I’ve never seen naptha (i.e. Zippo lighter fluid) do anything to any painted or finished surface, nor any of the plastics I’ve ever tired it on. I’ve been using the stuff in that context for decades, to the extent that I literally purchase it by the gallon. (I also use it in my lighters, because painter’s naptha is like 2% of the cost per volume of brand name Zippo fluid despite being the same stuff.)

WD-40 contains nonvolatile oils that will leave a difficult to clean off residue behind and if you use it on anything porous it will soak in and possibly stain the surface while being functionally impossible to remove without using yet more solvents. For that reason it’s not really a great way to get stickers off of things, especially things that you’d like to remain non-greasy or may need to stick something to again at some point in the future (paint, tape, etc.).

Naptha will evaporate entirely on its own given enough time, and you can even use it on paper and printed surfaces (excluding inkjet printed things, in my experience, which it will smear) with no harm done after it fully dries.

Chattel slavery is illegal. It’s true that you can be enslaved, or at least enslaved in all but name and forced to work, as punishment for a crime. I.e. as part of your incarceration. This is per the 13th amendment.

I’m not enough of a legal eagle to explain what would happen or what your recourse would (or would not) be if you refused, though.

He posted it on Juneteenth, i.e. the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery.

I have a strong suspicion this crowd would have voted for their fascist candidates regardless of whether or not Americans had gun rights at the time. Fascism (not to mention other broadly similar strains of right wing authoritarianism) has managed to rise in several places throughout history and all over the world, without the specific assistance of our deep south gun nuts.

Tons of liberal supporters are also in favor of gun rights. It’s just that nobody’s catering to them, because they’re less lucrative of a voting bloc than racist rednecks.

I await with interest your explanation as to how and why private gun ownership “caused and supported” the current unlawful government, considering that the government is perfectly capable of obtaining its own guns and supplying them to its goons without our input or intervention. And has been doing so for a little over two centuries. Furthermore, gun laws are deliberately structured such that the police and various government forces throughout the country enjoy considerably less restriction (or even none) on the type, number, and nature of guns that they’re allowed to own and use. Even if the individuals in question are retired or no longer on active duty.

Microcenter, Newegg, B&H Photo and Video.

Well, the one in the headline is so hilariously far out of scale that it could probably fire actual life-sized F-35’s like missiles from its wing hardpoints.

It’s the regulatory environment. Same reason all the Surrons and Cakes and so forth that are road legal in Europe aren’t road legal here.

If these things don’t show up with FVMSS compliance certification, correct manufacturers certificates of origin stating that they are on-road motorcycles, valid and registered VINs, complaint with all NHTSA requirements and certified to qualify as either a “motorcycle” or “motor driven cycle,” it doesn’t matter how many lights they can strap onto the thing. It can’t be imported or sold as a road legal vehicle in the US, period. Even if it could be legal due to having the required features and equipment, if the manufacturer didn’t do the paperwork it still isn’t legal. And that’s before you get into the asinine state-by-state laws that will refuse to acknowledge any vehicle that does not fit into their narrow definitions of motorcycle or moped. You know, the ones I’m always complaining about that keep smoke-belching two stroke 49cc mopeds legal but not a Surron. You don’t have one set of regulatory hurdles in the US, you actually have 51.

Just to put it into perspective, Zero already sells full size electric motorcycles here and they rack up something like 3,500 units sold across their entire product range in a good year; these chump numbers still manage make them the highest volume electric motorcycle seller in the country. Meanwhile, Harley Davidson sold 94,930 machines in 2024. (And if anyone cares, Harley only managed to shift 614 Livewires in 2024.)

They’d sell about four of these, most likely utterly failing to recoup whatever expense they generated in getting them imported. Urban commuters who want affordable in-town transportation will just select from the bevy of available electric bicycles that require neither a plate nor a motorcycle license. I imagine most buyers of these would be rich kids or their parents who expect to use them purely in the dirt, or the type of punk who would happily ride a Surron dirty everywhere anyway; neither of these demographics are particularly interested in road legal compliance.

And they sure wouldn’t sell one to me, because I refuse to buy any product from Zero, ever. They tried to pull the subscription and pay-to-unlock hardware features stunt on their electric motorcycles several years ago, and that demonstrated that they’re not a trustworthy company.

If it is, their stupid model forgot a “more” in this passage:

Password compromise is no joke; it leads to account compromise and that leads to, well, the compromise of most everything you hold dear in this technological-centric world we live in. It’s why Google is telling billions of users to replace their passwords with much secure passkeys.

(Wow, much secure. Very password.)

If the law actually applied equally to everyone, both citizens and government thugs? Absolutely.

But we all know that’s not how it works on the street or in the courts.

Manufacturers do have to use the same light module. There are still only like 11 types of DOT approved headlight bulb type that can legally be put in a roadgoing vehicle in the US. So yes, we have more than the original 2 options, but if you need a replacement headlight bulb that list is still pretty short. This obviously excludes vehicles with bespoke LED assemblies, which are currently in the minority but who knows for how long.

The difference is the housing they stick it in nowadays, which is vehicle specific (and also the expensive part, if you break one).

“Moooooom! They’re looking at me!!!”

I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

Niko, cousin! Let’s go bowling!

I could have it the other way 'round. I wasn’t paying close attention at the time.

Edit: Actually, you are right. The rectangular ones were permitted in 1974, so I did have that backwards. Corrected!

The pop-up headlights were a stopgap solution to a problem that no longer exists. They’re a result of the DOT at the time flat out requiring that all cars sold in the US must use the same handful of dorky looking sealed beam headlamps, bar none, without exception. None of them were very attractive and certainly not aerodynamic, especially considering that they must be positioned with their massive flat faces perpendicular to the road in order to actually work.

Have you ever wondered why every car in the '70s and ‘80s seemed to have this same doofy Clark-Griswold’s-station-wagon lookin’ square (and sometimes, circular) headlight design?

It’s because they had to, by law. Up until 1983 they didn’t have a choice.

“Ook.”

“You got all that from ‘ook?’”

You don’t necessarily have to stop your aperture down that far, but I suspect you should be able to use a much shorter shutter time. That’ll cut down your overexposure and possibly also help with the color fringing around the edges.

There will be a sweet spot of aperture for your lens where the sharpness and chromatic aberration (color fringing) are at their minimum. This is unlikely to be at the extreme open end (low ƒ number) or far down into the extreme closed end (high ƒ number). You can experiment to find where this is for your particular lens, though. The beauty of shooting digital is that film is free and you can review your results right away.

ƒ-16 was probably actually too small an aperture for my shot, but it worked well enough.

Moooooon!

Before I get into the usual kibitzing-on-the-internet thing: Great shot!

Something to bear in mind about the moon specifically is that you can throw away most of your astrophography habits, and along with all of their damned complexity.

The moon can be shot at using exposure settings pretty close to what you’d use for sunlit terrestrial scenes. That’s because the moon is… lit by direct sunlight.

I took this one at 800mm using my telephoto extender, hand held (!) at ISO-100 and a mere 1/50 sec, and through a veritable pinhole of ƒ/16 because I was vainly attempting to get it as sharp as possible. Although come to think of it, extended that far I’m not sure my current lens can get much more open than that anyway. Whether or not I succeeded at this is up for debate, but as long as your arms don’t get tired holding up your camera and lens you can use a short enough exposure to leave your tripod and remote release and all behind.

PC operating systems are, at least to a broad degree, generic. That’s because a huge amount of backwards compatibility is built right into the PC architecture, much to the delight or chagrin of everybody depending on who you ask. There’s silicon on your processor’s die right now that’s doing fuck-all except ensuring that if you were struck by the perverse urge, you could boot MS-DOS 1.0 onto it even though it’s virtually guaranteed that you never will.

Phone operating systems absolutely are not generic, because each phone model is basically unique unto itself in terms of what hardware is in it, and backwards compatibility is not in any way a design goal. Furthermore, the entire package has to be rolled into a single unified ROM image.

There are proprietary core components in phones, notably their SoCs (systems-on-a-chip) and modems (which are often built into the SoC) which their designers jealously guard and are loaded down with patents and other IP restrictions. This hardware requires closed source drivers which must be updated or at the very least recompiled for new kernel versions if the OS is to be updated. That’s for Android, anyhow. It’s even worse for Apple devices, because they’re entirely closed and Apple is in total control of both the hardware and the software. At least they bother to support their own devices with updates for quite some time, but even they’re not absolved of fuckery – see, for instance, the deliberate slowing-down-with-updates scandal from a few years ago.

If nobody is providing source code or compatible binaries for the core hardware your phone needs in order to work, at minimum it’s going to be impossible to update your device beyond the kernel version that was last supported on it, even with a custom ROM. And all of this is before getting into locked bootloaders and other chicanery that prevents you from running your own code outside of user space on the hardware even if you had the code to run.

At the end of the day: The hardware vendors are absolutely not interested in providing driver support to end users or source code to anyone, and the handset makers and most especially the cell service carriers, at least in the US where the majority of people buy or lease their phones from said carriers, literally have a vested interest in dropping support as soon as they can get away with it. That’s because rolling out updates to oodles of individual phone models costs money to do, but they only make more money off of you by selling you a new phone.