13of40

15 ms·

121.
by 13of40 3y ago
That's been going on a long time - see the "stone age" and "cavemen". Is it any coincidence that stone lasts a lot longer than wood or leather, and caves preserve artifacts better than leaving them in an open field
122.
by 13of40 3y ago
I was reading the specs for the GPS satellites vs. the GLONASS ones a while back, and it seemed like they transmit on a similar frequency but with a different modulation scheme and protocol. Pure speculation, but you could imagine a Tom-Cl
123.
by 13of40 3y ago
I think if you did it at that scale it might flood the market and push the price down. You might be able to trade it to areas with a legitimate need, but you'd be competing against the people who just scoop it from ancient seabeds wit
124.
by 13of40 3y ago
I'm going to replay this from memory without googling it, just to keep the late 20th century air of some people swapping unverifiable facts in a pub: There was an old friend of my mother's, now deceased, who was a retired enginee
125.
by 13of40 3y ago
Is it? In the US, I'm not aware of any way someone can legally drive, be employed, have a bank account, or get a cell phone without having an ID. At the same time, as long as you were registered at birth, getting an ID from scratch i
126.
by 13of40 3y ago
A similar quirk of the registry API is that it has a simplified set of methods that don't specify the data type of the value, so you can have an application that expects to read a null terminated string value, but substitute a binary v
127.
by 13of40 3y ago
Run it like an airline, where your name is on the ticket and you don't get in unless it matches your ID. Either that or your ID is the ticket. Just bloop that big barcode on the back of your ID with your phone when you buy the admiss
128.
by 13of40 3y ago
I was going to suggest comparing it to other developed countries' practices vs their rate of high profile terrorist attacks, but then I realized it correlates the other way. Spain and Italy hustle you through an old-school metal detec
129.
by 13of40 3y ago
> Lead roofing tends to get recycled into bullets in time of war That's interesting - I've read that there are a lot of castles and stately houses whose demise started from the owners selling off the lead roof, but I never unde
130.
by 13of40 3y ago
When I worked in Windows they had entire teams dedicated to backwards compatibility testing and "sustained engineering". At the end of every release cycle there would be a multi-month effort to pack up all of our test automation
131.
by 13of40 3y ago
I had a VCR back in the day that refused to function if you opened its case. It turned out that instead of using physical switches inside it used pairs of lights and detectors that would give false positive results when ambient light shine
132.
by 13of40 3y ago
A few years back I worked on a project that involved fingerprinting screenshots of web pages, and compressed image size was pretty much as good as any fingerprinting method we could come up with for comparing the similarity between them.
133.
by 13of40 3y ago
"If it's technically possible, they're doing it." It's their job.
134.
by 13of40 3y ago
It was an interesting time. I forget the person's name, but I talked briefly with the guy who implemented the crc32 and encryption algorithms for ZIP, and he (almost apologetically) said the encryption was designed to be exportable un
135.
by 13of40 3y ago
Most of the people holding gold in a serious sense never actually see or touch it. They delegate that to trusted entities who can provide all the physical security and auditing that an average person can't. I feel like there's a
136.
by 13of40 3y ago
Not trying to claim any expertise in the matter, but couldn't you say the same for gold? Any of us would love to have a box of it, but you can't do squat with it at the grocery store or the gas station.
137.
by 13of40 3y ago
Not sure how widespread it is or if there's a federal limit, but my state (Washington) even makes it illegal to possess more than 15 grams of it.
138.
by 13of40 3y ago
Well hold up, I do 1:1s with people at least every two weeks, but I haven't actually breathed the same air as one of them since the beginning of summer. (We both drove to that empty building downtown and had lunch, IIRC.)
139.
by 13of40 3y ago
I wonder how fast they would come up with a reason to shut you down if you set up an anonymous drop shipping proxy for Amazon. 10% markup but with the guarantee that your PII never goes anywhere unless someone comes by with a warrant.
140.
by 13of40 3y ago
Yeah, I get that, but my opinion is different from the policy is what I'm saying.
141.
by 13of40 3y ago
Yeah, I don't like it either. The original commentary should stay with the headline, not risk getting ignored or downvoted into oblivion.
142.
by 13of40 3y ago
Don't make me google it, but I thought they also consider a device that can make a semi-auto into full-auto a machinegun in itself. So much like an AR lower receiver, the shoestring is the gun, even though it doesn't have any cla
143.
by 13of40 3y ago
That's still just pushing the cost onto someone else, isn't it? City driving for 10 hours a day is going to put 3 or 4 times as many miles on the car as the leasing company estimates. Unless they've accommodated for that in
144.
by 13of40 3y ago
The devil's advocate could argue that they provided the hardware at a loss under the assumption that they would recoup their money through subscriptions. That's a silly position in this case, though, because heated seats have bee
145.
by 13of40 3y ago
I don't know about that. I work in security, as a service to customers, but we have a running gag about "the real security people" who give you a phone call if you accidentally step off the path on your work machine.
146.
by 13of40 3y ago
I don't know - I think primary research on these things might be easier than sifting through all the "exhaust" on someone else's laptop to figure out what they've discovered.
147.
by 13of40 3y ago
Presumably a place like Meta saves all of EXIF data for themselves and serves the end users sanitized ones. I bet you could still fingerprint an image and know what actual camera it came from based on imperfections in the optical sensor, t
148.
by 13of40 3y ago
> I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all. I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. T
149.
by 13of40 3y ago
Illicit Apple II knockoffs were an occasional find in thrift shops in the US in the early 90s. One of the many things I wish I'd paid the $10 for at the time and kept somewhere safe.
150.
by 13of40 3y ago
I know this is past the fold and you're probably never going to read it, but there's a difference between saying something is bad and saying it just isn't for you. Any famous performer, by definition, has someone who values

More ›