It’s funny to put major in quotes. If you look at shipping volumes then USPS is really the only major carrier. Since they have to deliver everywhere they deliver something like 120 billion things a year, where the second is like…7 billion.

I honestly think it’s kinda sweet how it worked to be honest.
People showed up, gave their kid postage, and told the clerk they were mailing them. Clerk was confused for a minute, and then conceded that there was nothing technically forbidden about that. Kid hops on the scale, postage is correct, and the kid waits behind the counter until the trip to train, where they ride with the operator.

Basically people gently gaming the system and the people involved saying “you’re technically correct” and then looking after a random child.
They only stopped it because they decided you can’t operate a train and keep a kid safe at the same time, and weight is not a great way to price childcare.

If you’re not sure, put it in a savings or stable short term investment account , like a money market account or a short term CD account. That way the money is doing something while you make sure you’re doing what you want, there’s no real risk, and you can pull the money out whenever you want. You might lose some interest if you pull out of the CD early.

You mentioned wanting to learn the piano for love of it, rather than for professional reasons. If you’re looking at a school the semesters might line line up with a CDs investment cycle, which means you might be able to avoid loosing out on interest. A proper credit union will likely have an account specialist who can help you get things sequenced. They won’t give you financial advice, but they can help you get things timed and setup right.

It’s super important to do what you love. The point of money is, in part, to help you do what you love. Sometimes that’s by providing security, and sometimes by creating opportunity.

If it’s the love that’s driving you it might be worth it to look if you can audit then classes, or follow a different path that costs less money. You don’t get the degree but you might be able to get the same education.

Oh, every single one of those is legal except paying anyone else, like UPS, to do it.

I don’t want them to do that one in specific because it gives them actual, as opposed to pretextual, justification to send postal marshals to raid and seize mail in ballots.
Sueing a secretary of state is fine, but an excuse to legally seize ballots would have immediate consequences on the election beyond what a lawsuit would.

They’re not time sensitive in the sense that the first class monopoly law means.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/320.6

The delivery window needs to be measured in hours for it to qualify.

As for the postmark requirement, that would entirely depend on the state. Usually the law is written in such a way that it’s dropbox, hand it to clerk, or received by postal service. The postmark requirement is because it’s usually not permitted to give the ballot to someone outside of your home, but the postal service is an exception because they’re part of the government. There’s no provision in the law for accepting the word of a parcel service for when they got a ballot.

States could change that but they’d run into the first class mail restriction.
The best bet would be to permit a “moving drop box” where a municipal clerk could bring the box to your house. Make it like an ice cream truck playing patriotic music.

If we look at the law, ballots don’t qualify as anything other than 1st class mail, which the USPS has a legal monopoly on.

It’s one of the handful of things that can actually get you in trouble with the postal marshals. They raided the credit reporting agencies at one point for sending credit reports via scheduled courier when they were neither time sensitive, heavy , expensive or short notice.

The airplane thing is a bit off. The requirements of a bomber haven’t changed in more than 50 years.
It’s not like the US doesn’t have the ability to use drones.
They’re different tools for different jobs. Drones are currently most useful for asymmetrical fighting. If you’re trying to blow up a piece of infrastructure a bomber is more efficient if you have the ability to field one.

It’s criticizing using a jackhammer when electric box cutters exist. There are places you wouldn’t use either if given the choice.

They’re plenty of places in the US working on m battery technology as well. Car companies keep working to make existing product lines more efficient, in no small part because the people in charge of the government just decided to make it harder for people to use different vehicles and get off gasoline.
Battery research isn’t just car companies.

A cultural sense of momentum around a state of affairs that’s lasted several generations is one thing, but it’s not like we’re all running around in the 1800s.

We don’t actually have much of a model for that type of disaster.
The biggest issue are civic services, and employment.

The area damaged by Katrina was roughly the size of the UK. This wasn’t all total detestation, but it was the area declared a disaster zone.
Now imagine your daily commute was from central London to Brighton if traveling by car, or Manchester if by train, with an average of the drive time to cockfosters or Greenwich. (I’m fully aware no one actually lives in central London , and traffic would be a big issue. I’m only going by the map software since I don’t have a sense for drive times in the UK) Now put about ~50% of the m25 loop underwater for two weeks. Deepest about 6 meters.
All the water infrastructure is gone, and there is no power or sewer, and no food. The nearest unaffected location is belfast, and most people are evacuating to Dublin or Glasgow.
It’s been a month and you have not been paid. You have been living off of charity, FEMA rations, and canned water from Budweiser (actually a really good charitable act they do: they have trucks and the ability to put enough liquid in cans and get them to a disaster area by the kiloton).
Greenwich is basically gone. Cockfosters still has two feet of water. Your employer is dead and the business will never reopen. They think they got most of the bodies out of the Thames but the authorities are still concerned about a cholera outbreak.
The government has phased out the emergency food and is now giving you vouchers you can use to buy food at stores. This will last another two months.
You have no healthcare. The military medic who gave you a once over and vaccine booster for tetanus and hepatitis is the first doctor appointment you’ve had in two years.
Your car is gone, and so is your home and everything you’re not carrying. Your insurance company is denying they owe you anything because your home was damaged by water before it was blown away. You might get resolution in ten years.

So how do you get food? Water? How do you get your trailer in to live in? How do you make money to pay your mortgage, taxes or for medical care and the aforementioned food?
You might not even be able to sell the land given that no one wants it. You will likely declare bankruptcy and give it to the bank.

I believe that’s basically the basis of the American size scheme. It’s just the size of the paper the paper maker would give you. Records seem to indicate it was based on the sizes of paper used for bookmaking, where a standard sheet would be folded once, twice, or three times to make book page inserts.

Some plastics will melt even on the top rack. Some older plastics will actively breakdown and release junk in the dishwasher.

Some metal corrodes quickly with hot water, soap, and hot air. It also offends your ancestral spirits.

On the plus side, it’s pretty straightforward that it can either be cleaned in the dishwasher or in the oven.

Mostly no, but the mostly is because most vegetables aren’t as high in protein. If you eat protein rich vegetables the effect holds.
Some starches and fiber also have the effect, since metabolism is complicated. I believe potato is quite high on the satiety index, as are apples.

Basically it’s that your body just absorbs sugar and doesn’t spend time on it, so it doesn’t satisfy you. Carbs are pretty quick, but depending on the fiber content it can more than make up for it. Your body cherishes fat so it tries to get you to drink it. Protein is useful calories that take a lot of work to rip up, and they occupy space.

An apple and a bowl of lentil curry will fill you up.

I believe what they’re saying is you can’t use work assignment to pressure someone to quit as a way around labor protections.

As with a lot of legal stuff, the intent matters.

Cringeworthy isn’t Internet slang. It’s been around for decades. It’s like saying “humongous” is Internet slang.

Right? Having the employee repeat it back in their internal words is fine and tells the customer they’ve been heard correctly, but you don’t need to make then customer jump through hoops.

Coffee shop I go to used to do the Italian thing. Then they switched to small/medium/large. They finally settled on just listing the volume on the menu.
The entire time you could just say any of them and they knew what you meant.
If they have no idea what you meant they can ask for clarification. They even have the cups right next to the register they can hold up and confirm.

Turns out not pissing people off is often as easy as “asking for clarification if needed”. Also offering free espresso occasionally helps.

You would be correct. However, they would truncate the password to eight characters, and 7 bits per character. This allowed the password to fit inside a 56 bit block for a des based hashing scheme.

This is an old scheme, but it was very compatible so it lingered on and on.

It’s less common to have a light or crosswalk away from a junction. Usually when you push the button it changes the lights to the crossing sequence on the next cycle so everything keeps flowing, so a pedestrian might hit the button, then wait for traffic to stop, then cross traffic, then a dedicated turn cycle. It can be a bit of time.
The light in question would turn yellow the moment you pushed the button, without integration with the nearby lights. Driver’s usually don’t expect to get stopped after being allowed to pass a red light after only about 100 meters.

In general, there’s too much variation to say the US as a whole doesn’t do some traffic thing. If it exists odd are someone tried using it on a road somewhere.

A cup of drip coffee is 150-200 on average. Multiply based on a pessimistic interpretation, then reduce.

You could also measure UV light absorbtion in the 260-280 nm band and compare to a calibration chart. That seems a lot more excessive than just estimating and working to reduce, as opposed to targeting a specific number.

Yeah, a lot of the time they’re just there because people look for them if they’re not and then they fidget, don’t wait for the signal and dash into traffic.

The town I grew up in, the vast majority didn’t do anything but they gently beeped, and if you pushed the button it would tell you the sign status until it completed the cycle. Helpful for vision impaired people.
There were a few that shifted the traffic lights to a different cycle and otherwise it never did a pedestrian cycle.

There was one though, where pushing the button nearly immediately started a pedestrian cycle.
There was a wide block with an apartment building in the middle on one side, and a grocery store directly across from it. Not long enough that people complained, but enough so that people still trotted across the otherwise busy street a lot. After trying nearly everything else they eventually put a traffic light in the middle of the block that was nearly entirely on demand for the crosswalk button, because almost any delay and the (college student) residents would just dash across.

Watching confused drivers was fun.

Typically you want to do the lockout for a location, not the user, or you step up the auth level. 3 bad logins -> please mfa before trying again.

But yeah, letting an attacker do that at will is bad. I’m a fan of token bucket rate limiting with exponential back off. You get 10 attempts. A new attempt is added every second. An attempt while the bucket is empty makes that become two, then four and so on.

Most people never notice because a buffer of ten and a new attempt every second just never runs out. If you accidentally hold down enter you’re only blocked for a few moments. A dumb attacker quickly locks themselves out forever.

Very old operating systems used to have a method for password hashing built in that could only handle 8 characters max. The need for compatibility with it, or things that were too zealous in being compatible lingered for a very long time.

It’s not good, but some services end up behind firewalls that reject inputs that look like SQL injection. Sometimes they decide it’s better to prevent sql-ish passwords than risk some weird fluke.
Sometimes they just say |, I, and l all look too similar and our users are idiots. Which is awful practice.

My personal feeling is that password length should be capped with the length of input the system can handle. Plaintext copy of Alice in wonderland from project guttenberg? Go for it.