litchralee

In a nutshell, voices are not eligible for copyright protection under USA law, whose hegemony results in most of the world conforming to the same. The principal idea for copyright is that it only protects the rendition of some work or act. A writer's manuscript, an artist's early sketches, a software engineer's source code, and a vocalist's audition recording, are all things that imbue their creator with a valid copyright, but only for that particular product of their efforts.

It is not permissible to copyright the idea of a space opera, nor a style of painting, nor an algorithm for a computer routine, nor one's own voice. Basically, pure thoughts cannot be copyrighted, nor things which are insufficiently creative like a copyright on the number 42, nor natural traits or phenomenon.

If we did change the law to allow the copyright of a human voice, then any satire or mockery that involves doing a good impression of someone speaking would suddenly be a copyright violation. This is nuts, because it would also deny someone else who -- by no fault of their own -- happens to have an identical voice. Would they just not be allowed to speak ever? Although intellectual property rights stem from the USA Constitution, so too do First Amendment speech rights, and the direct collision of the two would have strange and unusual contours.

For when ideas can be protected by law, see patents. And for when voices can be protected, see soundmarks/trademarks and brand rights, the latter stemming from rights of association. Such protections generally only hold when the voice or sound in question is an artificial product, like the sound of Ronald McDonald, and the protection only limits direct competitors from using the voice or sound improperly; everyone else is free to do impressions if they want.

So for the titular questions, the hypothesis posed simply will not occur under current law, and it's hard to see how it would be practical if the law did permit it.

Link to the blog post with the background on why this was made : https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/

I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

Was? I'm not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it's hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.

(this is entirely tangential to the OP's question, but I feel like hams deserve a good word every so often. Also, I understand that last weekend was ARRL Field Day in the USA)

It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:

• feet for vertical distances -- such as 1000 ft overhead separation for aircraft heading towards each other
• meters for horizontal distances, such as 1.3 km between two aircraft going for landings on separate, parallel runways of the same airport
• statute miles for visibility ahead of the aircraft, such as when fog is ahead
• nautical miles for distances to waypoints and navigational aids

The bizarre thing is that these are all conventions that stemmed from good rationale, at least initially. Using meters for horizontal distances means it's hard to confuse it with vertical distance, when speaking over rough radio comms. Statute miles is what the meteorological agency in the USA would report, and ATC provides that information to pilots. And nautical miles, as the name suggests, has a rich seafaring tradition, which aviation adopted wholesale.

It's why aircraft have the red (left) and green (right) navigational lights, same as ships do. It's also why the "rule of the road" for two intersecting aircraft is for the right-hand aircraft to go first, since their pilot sees the other's green light, while showing a red light to the halting aircraft.

TL;DR: everything boils down to: "it's how we've always done it"

When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn't be too surprising.

Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it's just a straight conversion of the trade destination.

Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it's ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.

I'm no expert in New York City governance; I'm not even on the same coast as New York. West Coast, Best Coast.

With that said, NYC's size and structure is not too dissimilar to that of a US State, save for a unicameral legislative body (New York City Council). Matching that, the Mayor of NYC is the head of the executive, with powers to appoint commissioners to various agencies and civil/criminal courts, as well as executive functions like administering city services like fire departments, police, and tax collection.

Meanwhile, the 51-member Council is headed by the Speaker, who presides over the body and controls the order that legislation is considered. So far as I can tell, the members are elected by district, every four years, so that each district has roughly the same population. So far, these procedures parallel those of US State governments.

As for the interplay between the Mayor and the Council, the defining criteria of any government is how it achieves its policy objectives, in passing the budget. Like with the California Governor, the Mayor's office will propose -- and later execute once duly-passed -- the budget and the Council will consider and approve or reject it. The final budget is sent to the Mayor for ratification, but can also be vetoed. In this case, the Council can vote to override a mayoral veto.

So for the titular question, with regards to only the structure of the government of NYC, yes, the Council could very much block much of what a future Mayor Mamdani wants to achieve. The Council could do this by passing laws that mandate minimum fares for transit, forcing tax breaks for the wealthy, and anything else that directly counters his policies. But he could veto such laws, and the Council would have to muster some 2/3 of the votes to push it through.

In turn, though, a future Mayor Mamdani could potentially use his executive control to direct the transit system to vary (read: change) the tariff structure so that bus routes in less well-off neighborhoods become free. Within the parameters of existing law, the Mayor could also instruct the Police Chief to do (or not do) certain things, and this wouldn't be within the Council's direct control except that they could have a Council committee do an investigation and raise new legislation. But that goes back to what the Council can and can't do.

Essentially, there's a fair amount of ground for a progressive NYC Mayor to deliver campaign promises, except that the budget and existing laws will require working with the Council. But as a practical matter, if a future mayor wins a substantial fraction of the city-wide vote, it would be strange that 2/3 of the Council could be in staunch opposition.

And that budget vulnerability can actually be a negotiating tactic. Here in California, setting aside any broader opinions about the policies and wisdom of the currently second-term Governor of California, he managed to negotiate a bill to cut red-tape for housing (or roll-back environmental laws, depending on who you ask) and tie it to the state budget, due end of June. So when push comes to shove, when the budget is coming due, there would suddenly be room to negotiate, even with bitter enemies. No one respects a government that cannot pass a budget on-time.

I personally am of the opinion that when a legislative body wishes to obstruct, or when an executive wants to pursue a policy, then neither should half-arse it. A future Mayor Mamdani should force the Council to publicly reject what he wants to put forward, each and every time. Let the people of NYC see who is actually fighting for the citizenry, and who is kowtowing to monied interests. Commentators often talk about "spending political capital" when doggedly pursuing a policy, but that's kinda the job: do it right, or step aside and let someone else do it. NYC deserves the best mayor they can get.

Although most Americans don't tend to refer to Social Security as a "pension", it does function very similarly to a "public pension", insofar as providing income during old-age as well as disability and survivorship benefits. And outside the context of government workers (eg state employees or teachers) who still have actually public pensions, I don't see it as confusing to refer to the publicly-administered Social Security system as the national pension system, even if not as extensive as other systems abroad.

This is especially true when comparing to "private pensions", which in the past might have referred to pensions operated by a private company and with whom a worker might have been a lifelong employee. But with that model mostly disappearing except for maybe railroads and certain other industries, the term can now reasonably refer to 401(k) plans, which are managed by the individual, and is more common than actual pensions from a private company.

So yeah, it's not colloquial American English, but I think personal finance circles would understand that "pension" can encompass a wide range of things.

Setting aside the cryptographic merits (and concerns) of designing your own encryption, can you explain how a URL redirector requiring a key would provide plausible deniability?

The very fact that a key is required -- and that there's an option for adding decoy targets -- means that any adversary could guess with reasonable certainty that the sender or recipient of such an obfuscated link does in-fact have something to hide.

And this isn't something like with encrypted messaging apps where the payload needs to be saved offline and brute-forced later. Rather, an adversary would simply start sniffing the recipient's network immediately after seeing the obfuscated link pass by in plain text. What their traffic logs would show is the subsequent connection to the real link, and even if that's something protected with HTTPS -- perhaps https://ddosecrets.com/ -- then the game is up because the adversary can correctly deduce the destination from only the IP address, without breaking TLS/SSL.

This is almost akin to why encrypted email doesn't substantially protect the sender: all it takes is someone to do a non-encryted reply-all and the entire email thread is sent in plain text. Use PGP or GPG to encrypt attachments to email if you must, or just use Signal which Just Works (tm) for messaging. We need not reinvent the wheel when it's already been built. But for learning, that's fine. Just don't use it in production or ask others to trust it.

Another example of 120: the California State Legislature is a bicameral body with 120 total members, with 80 in the Assembly (lower house) and 40 in the Senate (upper house).

And a related piece of trivia regarding fractional currencies: although the USD has been decimalized more-or-less since its inception, the USA stock markets continued to use fractional prices for shares up until 2001, down to 1/16 of a dollar.

A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone's location could be ascertained.

But that still doesn't say anything about where you are, since not everyone -- even in 2025 -- carries their phone every time they leave home.

But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.

And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.

Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:

1-meter-squared chunks

Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I'm not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.

But setting aside zoning, there's also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar's office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.

sell each of those sections to different people

Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don't keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land's title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.

Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot -- which no one should ever buy using a mortgage -- the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simply because people do want to know that they're actually buying something real and it's not a worthless deed.

(as an aside, it's entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It's kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you're SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry, and not a process based wholly on easily-forged deeds...)

If I wanted to ensure that my land would never be used for a shopping mall or sports stadium

The simple answer is to donate your land to a conservation group, who often buy land to protect it from development. They can and do pay market rates, but if you did want the land to be something that isn't a wildlife preserve, then alternatively, you can sell the land but retain the development rights. That way, you (and your heirs) would retain a choice in whatever future development happens, though how long this deed restriction lasts will depend on jurisdiction. Or you can sell the development rights to a conservation group, so that the party owning the land and the party owning the development rights are separate entities with different objectives.

You can't just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever.

To be clear, is the reason this is not sufficient for flying forever is due to orbital mechanics making "point and shoot" not feasible if aiming in a straight line for the void? Or because the boost isn't sufficient to escape the planetary system's influence and thus still predominantly subject to its gravitation pull? Or both?