plushpuffin

This is called EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) and it's impossible to opt out of it. It's super annoying.

You used to be able to opt-out, but not anymore:

1) opt out with the DMA (note: there used to be an opt-out form at http://www.dmachoice.org/eddm but it no longer exists)

2) each local advertiser has to download the list for your area of opted-out addresses and print them on a facing slip before handing their bulk flyers over to the USPS

3) the USPS has to pass that on to the mail carrier

4) mail carrier has to check the list before putting the (unaddressed) flyers in each mailbox

So many points of failure that you just know it was designed so that the opt-out would not be honored. Then they stopped pretending entirely by removing the form to opt-out a few years ago.

I don't remember exactly what we did but I think we used even more obviously fake course names like "FAKE COURSE" and "THIS IS A DEMO"

My first programming-related job was for a company that handled instructor evaluations for colleges. The UI we showed to the instructors when setting up their evaluation questions for their students included a demo table showing some fake courses. Rather than something boring like "Calc 101", "Bio 201", etc, I decided to go with themes/settings from the Alien movie franchise, so there was a table like this:

> Instructor, Course Name, etc

> Ripley, Interstellar Ore Hauling

> Ripley, Terraforming 101

> Ripley, Criminal Justice Reform

> Ripley, Military Bio-Weapons Projects

It stayed up for a few years until my boss made me change it because one of the instructors got confused, complaining that they didn't teach any of these courses.

Also, if you have multiple Minecraft accounts, the official launcher is much slower to switch between them than it used to be with the old Mojang accounts. It was so annoying that I finally bit the bullet and switched to the MultiMC launcher, even though it's really frustrating getting the various plugins like Optifine working with it every time the game updates.

You’re right, it isn’t. I haven’t used the iOS Firefox much but I did notice some ads were blocked. I thought that was AdGuard but it might be the privacy/tracking settings in Firefox.

It can sync your history and bookmarks with desktop Firefox. I think it's also affected by any ad blockers used by iOS Safari such as AdGuard, so there's very little disadvantage.

That's happening to you because sound is refracted by the atmosphere at night and bounced back toward the ground.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43154773

> "What we managed to show is the combination of the crosswind and the temperature gradient can cause sound that's going to go vertically (to) get refracted back down," he said. "The sound was literally bent back downwards."

> The effect often happens at dawn and dusk because sound bends from hotter air into cooler air. During the day, the ground is hotter than the air above it so sound bends vertically upward.

> "Its only when the sun stops falling on the ground that the ground cools down. Then the air gets hotter above," he said. "That's when sound can bend towards the ground and become trapped."

Yeah, the balance of sweet and tart that you would expect from an eating apple is missing from Granny Smith, because that would be lost when you dump it in a pie crust with a cup of sugar. It also explains why the apple is so firm, because it's expected to soften when baked. You can eat it raw, I just don't know why you would.

Granny Smith is a baking apple. I don't know anyone who eats it raw. It's great for pies and crumbles and apple crisp.

The books are a little strange. Interview with the Vampire is the most normal one. As I read through the rest of the series, it became more and more obvious that she was madly in love with her own character the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise in the movie).

Everyone who meets Lestat (including Satan himself) becomes obsessed with him, and it feels like it's not so much because the character is super interesting but because the author has a lady-boner for him. You start to feel like a voyeur reading some really personal love letters adapted into novels.

You're not kidding, I just opened Edge to see if I would notice any prompts, and it immediately threw up a popup in the middle of my screen asking to set it as the default browser and change my search to Bing (with "yes" selected by default, obviously).

I use it rarely but I know that I've told it no before. It looks like it's configured to ask periodically.

I just checked my task manager, and it was running in the background. I never manually launched it. No idea what it was doing.

This has apparently happened with birds. Some bird species have evolved shorter wings for better maneuverability near traffic.

https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175054275/birds-evolve-shorte...

I've used this trick on a Roku 3 and a Roku 4 and it worked on both. If there's no "reset / clear cache" option for you on the secret settings screen, it might take a little while for any downloaded ads to expire.

Also, it's possible to disable that home screen ad, if you mess around in the secret settings screen.

Hit Home 5 times. Hit Up, Right, Down, Left, Up. You're now on a secret settings screen. I don't know what its purpose is, internal development? Channel development? Set Image Service to "Dev" Set Home Screen Ad Banner URL to "Demo2" Do a Reset/Refresh of cached settings. Go to main Settings/System and reboot for good measure.

When you get back to the Roku home screen you shouldn't see changing ads anymore, just a static black and white Apple AirPlay image.

Eggs Good For You This Week - https://www.theonion.com/eggs-good-for-you-this-week-1819565...

What you described is actually closer to Apple's strategy for moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, with a virtual machine for running classic apps on the new OS.

It was like the early days of WoW, when nobody knew what they were doing, not even the developers!

Microsoft got in trouble for bundling, that is, using their Windows monopoly to unfairly advantage IE over Netscape. They still arguably have a monopoly position on the desktop and they're using the exact same tactics they used in the 90s, so yes they should get in trouble for this all over again.

They successfully took over a New Hampshire town a few years ago. It didn't go well...

The Town That Went Feral | The New Republic - https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

I believe that PRC doctrine for an invasion of Taiwan is to launch preemptive strikes against US bases in the region. So unless they change their strategy before they invade, the US will definitely get involved.

Kitboga is a scam baiter (a guy who messes with phone scammers) on YouTube. He once set Windows RG to fullscreen in a VM and had a Windows tech support scammer connect to it and try to go through his scam script in the Windows RG flash app.

https://youtu.be/F0peLpovDB8

I'm not going to cancel my banking account and move to a different bank just because they don't want me accessing their website with a particular browser. It's not a big deal to bypass it and it's far more of a hassle to switch.

No, ADP was broken for Firefox just a few months ago. My workplace is on the ESR release channel, so maybe it broke for the slightly older ESR version of Firefox?

For some reason, Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I spoof my user agent. They claim it's due to security issues with the browser. This is more of an active check though. when I pretend to be Chrome using as different user agent in a container, everything works fine.

Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they only test with Chrome.

It's hard to search for this kind of thing to back me up, but I vaguely remember IE 5 on Mac not only being better than Netscape, but also being the best implementation of IE across all platforms. It had a ton of unique features and its rendering engine was superior to the Trident engine used by IE on Windows.

Tasman (layout engine) - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

I can't speak for the two novels, but I've read the short story First Contact by Murray Leinster referenced near the beginning of the article, and I have to disagree regarding it being clever. Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but I think it's really contrived and it doesn't hold up.

Spoilers below, if you don't want to read a badly aged sci-fi story from 75 years ago.

A human and an alien spaceship randomly encounter each other in deep space and can't be sure that the other won't track them back to their homeworld. So, they come up with the "clever" solution of ripping out all their long-range sensors and wiping their navigation logs and then swapping spaceships! That way they both know that the other ship can't track them because they each sabotaged their own sensors. It's really dumb because you can imagine that there must be differences in levels of technology like metallurgy, life support, propulsion, etc, but the story didn't even give those concerns a passing nod.

Then, like much sci-fi of that era, it has to end with a punchline as one of the human officers proclaims that he trusts them after all because he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart... who evolved on a different world and probably has a radically different biology and sexual practices.

There was a way to disable it. You could revert to an earlier version of the Twitter app on Android. Version 8.68.0 was the latest version without this feature. As soon as they added it, I uninstalled and then side-loaded the older version and turned off automatic updates. In 2 weeks I'll be able to update again!

Well, yeah, I wasn't seriously suggesting a matchmaking service for old people to chat with each other. I don't think that would work because I imagine this service is less about starting a conversation and more about ensuring a captive audience.

My suggestion was meant to illustrate that the payment is a self-admitted necessary component of the conversation, and raise the question of how "engaging" such a conversation could possibly be given that.

I think they do it by running background checks and meeting the job applicant in person. That wouldn't work very well for remote-only work that recruits people from anywhere. I don't see how you could vet people with anything approaching due diligence without eating up most of your first few months worth of fees up front.

Are you planning to operate as a for-profit company? If so, it seems exploitative to consider utilizing children as free labor.