So glad I completely gave up on MS after Windows 7.

Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/REGoa

I still use a Roku that was gifted to me, but only thanks to also having a pihole. The amount of logging & ads it blocks on the Roku is insane. If that ever stopped working I would ditch the Roku in a heartbeat.

I used to be on a team of 10 people that installed & managed roughly 3,000 servers and associated networking gear. We got hit hard in the early 2000’s by the Capacitor Plague and it fell on me to identify around 700 faulty motherboards and manage their replacement.

I don’t miss that at all…

Those new Mexicans are so much worse than the old Mexicans! At least the old Mexicans know enough to stay in Mexico!

Part of the problem is how insanely complex modern cars are. Modern cars can have 30+ different ECUs, and knowing which ECU does what can be difficult to figure out. Programming ECUs is also a bit of a dark art, and a model line of cars can go through a number of ECU versions over time.

I used to own a car that the battery regularly died on. Eventually, after multiple dealer visits, a couple replaced batteries, and hours of internet research, I found two service recalls that described my cars symptoms perfectly. The problem for me was my cars VIN fell outside both recall notices. But I took printouts of both recall notices to a dealer and they agreed to look into it. They confirmed my car had buggy firmware, annd ended up installing updated firmware on two different ECUs. I never had a battery problem again after that. I’ve worked in tech for 30+ years and I wouldn’t have wanted to tackle that on my own…

Bluetooth? I got mine from a dial-up BBS via a 1200 baud modem.

This. I’ll happily buy an 8k TV only if it’s a dumb TV/monitor.

I would ditch my Roku in an instant if it wasn’t for my pihole. The volume of ads, logs, etc. that it blocks on Roku is insane…

In some states an obscured/unreadable license plate is all a cop needs to pull you over…

I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.

We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.

ISIS has/had for a while a really good recruitment program that identified and groomed Muslim ideologists. I have a distant relative that was married to such a Muslim man. He was recruited by them, eventually proclaimed himself a member, and to make a long story short will now spend most of the rest of his life in jail.

That’s why we typically arrive 15-20 minutes after the posted show time…

No kidding. My wife & I go to AMC once in a while. We plan to arrive 15-20 minutes AFTER the posted show time since we know the ads & trailers will last at least that long. We still end up sitting through 5+ minutes of them.

I wonder if this is just a necessary legal/regulatory step in order for them to start running Virtual Power Plants in the UK. There was a recent article stating that they recently ran a successful test of a 100,000 node VPP in California. Up until now I’ve only heard of them being 1000-2000 nodes, so that test is a massive improvement.

I’d be wary of one or more colors fading over time unless you are VERY careful with how you print these. Being monochromatic, QR codes don’t have such issues. It would likely also be easier to recover a faded QR code than a colored bar code.

It absolutely blew my mind how many times he clearly heard the carbon fiber cracking under the pressure yet constantly explained it away as not a big deal. And despite having acoustic sensors meant to identify when that cracking was likely to be a major problem he ignored that as well.

My dad was an electrical engineer that worked on the Gemini & Apollo programs. He actually worked at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA which did a lot of work for NASA.

He likes to tell the story of a coworker he shared an office with. This coworker designed a lot of the circuitry used in the rockets, and back then it was all drawn out by hand on huge sheets of paper on drafting tables. This guy was also fairly short, so he’d practically stand on a stool to reach the upper parts of the drafting table. He’d draw up various circuits, have the papers duplicated, and send the duplicates off to NASA. He kept all the originals on his desk. When it was time to draw up a new circuit he just put down a blank sheet of drafting paper over all the other circuit drawings and start drawing the new one.

From time to time this guy would get calls from the NASA teams that were actually building the rockets. They’d say they were calling about a specific circuit, so this guy would start flipping through the corners of all the sheets of drafting paper looking for the right one. When he found the right one he’d duck his head under so he could get a good look at the circuit diagram while discussing it on the phone with the NASA people.

If he had to then he’d actually crawl onto the drafting table during a call. My dad says that more than once he walked into the office to find this guy covered by sheets of drafting paper with only his legs & the telephone cord visible as he talked to the NASA engineers.

Except the cops will argue there’s no actual proof that the bills with dye on them are the same bills you took out of the ATM or got from a bank teller. It’s not like the serial numbers are recorded. So they’ll just claim the most likely scenario is that the cash is indeed stolen and confiscate it. And for good measure they could also charge you with receiving stolen property.

1. That flag violates US Flag Code which is a federal law, although not truly binding in a legal sense. So these people are ok with violating laws.
2. It’s inherently racist. It was created as a knee jerk reaction by law enforcement (a job) in response to Black Lives Matter protests (a race of people). If you’re so so offended by BLM support then get a different job.
3. It’s being co-opted by white supremacists & extremist groups (see #2).

These are what come to my mind any time I see one.