Sending messages like this isn’t uncommon.

Back in the early 1960’s my dad had a high level security clearance at a defense contractor. He was one of a handful of people who knew the full details of a project to “identify, track, and destroy a hostile satellite”. This was in direct response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The President of the US was another one of the handful that knew the full details of the project.

After a lot of R&D work a test was performed. A rocket was launched from somewhere in the South Pacific. It tracked a derelict satellite used as a target, closed on it, and disabled it. At that point my dad’s involvement on the project ended.

A few months later while at home he & my mom were listening to a speech by the President. In the middle of the speech he announced to the American public that the USA now had the ability to identify, track, and destroy hostile satellites. My mom says all the color drained from his face but she had no idea why since the entire project was still highly classified. In fact when my dad got to work the next day there was a memo waiting on his desk telling him that he was not to confirm, deny, or even discuss anything he may have heard on the radio or tv the previous night.

The President didn’t make that announcement for the benefit of the American people. He was sending a very public message to the leadership of the USSR.

(And my dad never told this story until well after the 25 year time frame established for routine declassification of such materials.)

Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

My wife and I plan 6-12 month out, and sometimes more. At least for the dates of our vacations. My wife runs a small dog boarding service out of our home, and limits the number of dogs she boards. As a result she has clients that will schedule boarding up to a year in advance. So we need to block out our vacation time early enough to prevent clients from making reservations at those times.

At some point after we block out the time we’ll figure out where we want to go.

I’m shocked that the data center required retinal scans but that the employee with access could then just hold the door and let him and others in.

I used to work at a data center with lots of security. To get into the area with the servers you had to go through a man trap. It was a room a little larger than a telephone booth with automatic doors on both sides. To open the first door you needed a physical card key. Once inside the door closed, then to open the inner door you needed to both enter a PIN and have your hand scanned in a biometric scanner. Only after all that could you get inside. The booth also weighed you, and if your weight was off by a certain amount after your last pass through then it wouldn’t let you in. That was to prevent somebody from piggybacking with you.

Put them both in soundproof booths and only turn on their microphones when it’s their turn to actually respond to a question.

That’s an optional software upgrade. It’ll cost you $12.95 a month.

I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:

• Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
• When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.

About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

We’re going to see driverless cars failing all sorts of edge cases for decades…

What's confusing about it? A recall in the automotive world has a very specific definition, and it covers not only software related issues but hardware related ones as well.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is a part of the US Department of Transportation, and they publish a 20 page pamphlet that describes what a recall is. Here are the relevant parts from that brochure:

The United States Code for Motor Vehicle Safety (Title 49, Chapter 301) defines motor vehicle safety as “the performance of a motor vehicle or motor vehicle equipment in a way that protects the public against unreasonable risk of accidents occurring because of the design, construction, or performance of a motor vehicle, and against unreasonable risk of death or injury in an accident, and includes nonoperational safety of a motor vehicle.” A defect includes “any defect in performance, construction, a component, or material of a motor vehicle or motor vehicle equipment.” Generally, a safety defect is defined as a problem that exists in a motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment that:

• poses a risk to motor vehicle safety, and

• may exist in a group of vehicles of the same design or manufacture, or items of equipment of the same type and manufacture.

Furthermore:

The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act gives NHTSA the authority to issue vehicle safety standards and to require manufacturers to recall vehicles that have safety-related defects or do not meet Federal safety standards.

In other words, federal law gives NHTSA the authority to issue recalls for any defect that is considered a safety defect. There is no qualifier for it having to be mechanical in nature.

I've had software-related recalls issued for both a Toyota and a Honda that I used to own. The Toyota one resulted in them sending me a USB stick in the mail and telling me how to install it in the car (basically plug it into the entertainment system and wait). The Honda one required a trip to a dealer to update the software in the ECU to prevent the cars battery from dying due to the alternator being disabled improperly. Just because these were software related in no way means they weren't recalls. They were both mandated by NHSTA, both resulted in official recall notices, etc.

Edit: Just for fun you might want to go to https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls and do a search there. If you enter "Tesla" in the field for "VIN or Year Make Model" you can browse all their recalls. The very first one on this page is titled "Incorrect Font Size on Warning Lights". That's most definitely a software recall. It's assigned NHSTA recall #24V051000, and they list the affected components as "ELECTRICAL SYSTEM". If you read further it also shows the remedy was an over-the-air software update.

SAE is ratifying NACS as an automotive standard. Once that process is complete Musk won’t have control over it.

https://www.sae.org/news/press-room/2023/06/sae-international-announces-standard-for-nacs-connector

Wake me up when they’re being mass produced at cost effective rates.

My wife and I have slightly complex taxes. We pay a local independent tax preparer to do it for us. I’d much rather my money go to a hard working neighbor than a scam-baiting company like intuit.

Sue the mine in China that supplied the raw materials that went into the dielectric material in the capacitors in the power supply of the computer that facilitated the downloading of illegal content….

The insurrection clause says NOTHING about a conviction. It was written so as to apply to virtually every confederate soldier and other supporters of the confederacy, without needing to drag each and every one of them before a judge.

Send ‘em to Ukraine instead.

No they won’t. Virtually every tech company in the world uses them. If any legislation was proposed then companies from the likes of Google and Microsoft down to hundreds of companies with fewer than 100 employees would all fight it.

“Pro forced birth” is much more accurate. If they were truly pro-life they would champion universal healthcare that included at the minimum abortions when the woman’s life is in danger and when the fetus couldn’t possibly survive.

I know virtually nothing about the Russian train system. Are all the routes able to carry the same loads? Older lines may have narrower tunnels, weaker bridges, etc. that are unable to transport the larger/heavier loads that Russia hopes to bring from China…

Edit: Track gauge is another question. I did some quick Googling and it looks like Russia used to use 1,524 mm gauge while China uses 1,435 mm. If those other lines aren’t compatible with China then it means cargo would need to be unloaded from their trains at the border and then reloaded onto Russian trains. That would slow things down tremendously.

My wife’s grandparents lived literally down the road from a theme park (not in Florida) and during the summers especially both vehicle and foot traffic on their street could be nuts. The theme park would give out a number of free passes to all the residents that lived within a certain distance as a way to apologize for having to put up with all the traffic. My wife and I used those free passes a couple times before her grandparents passed.

DeSantis and his cronies are major a**holes for taking a perk like this away from the very people who risk their own lives to keep others safe.

This AND forfeiting properties next week. 🤞🤞🤞

Trumps lawyers get a chance to question her in order to make the jury question whether her testimony is truthful or not. They’re likely going to drag out her entire life story as a porn star to try to make her look bad.

Then the prosecution gets to redirect.

Having sat on a jury myself I can tell you that the whole process is very time consuming. Lawyers raise objections, stopping everything and requiring the judge to make a ruling. Occasionally an objection or something else can result in a sidebar where the judge & lawyers huddle to discuss details before the judge rules on something. And there are times the jury may be removed from the courtroom so some issue can be discussed/argued at length, after which the jury is brought back in and the judge then might explain why they were removed and the results of their discussion.

I admit that I have a Tesla. Overall I’ve been happy with it, but there are things that I definitely don’t like either. Unless there are major changes in the next 5-10 years, which I don’t anticipate as long as Musk is running things, then I definitely will not be buying another one.

Some recent developments have also made me wonder how Tesla’s finances are holding up. There was an article recently stating that Elon had issued an edict that new owners could not get their cars unless an employee gave them a test drive to demonstrate the Full Self Driving system. Clearly it’s an attempt by Musk to try to convince new owners to shell out an additional $12k for the feature (or a monthly subscription).

Just the other day I received an unsolicited email from Tesla that I’ve been given a free Full Self Driving trial for the entire month of April, clearly with the same intention in mind.

Personally I won’t try FSD at all and have zero desire to be in a car that uses it. I’ve had enough issues with Autopilot (their terribly named adaptive cruise control) and other things that rely on the cars camera system that I just don’t trust FSD to operate properly. I’ll often get alerts that a camera is blocked/blinded by bright sun, road grime, etc. And the cameras have a hard enough time operating things like the automatic windshield wipers (they can turn on in bright sun on a clear day) and automatic high beams (nothing like blinding oncoming cars at night) that I find it hard to trust them. If the car can’t handle those simple tasks then how can I trust it with more complex ones like FSD?

My next car will probably still be an EV. It just likely won’t be a Tesla. By the time I’m in the market for a new one there should be a lot more good options available.

OJ declared bankruptcy. If Trump did that he’d be opening up his finances to a ton of scrutiny he doesn’t want. He’d also be admitting to the world that his status as a successful billionaire is pure horseshit.

Not just a billionaire but he testified under oath a month or so ago that he had approximately $400 million in cash so covering the whole thing himself should be relatively easy.

By sending thugs door to door demanding “papers”…

Judges will often bend over backwards to limit the possibility of a successful appeal. They don’t like having an appeals court overturn a verdict since it means they would then have to retry the entire case again.

By giving the defense multiple warnings they’re effectively preventing them from using this instance as a credible argument in an appeal. In an appeal the defense might say something like “the judge unfairly ruled against me regarding X”. But the appellate court will see in the transcript that the judge issued multiple warnings before ruling on X and use that to reject the claim.

Back in the 1990’s I was a member of the USCG Auxiliary, which, while made up entirely of civilian volunteers, we worked/trained with active duty USCG and wore very similar uniforms & insignia. The primary differences in our uniforms was we use silver wherever the USCG uses gold, and our insignia, epaulets, etc. have a big “A” in them. So if you know what to look for it’s fairly obvious, but to the casual observer there’s not much difference.

As civilian volunteers we don’t salute one another and don’t expect salutes from active duty USCG, but if someone did salute we would return it out of respect.

I was appointed a position on the USCGAUX National staff for a couple years and had a position that roughly equated to a commander (3 stripes). I occasionally traveled to various USCG training centers as a result, along with other Auxiliarists, and we’d wear our uniforms while on those trips.

We used to chuckle at the various reactions we’d see as we walked around these facilities. Virtually every senior USCG officer could spot us a mile away and offered nothing more than a polite nod or greeting as we passed. Younger members that had been in the USCG for a while would obviously start paying close attention as they got close, looking for a clear sign, then obviously relax when they realized they didn’t have to salute. Cadets and newer USCG personnel would only see the three stripes and immediately salute.

Musk will make it a pay-to-block feature. Block a user for 30 days for $5. Block them for a whole year for $20. Now watch the platform turn a profit!

How’d that eighteenth amendment work out for you? Just so you don’t have to go search for it, it’s the one that made production, distribution, etc. of alcohol illegal. AKA prohibition.

The 21st amendment eventually repealed it.

So these things are not set in stone as much as everybody would like to believe. They can and occasionally are amended, repealed, etc.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Constitution mentions anything about women in government.

What a snowflake…

They did that in Hawaii decades ago when Kīlauea covered Chain of Craters road and others.

Kīlauea said “Fuck that” and covered the roads again and again, along with entire neighborhoods. The Hawaiians just let it all go back to nature now. You can drive roughly 10 miles of Chain of Craters Road now, which is in Volcanoes National Park, until it ends very much like the road in this picture.

Speaking of Kīlauea, you might be interested in reading about Jacks Lava House which survived for years as the entire neighborhood around it was reclaimed by the volcano. It was eventually reclaimed by Kīlauea as well about a decade ago.

The law requires debts be paid. Simpson has debts owed to the victims families. It’s the legal responsibility of the executor to pay those debts, not to squander it away on lawsuits like this.

The judge in the last Trump case told jurors when the trial was over that it was in their best interests to remain anonymous and not talk about it. I don’t think judges do that very often…

My understanding is that the beams were sprayed with a fire retardant foam that is designed to protect it in the event of a typical building fire. But the violent impact of the jets would have stripped most of it off, and the jet fuel did indeed weaken the beams. They wouldn’t have melted outright, but softening them after already being damaged by the impact was more than it could handle.

Came here to say exactly this. Gaff tape is made out of a cotton cloth material. This is clearly plastic, so duct tape, which is very different.

Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.

Ok, so what if dad brings his 3-year-old daughter into the men’s room, or mom brings her infant son into the ladies room? Can I sue over the emotional trauma that caused me?