If earth venues can't install a femotcell in their deadspots so the frickin ticketshafter app can get a signal to show the barcode (all for my convenience, remember) then sure, you can hold a concert in orbit, but nobody can get in.

But more seriously, there are far better payloads to put into space and far better ways to support live music of all kinds.

Came here to say the same thing. But then I realised it is 10 orders of magnitude if you round the value to the nearest order of magnitude. Lolz.

well, for me at least, is when I've bought 5 previous albums from a certain band through Amazon and there is a new one out soon. Amazon has all the data and all the incentive to say "Hey, new album coming soon, do you want to pre-order"?
But no, they can't even get that part right.

So I can understand that this might not be legal no matter how safely someone builds this (maybe? this is electrical stuff so I've no idea what the exact laws are), and I can understand that power socket accessibility might be hard once the appliance is in place due to the layout of your room. But having a gizmo that you put in the dryer that talks to a smart socket inline adaptor (a bit like a timer socket) to kill the power to the dryer once the clothes are dry would be an 'upgrade' that might have merit for some people.
No, it wouldn't alert you when it's done but it would stop you over-drying your clothes and you'd need to manually flip the switch to re-enable the socket when you next loaded the dryer of course. It would be 100% compatible with all makes and models and no need to access any interwebs.
Additionally there's probably a denial of drying attack if the comms aren't suitably encrypted so at least we'd get an amusing Black Hat talk out of it.

I think that is what is leaking from my turboencabulator.

At a previous employer using a laptop keyboard was explicitly banned if you were at a desk. You _had_ to use a proper external keyboard. They would just about allow you to walk up to a laptop in a lab environment and type a few commands directly and walk away, but any 'prolonged' stay needed a separate keyboard.
This worked both ways of course. You could always expect to be able to get a new keyboard, mouse, wrist-rest, foot-rest etc at short notice if you needed one.

My first thought on reading this story was about where to keep my keyboard/mouse etc. I'm no neat-freak but for a long time I have said that DSE [1] needs a hygiene section because of how gross keyboards can get. I would have thought that a post-covid world would heavily discourage and possibly outright ban shared keyboards - which means everyone needs a suitable locker for their kit.

[1] If the acronym doesn't translate. Display Screen Equipment. All about monitor and keyboard placement and good posture in your seating position.

A previous employer used to hold the monthly team meetings where all the 'corporate' stuff was covered during the lunch hour. As compensation for taking up the lunch break they used to feed us. We got a free buffet of reasonable quality and management got to do the meeting without it taking up time that could be charged to customers. All round it was considered a win. There wasn't pressure to attend but just about everyone did unless they had a pressing reason not to.

Sometimes. I saw him support Alice Cooper at the Ali-Pally a few years ago (just checked and it was 2011, crikey) and yes he did then. But I saw him at a smaller venue in 2016 and no, he didn't that time. Changed outfits about 12 times though and still moved around like he did on _that_ B&W video of Fire from 1968.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

I still might go to HRH Prog, there are several bands on the lineup that I like lot.

... at the two finger typists I've seen who would have used caps-lock, the letter 'k', followed by another caps-lock to start the subject of this post. Some of them even know the shift key exists but seem not to care.
It's frickin hilarious to watch them move their hands so fast but type so slowly.

Overtime was possible but you needed permission from the project manager to do it. There was an unwritten cultural rule of 'hanging back' at first on a project so that overtime was 'needed' to close it out by the deadline. This was great because it paid more but worse overall. I would have far preferred to be paid more in the first place (so the overall pay roughly evened out) and have the culture of going home when the work is done (or when you are starting to make mistakes), which was the culture of the place I was at before that.

I know of one place where the 9 day fortnight still happens site-wide.

Agreed. While I've never been and never will be a no-show for an interview. In this age of the cheapest communications ever it takes moments to send an email to the candidate that they will not be considered any further for the position. But in my experience the default position of recruiters and companies is that they can't even be bothered to do that.

For context, I waited about a day while deciding whether to create an account or not. Hence my UID is >2000. I probably spent a lot of that time re-configuring my Afterstep config file to get my desktop just right.

You forgot to mention making the invisible border a little bit bigger. You know, the thing that breaks the fundamental point of mouse driven GUIs: if I can see it I can click it.
Try getting two file manager windows and place them with a small but visible gap between them. Place another window, say a terminal in the middle and click both file managers to raise them over the top of the terminal. Now you can see the terminal in between the two file manager windows. But can you click on it, expecting it to raise to the top? No! Fricking invisible borders!
(If you can click on the terminal, make the gap smaller and try again).