Eleison23

They are, however, secret codes, and should be regarded as confidential. Just because you can divulge them without direct harm does not mean you should publish them on billboards and Facebook for safekeeping.

Perhaps legislators should put their own house in order first. Have they considered how an ever-growing corpus of laws and policies and guidelines and regulations places an enormous burden on corporations and ordinary citizens? "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" but it would take many lifetimes for any of us to study all laws that apply to us, much less to understand them!

If legislators wish to ease compliance, enforcement, and awareness, they will winnow down this corpus on an annual basis by removing, deleting, merging, and summarizing.

How can there be "too many children"? That is like having too many flowers!

I'm waiting for new lenses/frames as we speak, and I made a mistake two years ago in accepting the "blue light filter" coating that they were pushing. It was horrible - everything was green, especially my peripheral vision. It ruined my experience off the computer. So I took the glasses back to the optician under warranty and requested they be remade without the filter coating. My experience immediately improved and I was satisfied with those lenses. Never again will I opt for that ridiculous blue light coating.

The blue light bugaboo is a hobby horse of my psychiatrist and other quacks. It really makes little difference, because the intensity of the light coming from your monitor or your smartphone is negligible compared to sunlight/daylight. What matters ten times more than blue light is what you are doing on that computer at night: are you engaging in bitter social media arguments? Playing twitch AAA games? Are you watching YouTube with a ton of fast talkers and ads and quick edits? That will amp up your hormonal imbalances and disrupt your sleep patterns surer than the color of light wavelengths coming into your retinas.

Make sure to get backup codes for your MFA-protected accounts, and then keep them out of your password manager at all costs. Print them out on paper and store them in a fire-safe location, preferably one copy off-site.

I could leave my keys at home, but most days now I'm traveling with my security keys, partly to keep them away from my desk at home and partly in case I might need to login to a secure account while out and about.

Cybersecurity. There's plenty of governance and policy mixed in. Plus there's plenty of gray, rather than black and white, in security configurations.

A QA friend of mine remarked that he was amazed that the loss of general purpose computing capability would be accomplished simply by a change in form factor.

Smartphone OSes have propogated their own curated walled-garden app stores, and then the desktop OS vendors follow suit. Soon it will simply not be possible to install unsigned, uncertified software on your computer, and that will be the end of GPC.

If only 27-year-old me had realized that 50-year-old me would have need of save files from a game I no longer wanted to play.

It's funny about that. Our transit system began an initiative just a bit before COVID-19, aimed at cleaning up the bums and criminals. So most people are not able to hang out on the train or bus, they're hustled off at the nearest stop.

What effect that did have is that the train and bus is more empty, but all the bus stops and train stations are clogged with people literally camping out. There is nowhere to sit and wait, because the stop owner either removed the seating or someone is sleeping/camping on the benches already. Every stop is full of skeezy people who have nowhere to go and aren't boarding the bus.

So perhaps the perception of clean/reliable/safe has increased aboard the bus, but it has plummeted at the locations where it really counts: the stops and stations where I spend the most time. I feel notably unsafe when waiting for a bus and there's nothing to be done about there, and there's no recourse because nobody's in charge there (the city will point the finger at transit and transit will point the finger back at the city. LEOs won't touch it because it's not a priority.)

>internal video camera pulling back poltergeist-style

That cinematic technique is called a "dolly zoom" and it's totally dramatic, if used correctly!

When the doctor's office phones me, they must immediately learn my DOB or they can't reveal any information. Unfortunately the person calling is sometimes a nurse who's working on test results or some followup and they don't have a direct number. But it's kind of a stalemate if I won't reveal anything to them, and they won't reveal anything to me.

At this point if they manage to have the correct caller ID and I'm more or less expecting the call, it can't hurt to divulge my DOB. Scammer's going to find that out easily anyway.

Soon the car will just purchase its own new tires, or drive itself around town in search of a working air pump.

Yes, police response is typically prescribed when people do something that is proscribed.

That's a myth that the medical establishment wants to sell you. Women are fine and have children with no problem, long past that artificial "deadline".

https://youtu.be/g9ryP0UyO5U

It would seem to us that nights and weekends are the most convenient time for citizens to access government services such as this. But the things that are down for maintenance are not our publicly-accessible frontends, they're the backend databases that the administration uses internally as well.

So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.

I hope that you've counted how many paces it is to the emergency exit, in case the cabin depressurizes, fills with smoke, and you've made a water landing.

Yeah also because departure and landings are the most critical times for aviation safety. If you're jabbering away on your mobile phone then you are not paying attention to the stewardess who is demonstrating important safety features that could save your life one day. Also if the aircraft encounters difficulty and there is a real emergency, you don't want a bunch of people enslaved to their electronic masters rather than having situational awareness and responding and obeying the flight safety crew (the crew is there to ensure your safety, not to feed you Coke and pretzels.)

I absolutely confirmed that my diet is the biggest factor in sleep patterns.

If I eat takeout or delivery food I will be groggy all day, sleep late, have trouble going to sleep at the same time every night.

If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals at home, including a yogurt and muesli breakfast every day, I awake refreshed and ready with the sunrise. I have energy throughout the day. And I fall asleep at about the same time every night without relying on drugs or medications.

I found a great WiFi router at a thrift store, along with the original transformer brick, and it was in service at my home, unpwned, for about a decade until I could afford a brand new replacement.

So the oldest, greyest employee disassembled the code and dumped the ROMs, and ran them through a steganography scanner then?

But moderns are jaded and blasé about stuff that's recycled.

When the Gospels were written, the known world was fascinated and captivated with what was being preached. Because it was familiar, logical, and somewhat inevitable to them. To Jews it was revolutionary, and to Greeks it was transcendent.

The inspired authors of the New Testament tugged on every heart string, checked every name, and copied every dank meme that mattered. This stuff is fulfillment of every prophecy. Of course it's cliché; that's a good thing!

The 1541 was set to be a highly capable and performant machine, but an interface/design bug held it back and delivered dismal performance whenever connected to the C64. They tried to fix it but it couldn't be rescued, so speed freaks needed to wait for the 1570 series.

In the TinyMUD world, one of our most esteemed client hackers became renowned for writing the comment in his code:

/* drunk, fix later */

The odds are never in our favor!

I used a PiHole on an actual Pi and I actually bragged about it during a job interview. However it was difficult to admin and difficult to tweak to my liking. I've moved to NextDNS and I'm impressed by the featureful features it features. I also enjoy the seamless transitions from my home network to anywhere else while keeping NextDNS resolving correctly. The only feature I wish it had was an off switch. It is not easy to get its hooks out of each device and I cannot find a way to make it act like a classic resolver... except when I exceed the monthly free account quota, and then it cuts off its special features until next month.

No hate for the PiHole here; it served me well and it really gives lots of kids a nice project and it's totally turnkey protection. Mad props to the PiHole guys and gals for proving this is viable and this is a good thing for privacy and safety.

HP was a big Unix vendor, but they were also vendors of other OS such as DOMAIN, and HP kept the m68k alive right through the '040s with Apollo-derived workstations that became part of the HP9000 line. DOMAIN/OS died out with PA-RISC and the 9000s segued into a new architecture, but not before cementing a legacy of a really well-done distributed network OS, a good way for college kids like me to learn assembly, and a cool OpenBSD platform for me in 1999.

Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree.

I managed to make lasting friends in high school with some gay boys. But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?

I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism. I developed an attitude that women can fend for themselves and don't really need me to assist or be a gentleman anymore, because feminists drilled that all into my head.

Example: I invited a woman to church one evening and the event had a reception with delicious food afterward. It finished up around 9pm and we were right in the middle of downtown in a major metropolis. I flitted off to the train station chatting to a different woman. I hadn't given a second thought that my companion was stuck downtown wearing dark clothing and she would also need to find a bus stop, alone and female. Honestly none of that occurred to me because I didn't even consider it a "date" or a "companion" for the night.

I have a close male friend but I am extremely troubled on an ethical level that we should not have such a friendship. It's difficult to explain and I'm sure I hurt his feelings but he has a huge family and, if you ask me, I mean little to him compared to others.

COVID-19 and the Internet killed off all my remaining social opportunities. I sit at home and I work and I sleep and I eat, and that's existence. My closest friends are YouTubers and so they get all my likes and subscribes.

I don't know about iOS/Siri in particular, but Linux these days has good sources of entropy that can make for good randomness. And I'm not sure why you believe that Siri's random seed would be shared with anyone?

Imagine if our water service was like the Internet: We'd distribute potable water by shooting it way up into the sky and just having a constant municipal drizzle/rain/downpour everywhere. Every house would have some buckets to collect enough potable water to use.

Then the sewer system would be a bucket brigade: You fill a bucket at home and bring it over to your neighbor, and they pass it on in a long stinky chain of wastewater until it gets to the treatment plant or the ocean.

There would be no such thing as faucets, pipes, or protected water sources. It would just be a cycle of spraying it all into the air and bucket-brigading back to the source.

And that's today's Internet.