You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

A lot of people as part of sleep paralysis, experience a sort of hallucination of usually a vaguely humanoid demon lurking over you or sitting on your chest. They’re a different experience but there’s some connection between dreams/nightmares and sleep paralysis, and lucid dreamers are somewhat more likely to experience it than most people.

I’m very much in the same boat as OP as a nightmare-enjoyer, I don’t scare easily and kind of enjoy the adrenaline rush when it happens. When I have a nightmare

I’ve only experienced sleep paralysis once, saw my sleep paralysis demon just kind of lurking in the shadows in the corner of the room. Didn’t really scare me, I knew what was going on, I just kind of sat there (not that I had much choice in that I suppose) and enjoyed the experience for what it was. Then as my ability to move returned and the demon just kind of faded into the shadows I pretty much just thought (that was cool) rolled over and went back to sleep.

My demon was also kind of boring, just a vaguely human-shaped patch of shadows that kind of stood out from the rest of the shadows in the room, and it pretty much just stood there watching me.

It goes through your phone’s data connection. That’s part of the reason we don’t get GPS info on all calls, no data, no gps. If you call from a deactivated cell phone that can only call 911 for example, since you don’t have data we don’t get that gps data(or your emergency contact or medical info if you’ve filled that out on your phone)

I work in 911 dispatch, so I have some relevant knowledge here

Cell tower triangulation is our bread and butter for locating a cell phone. It also kind of sucks.

With triangulation we get a set of latitude/longitude coordinates, a “confidence factor” which is a radius in meters around that point that basically shows you the potential error, and a “confidence percentage” which is how confident the cell provider is in that information (it’s 90% I’ve literally never seen it be any number other than 90%)

The confidence factor depends on a few different things- geography, how many cell towers the phone is able to connect to, if you’re inside/outside, etc.

The policy where I work is if it’s within 300 meters we can enter the call as normal and send cops, fire, EMS, or whoever out to look for the emergency if we get no other location info from the caller. More than 300m and it’s usually getting bumped down to an information call, cops will still go to check it out but even 300m is a pretty big area to have them check and can include potentially hundreds of houses, apartments, businesses, etc.

Usually we can get that 300m accuracy, but not always by a longshot, I sometimes see them in the thousands of meters which is basically useless. It also takes about 20-30 seconds to refresh so it’s not a live location, and if they’re, for example, in a moving vehicle, they can be a pretty significant distance away in 30 seconds, let alone in the several minutes it takes responders to arrive.

And once we’re off the call, we don’t get any further location updates. If we want to ping the phone again, that involves calling the phone company and faxing them paperwork or something like that (it’s handled by our supervisor so I’m not directly involved in that part of the process) I think it normally ends up taking like 10 or 20 minutes for us to get a ping that way, and then it’s only 1 ping at a time and they’re going to be spaced out about that far or further.

Handset gps based location is generally more accurate (although occasionally it does happen that it’s less accurate than the triangulation) but we don’t necessarily get it on every call, it’s still kind of a hacked-together system at a lot of dispatch centers and it doesn’t always integrate well with the other software. It does update much faster, and we usually continue to get updated locations from it for maybe a couple minutes after we hang up.

We don’t really have any way that I’m aware of to request a gps based ping on a phone we’re not on the line with.

I’m sure the feds have some back doors and extra tools at their disposal that we don’t have at a county 911 center, I really can’t speak to that. I doubt they’re able to get a much more accurate triangulation ping than we are, that seems like a pretty hard limitation of the technology to me.

*Arlo

But yeah, the movie was pretty bad. It’s based somewhat on real events but with a lot of made up shit thrown in that Arlo himself didn’t like. The real-life Alice actually just died a few weeks ago.

My friend and her husband got a switch back when it first launched, I had heard about this and so the next time I was over I asked if they’d licked one yet.

He said they hadn’t, and he also denied my request to lick one.

When he left the room, his wife got a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.

I of course took her up on her offer and tasted a cartridge while he wasn’t looking.

I asked if she had tried one, and of course she had.

They’re both cool people, but of the two of them she’s definitely my partner in crime.

It depends a bit on what you mean by “stealing”

If you were to break into the coke vault, hack into their computers, threaten or blackmail a coke executive, etc. in order to obtain it, those would all be illegal acts on their own.

But if you reverse-engineered the recipe yourself, or just happened to come across it in some legal fashion you could do pretty much whatever you want with it- publish the recipe, make your own cola and sell it (can’t call it “coca-cola” or “Coke” though because of trademarks and such,) try to sell the recipe to one of Coke’s competitors, etc.

Anyone with the recipe is going to have a hell of a time trying to do anything with it though because one of the ingredients is allegedly still coca leaf extract and coke is pretty much the only entity that is allowed to do anything with the stuff.