they only speak about “infringement”.

So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims. And it’s not going to be the first time that they’ve done this, but even this high publicity case will probably not have any legal consequences for brandshield, so it looks like they will continue getting away with it. Unfortunately they’re not alone, it often seems like the entire DMCA industry is rotten.

Why ask the registrar to take down a subdomain of a website?

Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar, so all the registrar can do is either take down the entire domain or ask their client to take down the subdomain. In this case they asked their client, who took down the subdomain, after which the registrar took down the domain anyhow :D

For a single isolated offence, Brandshield’s first action should have been to report the copyright infringement to itch.io and ask for a takedown of that content, instead they went directly to the registrar and falsely claimed that itch.io was a fraud & phishing site. I suspect that they falsely claim that it’s about phishing and fraud, because otherwise registrars will not take down the site unless there is systematic copyright infringement (like a torrent site). And I suspect that brandshield goes directly to the registrar with their complaint, since that is easier to automate than finding the right contact info on a website.

So my take is that: The registrar was in the wrong for taking down the domain after itch.io removed the problematic subdomain. Brandshield is scum. And Funko is in the wrong for using brandshield.

No real need for further answers from itch.io, nothing new has come to light.

Edit: while under the shower I realized that Brandshield’s posts do contain some kind of news: Brandshield does not deny having used fraud & phishing as reason for the takedown request, thereby confirming that they did. Before we just had itch.io’s retelling of the events, which might have been a misrepresentation by itch.io or due to a cock-up by the registrar, but because of the lack of denial by brandshield, we now have confirmation that it did happen like itch.io said.

I nearly always scroll lemmy on my phone, so when I can’t find the Waldo right away, I zoom in and start panning around. But with this find Waldo picture, I can actually spot the leopard easier when not zoomed in. It just pops out for me, my cat has probably trained me too well.

I think the issue with the boredpanda picture is that the original photo was already fuzzy (long distance shot I think) and a compressed jpeg. Someone at boredpanda then cut out a too small part of that and jpeg compressed it a 2nd time, giving the leopard additional dazzle camouflage on top of it’s natural camouflage.

https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/0b31d94e3bff7d6804274d24562f62cd?width=1024

From https://www.escape.com.au/news/snow-leopard-perfectly-camouflaged-in-mountain-terrain-baffles-the-internet/news-story/bcc5e99d35292787175a13f489ebd7aa. Brought to you by reporters copying things of reddit, but at least escape didn’t butcher the image, unlike boredpanda.

The photographer’s website wouldn’t load for me, so I don’t know if it has a better quality available.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.