Posts by Wzrd1 2274 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2012
The last good HP printer was the Laserjet 5 series. The 4000 series went with a fuser that was composite and eventually crumbled, compared to the 5 series that was still metal.
Fortunately, there are other vendors, at least until they pull an HP and Lexmark and shoot their own feet with their chipped toners and inks. Then, as far as I'm concerned, ban paper.
Why are they selling the investment, erm, printer? Give away the printer, then it's an investment.
This is more like roping someone into buying only one brand of gasoline for their car - their brand. Totally stimulating innovation and competition via monopoly.
Thankfully, they're not the only printer company around.
>I've been to Siberia in winter. They leave their engines running 24/7, light a fire under the engine, or they use block heaters (rarely) to prevent the engine freezing solid.
Alaskans typically go with block heaters. But, that doesn't help the car battery.
Excessive heat or cold wreak merry hell on pretty much any battery. Maybe we need to borrow a page from the book of Trump and go back to steam.
Frozen boilers can be *really* entertaining.
I'll just get my coat...
Now I hold out cash and am met with refusal, apparently I must sign up for direct debit payments and give my name, address, phone number etc...
Yeah, got that same crap myself. I put my money away, "Lemme check my other pocket", rummage a bit around and withdraw a fresh third digit.
Some years back, when I was supporting small to mid sized businesses, a chemical company (I joke not) had an internet presence that the owner insisted upon self-hosting.
The admin password being LetMeIn. Nothing could convince him to use a password that was stronger, such as 'assword'...
The decision to do this is driven not by efficiency or technology but rather by the bean counters who are more concerned with hitting the quarters' numbers than protecting their businesses or customers.
Yeah, Billy-Bob and John-Boy really care about the quarters numbers, rather than taking up a handful of computer security courses. Because, it's far cheaper for their minimum wage selves to take college level courses than to just set up the water processing equipment for their town of 10k than it is to just set up the equipment and hope that nobody notices.
The singular case outlined was from a community of that number, from a water works for said community with a part time employee base of six, two being managers.
But, it's all about profits, because water in a land where water is plentiful is ever so prohibitively expensive or something. Why, that Pennsylvania river right outside of my window is obviously worth its weight in platinum!
The only time IQ testing is a problem is when amateurs make it a problem. It's supposed to be *part* of a comprehensive examination of mental abilities, not a start and finish line. There's emotional testing, empathy assessment, etc.
Each assessment stage is worthless in isolation and is frequently abused by isolating one stage by itself, rendering any assessment entirely out of balance and incomplete.
"That really casts doubts as to whether standardized IQ ratings are valid. What's really being measured and is it any good indicator about a person?"
That's been an ongoing debate since IQ testing first started.
Case in point, Wikipedia is an absolute genius in general knowledge terms. It's also entirely vacant in terms of mathematical skills and spacial reasoning. But then, it's a searchable encyclopedia, not an AI.
Our current AI's are barely that, in narrow enough areas to fail an IQ test, let alone a Turing test.
Meanwhile, I've personally met some high IQ types who would also fail a Turing test, but are undeniably intelligent and some, even socially skilled.
Meanwhile, to assess mental function, IQ testing is part of a comprehensive battery of testing, it's not a be all and end all, save for the layperson, who doesn't understand psychology at all.
And to properly cover that requires at least a psych 201 level course. :/
The idiot brigade and the various foreign professional trolls share a common delusion.
Companies separating themselves from hate speech is not censorship. Censorship by definition is conducted by governments, per the US First Amendment.
So, either Congress has delegated legislation to corporations in their version of unreality or they're simply idiots trolling other idiots, utterly ignorant of what "Congress shall pass no law" is not corporations withdrawing advertisements.
"And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company," he added ominously, "and we will document it in great detail."
And where is this mythical documentation to be stored, once the company is defunct? Written in pixie dust?
Of course, his investors will be quite out for blood and well, every other bit of moisture in his body, as he bought Xitter largely with investor money, not his own.
Sounds like a nascent riches to rags story, once punitive damages get awarded in a century or so.
I naturally was cursing Microsoft for being shit again, however this article seems to indicate my problem must lie in the reader chip instead and I should be cursing Dell.
More like cursing Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft, as well as the hardware vendors behind them.
It's reliable to the point of worry on my phones. If it's *that* reliable to log on, what does it take to get a rejection?
False positive is about as bad as having the customized wave through device.
Meanwhile, Microsoft gave a gift, use a pin to logon, rather than my old 15 character password. :/
Well, at least I can change that over on devices that I want secure, can't do that with crappily implemented booger picker readers.
The only reason a partial drop in warrantless monitoring occurred was the FBI got caught and the will to renew the act intact evaporated.
Otherwise, business as usual would've continued unabated. History has repeatedly shown, abuses don't simply disappear willingly, the abuses are halted by intentional acts by regulators enforcing the law vigorously and leaders actually leading and prohibiting such abuses.
The only problem is, manglement would then suggest what to ask the AI, reducing Artificial Intelligence into Artificial Idiocy by using the wrong questions and creating wildly incorrect schema, as history of custom business application development has well proved.
...but everyone else (including Apple) is eagerly awaiting mass production of N3E which fixes the issues with N3B. It won't be available until next year.
So, in other words, get one now, then replace your iThing when it breaks next year with the one with less problematic chip.
Or wait until next year and save a bit of change.
Actually, most of the Soviet testing was in one general location, unlike US and European testing, which occurred in captured island atolls (and for the UK, one in Australia, with the US detonating a shitload of warheads in Nevada). Wind patterns could trivially carry moderate yield to high yield device fallout into a fair chunk of Europe. Hell, the US used to send balloons up to monitor Soviet fallout over New Mexico.
There was a really big stink about one of the then classified balloons crashing in a tiny town called Roswell. Yeah, I'm serious, that got declassified quite a while ago.
Won't get a microgram of cesium-135 or 137 from uranium mining. We don't mine uranium by fissioning it.
Well, save in Gabon, but that was noticed because the U-235 / U-238 ratio was wildly off, with the 235 flavor being far below the typical 0.7% level, due to it fissioning in a natural reactor a billion years ago.
And not a lick of cesium-137 there, as that has around a 35 year half-life.
But, observing it preferentially concentrating in truffles does suggest a bioremediation pathway using various fungi. One then gets stuck storing dehydrated radioactive fungi for a century or so, then able to safely discard it.
Pretty much, xenon poisoning was part of the root cause for the Chernobyl reactor blowing its top. It had been running at full power for an extended period, then ran at extremely low power for the test, then they tried to bring it back to full power and had trouble getting the power output to increase. So, they pulled the control rods far higher than normal and never considered xenon poisoning the reaction. Then, the xenon began to "burn" off and the reactor went into a prompt critical excursion far beyond its rated output and displayed its explosive temper.
That, from a publication that has already posted at least one article about a Tesla plowing into a police car on the highway, under said "super" cruise control.
A lot worse than that. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks seem to be a Tesla perennial favorite impact target, with a CEP of less than 1 meter.
Would that our guided munitions had such unerring accuracy!
The damnable things preferentially seem to aim at emergency vehicles that are stopped and have their emergency beacons on.
And at least one highway divider that had illuminated signal devices on it, which apparently must have swerved suddenly into the autopiloted car's path and braked hard. As concrete walls are also known to do.
Flashing emergency lights? Tesla automobiles on autopilot aim directly for those, with numerous reports of stopped, well illuminated with megawatts of emergency beacons flashing away, being preferentially struck by the autopiloted Tesla with utter, unerring accuracy beyond that of our current precision guided missiles.
The functionality goes away with cloud based craplets when the connectivity goes away.
I'm sure that Corporate types will love an outage resulting in paychecks for the now idle, as no apps are available for them to grind money out for the company.
Meanwhile, I'll happily be chilling, using my LibreOffice, Thunderbird and well, actual applications on my desktop, be it running Linux or *BSD.
I do keep one Windows box alive here, that for my wife's glucometer. She's dead, so my need for that interface is just as deceased.
"The other amusing calculation was how much more valuable the server was than the vehicle it was riding in..."
Yeah, installed a DNS server that cost far more than a luxury sports car.
Irritatingly, some idiot second lieutenant (but, I repeat myself) decided its partner was excess inventory and sent it to the property auction to be sold for pennies on the thousand dollar. He's probably a twenty star General by now, with that level of performance.
Whatever are you talking about?
The US has incredible credibility, absolutely incredible.
The noise is due to shock at, after a review of older data, this was at least the sixth balloon that flew that course. A lot of leaders had seriously red faces once that became known, although their high level bosses faces were the most fetching shade of purple.
"Yeah, um ... you really don't want to pull that thread."
Yeah, there'd be a whole lot of show me yours and I'll show you mine. First lesson, even friends spy on each other out in the real world.
Second lesson, remember that thing in Roswell? It was a US spy balloon that was capturing fallout from Soviet nuclear atmospheric testing. That got declassified a handful of years ago. The souper seekrit alien metal, honeycomb aluminum, which was brand new tech at that time. The only aliens in that area were from Mexico, on their way to pick US crops for cheap.
Because, only the sun can produce light? You'd aim the contraption how, given the accuracy you'd need to straight reflect a bit of sunlight that'll inverse square to dimness in no time at all?
Still, if anyone is to spy on me, you're welcome to it. I know that blocking your reporting can be done by someone only halfway through electronics school.
Well, it could be jammed from the air, but it'd be easier to simply blast noise at the satellites themselves, drowning out anything that the balloon tries to transmit. Ground based transmitters have a hell of a lot more capability and power over airborne ones.
Still, it's six of one, half dozen of the other.
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