God forbid that some poor kid ever accidentally knock a softball over the White House fence. He'd never escape Gitmo.

Hello, Arthur.

Probably useless for most people reading this, but my favourite-ever electronics store must be the utterly one-off R. F. Potts in Derby, UK. The shop is absolutely tiny, but chock-full of stuff both new and old - with incredibly helpful and knowledgeable staff. Weird, obscure component is buggered, and you need a new one? Hand it over, and they'll find a replacement from the wall of drawers behind the counter - then charge you something like 20p for it. They also have a wide range of old computer parts and random reclaimed mechanisms from things - one of their front windows is always filled with inspiration for stuff to build.

It's probably Derby's engineering heritage that allows it to keep going - with Rolls Royce aero engines and Bombardier trains based nearby, there must be plenty of engineers mucking around with stuff in their spare time...

I only wish they'd open a branch in Seattle, where I live now! A trip to a Radio Shack a few years ago for components was most disappointing.

Wouldn't that make an awesome app, building *real* 3d scenes, and making the models available for export in a variety of formats and with direct-links for popular functions (editing apps, export to popular 3d printing services, etc)?

Look into photogrammetry software like the cloud-based 123D Catch and the defiantly offline Agisoft PhotoScan - they'll turn loads of conventional photos into arbitrary 3D models. The former is probably closest to your request!

I've been playing around with the latter software recently - the required photography is pretty difficult to master, but it's a rather useful tool. Here's a geometry-only render of a statue I scanned as an example - there's a full texture map for the model as well, but this is showing off the frankly implausible levels of geometrical detail you can get from a physical object. (Excuse the noisy crevices - I was shooting hand-held at ~9am in the middle of winter on a cloudy day...) It's terrible at shiny objects (reflections confuse the hell out of it) and system requirements are pretty steep - it'll eat however many CPU and GPU cores you throw at it, and the more memory the better - but the results are well worth it.

Not having gone to MIT myself, I always wondered if the MIT phone system really had the following error recording?

Others have already mentioned the dot-matrix printer, but there was a big one before that: the high speed line printer. They were too expensive for individuals, but they certainly were a familiar sound to 1970s programming students like me.

There were two main types: the drum printer and the chain printer. The drum printer was cheaper and therefore much more common. The drum, which contained all the characters in a given font, rotated once for each row printed. An entire row was printed simultaneously; a separate solenoid-driven hammer in each column fired at the right instant to print the desired character in that column. You could easily tell from across the room whether your program had failed to compile or if execution ended with a core (!) dump. The burst pages between jobs had their own highly characteristic sound.

A related sound is that of ripping fanfold line printer paper to separate jobs. Who uses any kind of fanfold paper these days? Or even paper...?

Oh, and let's not forget the sound of the Hollerith (IBM punch card) reader...

Is NK still off the net? About a half hour ago I had no trouble reaching the sites www.kcna.kp - 175.45.177.74 / 175.45.176.71 naenara.com.kp - 175.45.176.67 / 175.45.177.77 According to https://www.northkoreatech.org..., both sites are physically hosted inside North Korea. I see that both are in the 175.45.176.0/22 block that whois says is assigned to North Korea, and traceroute shows an extra latency (satellite hop?) for that network past China. Is that their only net block? A /22 is 1024 addresses, which I keep hearing is the total number for the entire country.

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

Adobe for reasons only known to itself absolutely refuses to support case-sensitive file systems for Mac OS X.

I've heard of various other software breaking when used with case-sensitive filesystems on OS X - not making an excuse for that software, but what is the benefit of running with such a filesystem anyway? I'm genuinely interested.

(I've been running with the default case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystems for a decade or more, and not hit any problems.)

"National Security" is the root password to the Constitution - me

It's a little hard to believe it's insulation degradation despite that .au recalls website entry. When insulation degrades, you tend to get short circuits that trip circuit breakers rather rapidly. It seems more likely to be an undersized or underprotected conductor, e.g., a multistrand conductor in which flexing from improper strain relief can break most of the strands, increasing the local series resistance and heat dissipation and possibly leading to a complete conductor failure with series arcing. Only an arc-fault protector would trip on a failure like this, and those breakers are still uncommon in the US even though they're required in much new construction. It would also seem that cord failures would be more likely in North America, Japan and other 100-120V countries because a universal switching supply producing a given amount of power will require twice the line current draw and produce 4x the heat dissipation (I^2 R) in a high resistance section of cord as it would in a country with a 230-240V supply voltage.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.

It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.