Ehh, maybe.

POTS lines go from 40v to 54v when on-hook, and 5v to 20v when off hook. 48v is nominal, but there's a lot of tolerance there too.

And when the phone is actually ringing they'll throw an A/C voltage in there up to 110 volts. That will definitely shock you.

I find it kind of hard to believe that a pharmacist would break the law on that, even a rural one -- I mean, the government will take their license over stuff like that with a quickness.

I am also in the USA and this process is a hassle.

Also, living in Austin, TX we're now entering Cedar fever season (it's really "juniper but I digress), and the amount of pseudoephedrine that they'll let you buy is insufficient for some who really suffer from this, and if one person is buying for a whole family it's pretty much impossible to get enough.

It's bad enough that some people have to plan months ahead -- they'll start "hoarding" (not that there's any shortage) pseudoephedrine months in advance so they have enough when cedar fever arrives.

Typo for 2014....

Comcast vs. Netflix had nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Their dispute also happened in 2024, well before the deregulation in 2017. Were they time travelers, to cause it?

The "corporate giants" prefer the FCC regulating their industry, because that way they can use their political and commission connections to get rules put in place over time limiting their competition, which has the side effect of stagnating the industry. Regulatory Capture is a much larger threat to the Internet than anything which has happened in the absence of FCC control.

"The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day."

Over time, the FCC hurts the technologies it regulates, because it ends up captured by a combination of industry big players and political hacks. All of the "problems" used to justify FCC regulations are a combination of speculative non-issues and minor issues where the "cure" is worse than the disease.

The reason the Internet in general and broadband specifically has been able to grow as well as it has is in part due to the lack of regulation helping big corporations and government from squashing it. The supposed "issues" are just an excuse to get the FCC's foot in the door so they can sell their power and influence.

We don't know the details of the implementation. In particular, it may only work on unactivated/unregistered phones. (That would be a reasonable protection, anyways.)

Also, I doubt the device itself is the source of the new firmware -- that probably comes from the Apple servers on the Internet, and of course they'd have to be cryptographically signed as they always are. (That said, how do the devices get access? Connect to a specified (or default) WiFi network?)

Either way, assuming that Apple makes it so the forced upgrade only happens when the phone isn't activated yet, the biggest exploit I see here is that an attacker could cause a phone that was turned off to burn through its battery faster by repeatedly turning it on. (And each time the phone realizes that it's already been activated and so this is not supposed to work and turns itself off again.)

id.me certainly works worth a shit.

That said, it's highly intrusive, since it doesn't just verify your age -- it verifies your identity (and your age is just a part of that), or to use the words of the person you were replying to, "it's that any age verification that works worth a shit basically kills privacy online."

I'm not sure how any age verification system could be made that didn't verify your identity, but it's not like we have to go far to find a working system that verifies one's identity (and therefore their age.)

You seem to be suggesting that the cheat detection is just a performance thing? It's not.

There are some forms of cheating that can be detected at the server level, and they probably are. You fired more ammo than you've got? You defied gravity in ways that the game doesn't allow? You took fatal amounts of damage but never entered the code path for death on the client side? Your aim is absolutely 100% flawless? Those sorts of things they can probably detect at the server level.

But there's a bunch of cheats that the server can't detect. You've got a mod that lets you see through walls? That highlights enemies so they'r easier to spot? That shows secrets that your client is aware of but isn't supposed to show you? That looks at what's on the screen and nudges your reticle over towards the face of your enemies without making it obvious? These things generally need to be detected on the client machine.

Now, if they were rendering the entire game at the server and displaying it back -- like you seem to be referring to with PSO2 -- then they wouldn't need to scan that for cheats, because all that code would run on their own servers and be untouchable -- but that is *not* how most people want to play FPS games, especially those who are playing competitively.

In SF, where they basically stopped going after shoplifting, less than 600 people did all the stealing. Most of those people were from out of town and had never lived in SF nor the bay area.

Interesting claim.

I have to wonder where these figures came from -- I mean, if nobody went after the shoplifters, how could we possibly know these things you're claiming?

Do you have a citation to share where I can read more details about how they figured this out?

I may not be the ideal person to ask -- I just read the summary and skimmed over the links given in it.

That said, the summary says "AMD has patches ready for its EPYC 7002 'Rome' processors now", and AMD's response talks about that and "AMD Ryzen 7020 Series Processors", so ... I guess yes?

I've got several Ryzen machines, but most are 2xxx so I guess they're not vulnerable, but one is a 5500 so I guess that is. It doesn't strike me as a large concern in my specific case, but it's easy to see common cases where this would be a huge problem.

They say the exploit can even be run via javascript (and presumably other sandboxed languages that we usually think of as safe), so it could be a viable attack even against a typical desktop machine only used by one person.

Also, even the /. summary makes it clear that Epyc is affected as well.

Well, they dumped 68040 for PowerPC, anyways. Intel came years later.

(To be more precise, they started using PowerPC chips in 1994, and started using Intel chips in 2006.)

They really have used a lot of very different processors over the years -- 6502, 65C816, 680x0, PowerPC, x86/x86_64. ARM.

"I Often Quote Myself. It Adds Spice To My Conversation." --George Bernard Shaw

(note: it's uncertain if he *really* said this, but it is attributed to him.)

The dissents in the case were from Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas. I'm not sure anyone would describe them as "the two strong leftist judges", but their concerns were primarily about the impacts on potential victims.