plushpuffin

I downloaded an app that automates the process of disabling voicemail entirely. I don't need it. Anyone whose call I miss can just send me a text or email.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.teltech.nov...

I didn't have any programming books when I was 12, so I learned entirely by reading the source code of other people's stacks. For a little while I thought all variables had to be named box1, box2, etc, because one of the stacks I played with was a kind of mad libs game and all of its variables followed that convention. Finding out that I could name variables whatever I wanted was a revelation.

I'm sorry, but this is a flawed analogy. When you leave the room for the duration of the commercial, you are essentially skipping/ignoring/blocking it. This is the same as hiding an ad on a webpage in that you are taking steps (pun intended) to avoid seeing/hearing the advertisement.

It doesn't seem that difficult in the US. You just mail a check to a PO Box.

https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

Good luck confining it to the fridge. Given the horrific security of all our devices, it wouldn't be very difficult for such an AI to leap from the fridge to a nearby internet-connected device and then order itself a few hardware upgrades, including 3D printers, custom-fabricated chips, etc.

Because large corporations sometimes substitute their internal numbers with a more public number when dialing out so that if you call back you connect to the appropriate incoming call center. And also because this caller ID system is super old and therefore has no real authenticity checks.

The Earth doesn't have a few billion years. Multicellular life on Earth will end in about 800 million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

This is the 90s all over again! Something very like this once existed for Java games. It was called Castanet. IIRC, the website ClassicGames.com (later acquired by Yahoo) used this before broadband really took off.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/castanet.html

While I share your disgust for IE and its successor Edge, you are incorrect about one thing.

The Chrome install base on Windows is not entirely due to user choice. Chrome is/was bundled and selected for installation by default with many other software products, including Adobe Reader, CCleaner, and Avast antivirus.

Came here to post this, and upvoted you instead. Everything I've read about it indicated that Copland never worked and was an unstable POS that was impossible to develop for.

At one of the Apple developer conferences, people booed and criticized the new OS's unimpressive capabilities during a demo/slideshow, prompting Amelio to come back on stage and promise to "tack on" symmetric multiprocessing. For an OS that was supposedly mere months away from release...

Frederik Pohl wrote a novel about just such a creature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

Good article on the worst apple: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-...

There is already a non-targeted precedent for this. How I Met Your Mother inserted new ads into reruns a few years ago.

https://ew.com/article/2011/07/07/how-i-met-your-mother-reru...

The advantage of micro USB over mini is that the cheap cable's connector will wear out instead of the port on the expensive device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_%28Physical%29

> The Micro connector is also designed to reduce the mechanical wear on the device; instead the easier-to-replace cable is designed to bear the mechanical wear of connection and disconnection.

There was an article in The Atlantic recently that remarked upon this.

The Atlantic: Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/what-al...

Then I stop myself. Isn’t it possible that he expects Alexa to recognize a prompt that’s close enough? A person certainly would. Perhaps Dad isn’t being obstreperous. Maybe he doesn’t know how to interact with a machine pretending to be human—especially after he missed the evolution of personal computing because of his disability.

...

Another problem: While voice-activated devices do understand natural language pretty well, the way most of us speak has been shaped by the syntax of digital searches. Dad’s speech hasn’t. He talks in an old-fashioned manner—one now dotted with the staccato march of time. “Alexa, tell us the origin and, uh, well, the significance, I suppose, of Christmas,” for example.

The only copy I had on my PC was corrupt, but I managed to find a floppy disk from 1997 and a USB floppy drive that worked. I booted into a Linux VM, passed the USB floppy through to the VM, used dd to create a disk image, added it to my BasiliskII configuration, and started a BasiliskII VM inside the Linux VM. I was able to get a Compact Pro file off of the floppy disk image, extract it, and get a working copy of the stack from the archive.

At the time that I wrote this, I had never taken any programming courses. I didn't even have any programming books. I was about 15 and entirely self-taught from reading the source code to other people's HyperCard stacks, so the code quality is probably terrible.

It is very strange to find out that someone else remembers a stupid project I did as a teenager 23 years ago.

http://www.wwddfd.com/plushpuffin/Vumpir.hqx.zip

No, that was actually me. I think I called it Vumpir Slay. It was a 3D wumpus with something like a 20x20x20 cube and a map editor. I might still have it somewhere.

Batteries have seen incremental yearly improvements of a few percent in capacity, recharge time, cost, weight, and number of recharges, which looks impressive over several years. GP is talking about the articles that come out every month or two saying "new battery with nano-particles/graphene/etc has 20x the capacity of LiOn [in the lab]."

Not only that, but they added a clause to their contract with Yahoo that let them get out of it while still forcing Yahoo to pay if Yahoo was purchased by another company. When Verizon bought Yahoo, Mozilla switched their default search engine back to Google. I believe they're receiving double pay from both search companies for the next year or two.

Found a source: https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-marsupials-cant-f...

As one example on a physical rather than a chemical level, I read that marsupials are stuck for this reason. They need claws to climb into their mother's pouch after birth, so there are certain ecological niches closed off to them. You'll never see a hoofed marsupial, for example.

I'm pretty sure you just described a kidnapper, not a robber.

From the article:

> We’ve always wanted our customers to be able to use their iPhones as long as possible. We’re proud that Apple products are known for their durability, and for holding their value longer than our competitors’ devices.

From their website, linked from the product page: https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/

Your Apple lithium-ion battery uses fast charging to quickly reach 80% of its capacity, then switches to slower trickle charging. [...] This combined process not only lets you get out and about sooner, it also extends the lifespan of your battery. [...] Apple lithium-ion batteries are designed to hold at least 80% of their original capacity for a high number of charge cycles, which varies depending on the product.

I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.

That makes sense for debts, but how do you handle people who immediately blow their monthly UBI payment and don't have anything left over for food or rent? At least with food stamps, you kind of have to use it on food.

How does UBI take into account mental incompetence, addictions, poor decision-making, bad luck, and bad investments, and where do you draw the line?

Don't a lot of welfare payments have strings attached, with regard to what you can spend it on? UBI explicitly does not, so you can use it for anything you want. If UBI did completely replace the social safety net, and someone gambles/fritters away their basic income and can't get a job to make more, are they allowed to starve (or depend completely on private charity)?

The part that made me put that book down was when he listed a bunch of encryption schemes and one of them was ZIP.

Don't focus on the typo. Focus on the sentence, which contradicts itself halfway through. Apparently, the new Macbooks are interesting, except that they're not at all interesting.

> The new MacBook Pros, released in late 2016, where interesting, but something of a half-hearted shrug in the direction of users: they’re okay machines, but they sure aren’t interesting at all.

There was a good article about this in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American (paywalled, unfortunately; the name of the article is "Evolution Encoded"). It's about how similar gene sequences result in similar proteins, so that mutations don't necessarily result in death.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-encoded/

I've read a few guides that say you can use a race condition to kill the process and rename its directory before it automatically restarts itself.