If you are going to propose a law, you need to define “stupid”

At a guess:

• People with steam accounts and VPNs in countries that steam doesn’t operate in. Steam will block your “foreign” credit card as a fraud risk, but eBay dgaf cos it’s the sellers problem if they get ripped off
• This is probably a pretty convenient way to send small amounts of money to people in a way that looks pretty legit. Arrange to buy some drugs off someone over telegram, they get you to buy a “steam card” from them, they send an envelope with a blank bit of cardboard and the drugs

Damn, toner is running out

… so I shouldn’t use the CEOs history of bankruptcy and failed a Kickstarter when judging if I think it is going to succeed or not?

IIRC Ubiquity make a line of point-to-point ethernet bridges that operate in the 20GHz range (because more bandwidth, and if you have line of sight you don’t care about interference as much). Responsible vendors won’t even sell you one without sighting a license cos they can also get in trouble for selling it to you if it turns out you are operating it illegally

The irony of being asked to sign up to a website to be able to read an article about opsec failures

My concern isn’t that things will get delayed, it’s that I’ll give them my money and get nothing in return

I’m pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I’ve even owned - smart or otherwise.

That said, I don’t think I’m going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren’t around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn’t had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I’m not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I’ll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash

There are two truely hard problems in computer science; P=NP, naming things, and off by one safety

Theoretically the contents of these lots would be insured, so if there was a sudden unexpected fire that happened to destroy all the cars Tesla gets a cash payout, unlike if they just sit there where Tesla has to take the cashflow hit of having paid to build cars that noone will buy

… My first thought was “is this loss?”. I’m probably too online.

Many years ago, the university I studied at did some construction work in the chemistry department, which included rerouting the supply lines from the big oxygen and LPG tanks so they could reach the new lab they were building.

Turns out the contractor was either an idiot or misread the plans, and ended up running the pipes straight through one of the fire-resistant walls designed to compartmentalize the building so fires can’t spread as easily - a hole in one is a Big Deal on its own, but then running pipes full of accelerant through it essentially voided the buildings safety certificate and insurance, and ment that if there was a fire, the main evacuation path would have been a deathtrap.

I don’t know what happened to the contractor, but labs were closed for a few weeks while they purged the lines of gas, removed the badly installed lines and repaired the wall

It won’t help, but not having it sure will hurt

They didn’t prosecute anyone because there was essentially no evidence beyond the accusation of one man, and even then no-one was accused of doing anything beyond talking about it

Using GPS to drive the spedo/odo on a car seems like it wouldn’t be super reliable?

An alternative suggestion - do what they did with UTC. It’s an acronym of both “coordinated universal time” and “temps universel coordonné”, which doesn’t work in either English or French so everyone is equally unhappy

It’s the tech aura. The machines know not to misbehave in his presence because they know what happens to machines that misbehave. It’s especially effective on printers, because (as everyone knows) printers are sentient machines imbued with the spirit of a lesser demon, and therefore do experience proper fear.

That’s the straw man behind all of this - saying anything in support of the Palestinian people is “pro hamas”, saying anything negative about Israel is “antisemitic”. It deliberately conflates political groups with ethnic identities to dismiss the argument

Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.

So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren’t too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you’d want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.

Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing “looked around and couldn’t find anything off the shelf that was suitable” (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.

They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was “good with computers” by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.

Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it’s essentially a “no code required” drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.

On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:

• It lacks real version control - you can “undo” a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
• Because you can’t effectively manage changes to the system, you can’t do pre-production releases
• Its native database system doesn’t do referential integrity
• There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it’s really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
• There is no way to do automated testing
• The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn’t, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of “is this a bug or bad design?”

Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn’t isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.

Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don’t manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer

The thing people don’t really get about “bullet proof armour” is that it’s job is to stop the bullet going into you and messing up your fragile internals - but Newton still wins. The force still has to go somewhere.

Imagine someone held a stake to your chest then someone else smacked it with a sledgehammer - this would be a Very Bad Time for you, what with all the bleeding and internal trauma. If instead someone held you down with a steel plate and that was sledgehammered with the same force - it would hurt like hell, but probably not do the same amount of internal damage because the force is distributed over a wider area. There is of course a limit - at some point the force is still going to be too high and cause fatal damage.

Helmets work the same way - the internals of your head are very fragile, so keeping the bullet out is pretty important, but the same problem exists. The force has to go somewhere, and while getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer is better than having a stake driven into your forehead it not that much better