Just out of interest though, can you suggest some of these other contexts where you might want a valid replacement for a duck that looked like one, walked like one and quacked like one but was not one?
what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a calf btw?)
It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to?
In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.
Normally your top speed is not really very fast as the pedals are fixed to the wheel, so you get one rotation per pedal (extremely low gear) and slowing down is not often necessary.
You can overtake bicycles easily going uphill, but downhill is hard on your knees!
I'm not sure the reader would be breaking the law. Copyright law is about distribution, so the site would be violating the copyright by making it available. However, reading it is not distribution so simply reading it would not be an issue.
So technically, a yacht is any leisure vessel. ie not a working boat. In the UK, a yacht is usually a sailing boat though we also increasingly have motor yachts. In the USA though, a yacht is a large motor powered vessel. So, when an American says 'nobody needs a yacht' they generally mean one of those, rather than a sailboat. Not sure what context CrimsonCape was using.
Also, see "Moreau's Other Island" by Brian Aldiss, an updated version of the classic. I found H.G.Wells writing to be very dated, not that Aldiss is current (published 1980) but I think it is biologically more plausible..
Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.
They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.
The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.
Railroading is essentially coercing/bullying someone into a situation or doing something with a connotation of things being taken too far, very quickly, using overwhelming force… like a train.
The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.
The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?
I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.
first consumer device I ever saw was the Microwriter, back in the 1980's .. but court stenographers have been using chorded keyboards for a century or more
My information may be a little out of date, but in Bluetooth there was two types of audio. There is isochronous streaming (Headset profile) and audio streaming (Audio Profile). The Headset profile is bidirectional and time-sensitive (packets will be dropped if they take too long), it was designed for headsets as per its name ("communication device") rather than the Audio profile which, although it can be a source or a sink is basically for streaming, where the audio is not time-sensitive as such.
So yeah, the isochronous streaming mode is much lower bit rate but thats probably why Windows sets it as a communications device, because it needs that mode.
Its difficult to know exactly, but I use a Logitech Zone Vibe 125 headphones with microphone and find it works fine for phone calls and listening to audio. However, I am not an audio nerd and neither are the people I speak to using it. I never had any luck with in-ear devices.
The best you can do these days while keeping to the standard is to use mSBC codec which at least does bidirectional 16bit. It's not too common unfortunately. At least on Linux you can force the codec you want with pipewire. On Mac you just get whatever Apple decides you're allowed.
mSBC is kind of a hack, though. It pushes Bluetooth beyond its specifications and often works, but in my experience it also often causes dropped audio in less than ideal situations (i.e. walking with a Bluetooth headset on).
mSBC is worth a try if you haven't already tried it, but it's not a real solution. Bluetooth LE Audio does provide a fix, but real hardware that supports it is hard to come by.