Looks like an antique pill press. Feels innocent enough, but it's probably still illegal. Seems like a zero-tolerance policy (ban for life for a single mistake) might not be the right balance, though.
In this day and age an antique pill press is more of a collectable musket than a "as used by criminal gangs fully automatic large magazine assault weapon".
It's not the press of choice for drug baron king pins.
As others have noted it's illegal to sell pill presses unless you're registered with the DEA, and eBay has gotten slammed for millions of dollars over this.
Their treatment of this seller sucks, but they are also forced to cover their asses by the government on this. So they are in a somewhat difficult position.
I'm not defending eBay, mind you. As the seller notes on their Twitter thread... eBay should and could easily detect this kind of illegal item AHEAD OF TIME when the seller enters the item description. Just block the seller from listing the item, rather than letting them list it... and then banning them later.
It is possible (don't know how likely) that maybe eBay is being total overkill on this stuff as a sign of good faith to the government to avoid future fines. A lot of those fines can be based on the perceived level of willful noncompliance. Not excusing them. Just thinking thru what might be happening.
The regulations concern any manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic equipment which may be used for the compaction or molding of powdered or granular solids, or semi-solid material, to produce coherent solid tablets.
If the device in question is non-functional, I would dispute the "may be used for" requirement of the definition.
Asking out of ignorance & curiosity: did other cultures make cemeteries before Christianity spread that practice? I specifically mean burial plots with marked graves, for which Egyptian mummified pets don't seem to qualify.
In some ways, ancient Egyptian culture was more progressive than modern puritan derived pop cultures.
Victorian era London loved to steal mummified cats and corpses to use in early medicinal rituals. Now instinctively one would assume they were primitive savages too, but the antibacterial properties of the pitch used to preserve mummies was recently discovered to be an effective disinfectant.
In general, culture was propagated through literacy, religion, trade, slavery, and wars. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about wandering Troglodytae.
Note people have on average dropped an estimated 23 IQ scale corrected points since the Victorian era. One may find some comfort in knowing the crass film Idiocracy was a documentary about the present. =3
This isn't arguing against them in general, but against the unfortunate Javascript-esque abandonment of specified semantics.
In particular, whenever anyone thinks that "deep clone vs shallow clone" is a meaningful distinction, that means their types are utterly void of meaning.
Counterpoint: there's a vast underinvestment in academia and universities are cutting faculty jobs in favor of underpaid sessional instructors. We're paying much more for administration and executive salaries which don't add value to society, only line their pocketbooks with taxpayer dollars and ever-increasing tuition.
There will always be a perceived underinvestment in academic research. That's because "reproduction" of PhDs is so rapid that their number will expand to fill any funding available and then some. Aside from short lived transients, fields will exist in a state of Malthusian equilibrium, with most PhDs failing to stay in academic research. And this overabundance explains the relatively low salaries.
It could be reprocessed for use in a breeder reactor, but breeders are not attractive at present or foreseeable uranium prices. They make the expensive part of nuclear power (capital costs) even more expensive to save money on the part that doesn't cost much at all (making fuel from mined uranium). If nuclear power expanded drastically then breeders might be more affordable than exploiting really marginal uranium sources, but otherwise they make the economics of nuclear power worse.
I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at plants and pictures of plants and the first image I was shown prominently displays a species very familiar to me. Only, it's subtly wrong, with weirdness along the edges. It jumped straight of the page and distracted me from the rest of the image. Oh well, real life sucks anyway
Is it just me, or has Linus lost the plot here? He says that Kent isn't interested in improving his process and "playing with others," and completely ignores that Kent is getting funding and appears to be building a team of maintainers and testers. He responds
> You can do it out of mainline. You did it for a decade, and that
didn't cause problems. I thought it would be better if it finally got
mainlined, but by all your actions you seem to really want to just
play in your own sandbox and not involve anybody else.
How is Kent not involving anybody else? It sounds to me like Linus is fed up with Kent, not Kent's software, and is ignoring evidence in favor of bcachefs.
Kent sends commits last minute and his response is “they sat in my tree the last 2 weeks; nbd!”
Complains he has no idea what Linus is asking for…
He seems so overwhelmed a simple ask like “don’t let patches sit two weeks so you can personally noodle to your hearts content the git log” are missed.
Have seen similar from Kent on various kernel mailing threads I watch. Lots of deflection of his obligation to test more broadly, push sooner as he appeals to some big picture only he understands like he did here invoking acts over 20 years ago.
So what he’s working hard in his little btrfs bubble; what’s trickled down hill on others smells of bio waste
We read the same thread. I haven't read all the context. Thanks for that.
But I disagree that he's deflecting his obligation to test more broadly -- it does sound like he's trying to get people together to do exactly that. It's easy to see this situation in black and white, and Linus's approach to the conversation is rather polarizing in that regard.
He is deflecting the obligations that having a project in the kernel mainline puts on him.
Linus' reaction is very appropriate because Kent is breaking the mainline and wrecking the kernel development cycle. It is more than appropriate to pull bcachefs out of the mainline.
He says they have a process and Kent isn’t respecting it, it is very frustrating for him understandably because he has to deal with a lot of people like Kent and doesn’t want to compromise his process, he expects Kent to be humble and respect the process. And he says if Kent doesn’t want to respect it then this whole thing can be developed outside of his project, all of this seems pretty understandable.
