sacnoradhq

Haven't been there in a while, but I was able to collect VAT refunds a LHR.

Is that on top of VAT?

They put 49c labels over the 99c wherever I bought them in California.

I think the 99c price was originally for convenience stores because there were sales of 5 for $2 at Walgreens in 2018.

Even if nothing actually changes, this is what happens if you try to turn your customers into the product by unfair gotcha capitalism. The problem is that most customers, especially Americans, rarely push back, so product managers incorrectly assumed their customers wouldn't complain.

Caveat calculator.

100k is a cheap pro camera such as a 50k will get you a Red 8k package but minus the frame and other gear to go with it. A Sony Venice 2 8K is 60k just for the main body. Lenses aren't cheap either.

Gyroscopic stabilization for iPhone is cheap and doable: DJI Osmo is <$100. 2 axis ones that run ~$200.

Real microphones with dead cat wind covers also improve indoor and outdoor interview dialog quality immensely. ~$100 item per person.

Most indoor lighting is shit for still or motion digital photography. Get real lighting and flood the scene. Lights are cheap, but take time and coordination to setup and tear-down.

That's how predatory gotcha capitalism works.

It was 49c in 2017, then it was 89c in 2020, and now it's 99c in 2023.

VAT like the rest of the world for decades.

Bill to Ban Hidden Files in California Signed into Law (ca.gov) <- Remind me around the end of March ;@)

The design of T490 was a big "F U, users" from Lenovo.

My magnesium top cased T480 (non-s) with 64 GiB RAM, (4) 72 Whr batteries and the internal one still works and is good enough for the girls I go out with and Windows 11 Enterprise.

That's unnecessarily alarmist FUD from a decade ago that has nothing to do with today.

Windows 11 installed clean with support drivers has only minimal Lenovo items:

- Lenovo EasyResume Service - enables a grace period before hibernation

- Lenovo HotKey Client Loader - makes the special keys work

- Lenovo Intelligent Thermal Solution Service - fans go brrrrr

- Lenovo Platform Service - (not running)

- Lenovo PM Server - power management coordinator

The only other thing is their user-attended updater, Lenovo Update Service, that doesn't run in the background and doesn't do anything uncommanded. It finds driver, BIOS, and firmware updates. It's optional and you have to install it yourself.

Lenovo Thinkpads were already on the side of repairability, but that declined after the Apple cargo-culting that began around the time of the T470. The T480 had dual batteries, 1 removable and 1 internal. The T490 was even more enshitified with only 1 internal battery and a lower runtime.

Perhaps it would've led to a de facto ban on expensive-to-produce insulin variants.

Giving Medicare prescription negotiating authority and requiring that that be the maximum retail price would be the answer.

Like the federal penalties that ended bank robberies, drone strikes against individuals belonging to ransomware groups is the most apropos deterrent given the nature and scale of this form of criminality.

Instead of a knee-jerk reaction to spending money on a particular solution, think about the problem.

Most things of significant mass are in stable orbits or they wouldn't be there for very long. Regional sats like the one from Dish are in GSO way away, so they don't really matter. The problem is that Dish didn't have a disposal plan for this satellite. It's mostly when operators create clouds of junk, especially fragments from unnecessary collisions that cross other orbits, that pose a threat to lives and property. It's good to require operators to have a deorbit or parking orbit plan.

The biggest threat is LEO-crossing MMOD, which is why crewed craft have hundreds of Whipple shielding configurations to choose from for a given application.

This isn't a problem in need of solving in such a deliberate, costly, and arbitrary manner. Instead, the solutions are holistic: don't create debris that poses a risk to LEO, have a decommissioning plan for GSO objects, and protect what needs protecting by defensive spacecraft design.

Edit: The Kosmos 2251/Iridium 33 collision was reckless operation by the Russians leaving space junk in LEO.

Buy color toner refill kits. Melt a hole in the cartridge with a soldering iron, refill it, and seal it with aluminum tape.

Better to spend $70-150 than $300-1200 on new cartridges.

PS: I'm currently in the market for an 5-15 year old HP Color LaserJet but still assessing which model tends to be more reliable. There were a lot of lemon SMB Color LaserJet models. Suggestions welcomed especially by staff IT people who support these things.

Even if you only print things once a month, a laser printer is far less wasteful in time, money, and bullshit than ink that's perpetually dry or consumed.

Rather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.

In large enterprises, a printer's cost per page tends to be inversely proportional to (increased) initial acquisition cost and availability of repair parts. Put another way, giving everyone an entry-level printer would be far more expensive in acquisition costs, per-page costs, and an inability to repair them. (hitting TCO 3 ways).

I had a HP LaserJet 4 (released 1992, purchased new ~1994) until 2013 with a used JetDirect card. It had expansion options with cartridges and SIMM RAM and font options, but they weren't strictly needed.

Almost 30 years ago, I attended a college prep high school in Santa Clara County that allegedly removed all of the lockers because of pipe bomb explosions in the 1970's. The safety rationale was "lockers plus bombs equals shrapnel." The concrete footings for the lockers were still present throughout the school's outdoor halls. The campus was completely open and each classroom was a free-standing building.

There is no blocking enforcement, yet. On Apple devices with some major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon, it provides a check mark beside a validated number (mostly, other mobile subscribers). The expansion of interoperability with the rest of US carriers, landline operators, and the international expansion will take years. And before blocking unsigned calls can happen, it will need to be phased-in and validated.

Contemplating the risks and vulnerability this produces is itself part of the terror.

It's possible state-level actors could use public safety hoaxes to cripple an economy in the short-term with panics and interruption of events and in the long-term by preventing published in-person meetings of people for any purpose, including education.

Domestic criminal mischief, by teens or adults, scaled by technical means could also accomplish the same ends.

Perhaps police departments and education institutions will need to filter emergency comms to require origination from a STIR/SHAKEN-valid source.

It's like open carrying in Walmart (when they allowed it). Sure, you could do it... but it's stupid for a couple of reasons: it scares people unnecessarily and it announces someone as a target of violence and/or theft of a weapon.

Being a smartass in an airport is a pretext for cops to act as fascist pigs.

The passenger was stupid for a couple of reasons:

- They brought something with easily-identified branding through an aiport.

- They bragged about its capabilities.

- They made a political statement.

- The threw shade on this item because of their behavior.

Anyone with social sense would remove the branding and say it's a test tool for electronics.

Either The Onion strikes again or the French expect everyone to walk across continents and swim across oceans while holding their breath and farts.

Baltimore, like Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City, is a generally fucked, dangerous, dysfunctional city. Baltimore specifically has an absurd number of police cameras, highly racialized policing, and massive unemployment. It's generally not a nice place to live. Detroit is especially fucked because of large sections of abandoned residential areas and places so dangerous that the underfunded, understaffed police refuse to go.

It doesn't matter how much better the ultimate fix was, it was plagiarism and credit theft. A professional patch review process would ask for changes rather than kicking someone off the keyboard and taking over. It's a shitty thing to do and discourages contributions, contrary to FOSS.

Chill, Special Agent Bob.

Prayer hands emoji that it's a personal cloud, semi-OSS, Alexa killer with wide IoT support.

Could also be another Siri with intent to sell to MAA_G.

Lots of potential personal agent plays possible now on consumer price point AI accelerated hardware.

That sounds like a Kafkaesque, dystopian situation of readily tearing families apart, lack of due process, and guilt until proven innocence.

I would recommend contacting ProPublica and TheGuardian to raise awareness.

Edit: My cousin is similar to a nurse at an adolescent lockdown facility in N. Texas for serious mental healthcare and physical safety needs that no parent could reasonably hope to provide. The standard is so high and the beds so few, the kids in the facility are the most desperate cases and pretrial diversions that would otherwise go unaddressed in carceral situations. It takes a special, brave, and trained caregiver to meet the needs that medication, godly patience and tolerance, and love alone cannot provide.

Good references. The total gamut of child abuse doesn't necessarily leave any physical or medical evidence, and much of it isn't technically illegal. It's been my experience that there is widespread hesitancy on the part of educators and medical professionals to report borderline or even clear-cut abuse.