I recently heard Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political dissident, give a talk. He survived two attempted poisonings among other things. He described how the current method of poisoning is for Putin’s henchmen to sneak into your home and put polonium into your underwear. So this guy might want to consider walking around naked for a while as well…

A number of years ago my wife and I visited Lubec, Maine, which is about the northeastern point of the state. Lubec has a bridge that connects to Campobello Island, which is Canadian. For whatever reason, Campobello is in a different time zone despite being physically only one or two hundred yards from the mainland.

I learned the hard way that the closest cell tower in the area was on Campobello, and since it’s in a different time zone it caused my phone to change time to an hour earlier. Luckily it resulted in us being an hour early for a harbor tour instead of an hour late.

When I was a kid it was shaving cream. Take a can, put a needle in the nozzle, then melt the nozzle with a cigarette lighter. Once it’s cooled pull the pin out so you have a pinhole nozzle. It’ll spray the shaving cream ten feet or more.

I honestly forget how I learned that trick…

You too will soon be able to buy an abandoned datacenter for just $1,000.

Back when the capacitor plague hit I had to manage locating & replacing over 500 motherboards in the datacenter of my then-employer. Imagine if a hardware glitch like that happened in one of these.

The issue with cloud providers like AWS is that they charge for virtually everything, and that makes it easy to rack up charges if you forget about something you spun up as a test last week and forgot to terminate it. For larger companies it can be a significant issue. So there are other companies out there that you can use to scan your entire AWS account, summarize what you’re using, and highlight things you may not need any more. They’ll also recommend cost savings measures like paying for a year of server time up front instead of paying as you go. If you know you’ll need a server for a year then paying annually is a lot less expensive.

On the plus side, you don’t need to deal with things like hardware failures. We have a large AWS environment where I work, and we’ll occasionally get an email informing us that an instance is “running on degraded hardware”. A simple reboot (power cycle) will move the instance to new hardware. And if you decide you need more RAM, more CPUs etc. then it’s also as simple as rebooting.

Well it wasn’t meant to be used that way, but my understanding is that the wording of the visa program is vague enough that it can be exploited this way. And the rich assholes who exploit it this way make sure the politicians get nice big donations to keep it from being changed.

H1B is the visa that allows rich company owners like him to exploit cheap high tech talent. He can hire an aerospace engineer from India to work at SpaceX in Texas with it. He can also pay that engineer a percentage of what an American aerospace engineer would get. Furthermore he can force that Indian engineer to work a huge amount of hours. If the engineer tries to stand up for himself, threatens to quit, etc. then SpaceX can just fire him and send him back to India. If he quits SpaceX then he has to almost immediately find a new company to sponsor his H1B visa, or it’s also back to India for him. And good luck job hunting without SpaceX catching wind of it when you’re working 10 hour days 6 days a week for them.

Exactly. My employer uses Akamai, which is larger than Cloudflare. Akamai provides the ability to block traffic from Tor, traffic from VPNs, traffic from any countries you desire, and so on. They also provide managed lists of countries listed in things like ITAR so you can easily block them if you want.

They are pro forced birth under all circumstances.

Anybody who claims to be pro fife I just refer to as pro forced birth. After birth they really don’t care what happens to the mother or the baby. If they did care then they’d be pushing for healthcare, food, housing, etc.

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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…

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…

I see no reason not to believe the official story in this case. Bringing him back alive would have served no useful purpose, and would have led to him getting a ton of publicity that would have only inspired his followers. Most Americans were likely happy to see him die the way he did given the 9/11 attacks.

None of those were built in 1797. It’s the world’s oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat.

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