I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?! Thanks for the info....but I've been working as a developer in High-Tech for the past 30 years...without a degree...

I saw a cable that had 2100 (recent) reviews - ALL 5-star! A DIFFERENT post of (what appeared to be) the identical product indicated MANY more problems - and eluded to "other posts" of the same product having false 5-star ratings!

Back when I went to school we were taught to do research. We walked into the library, opened the encyclopedia, and if it said that the Indians and Pilgrims shared a meal of thanks, helped each other, made friends and lived happily ever after - and we could provide a Bibliography to prove we got that info from a "proper" source - then that's how it happened. People have a LOT more source-material at their hands - some good - some bad - and they have to LEARN how to sift through it themselves. Reputation is ONE way to do this - but as we're discussing - reputation is only a single weight that has to be managed when scrutinizing material.

We were in a Chinese restaurant back in the day with a bunch of geek friends - long before ssh was a thing (even before http!) - and telnet was the only way to session between systems. The waiter came to take our order, and was going around the table doing so. Right in the middle of someone giving their order, he just turned around and walked away. We were all kind of stunned. One of the guys exclaimed "Connection closed by foreign host"! :-D

"Ground Loops"? Really bro? This isn't 70's analog audio. You get no "hum" from HDMI not because it's "balanced" to avoid ground loops - it's because it's digital and doesn't pick up noise like an analog cable. That said - even if you could pick up the noise, it would show itself in the form of data corruption which would be audio loss/dropout. Also - HDMI is an LVDS signal, so it is the digital equivalent of a "balanced" signal. But I digress - digital is all about "getting it there perfectly" - it either does, or it doesn't - and if it doesn't - you have a broken system. There is no "noise" or "hum" that can be introduced into the cable that could be heard in the decoded, analog output.

I have a "rolled-my-own" solution which leverages Amazon AWS. Though this is kind of a mess of scripts, I like it for many, many reasons. First of which is that AWS is VERY cheap. You can also use the Glacier service (offline "tape?" backup) to make it even cheaper. You can set it up to automatically "destage" stuff over time from the "hot" (more expenseive) S3 tier to the cheaper glacier. It also has facilities for automatic versioning. One of the (oddly) most important things, is that you can specify very fine-grained permissions. For example, most of my machines only have key which are sufficient for *adding* more backup content. i.e. they cannont overwrite, delete or even read existing content. This is particularly important when things like ransomware attacks will try to compormize existing data. There is also the case where either ransomware or accidental actions wind up wiping/changing/corrupting files, whch are then backed-up, compromizing the backups (classic problem with using a "mirror" as a backup). I also have scripts which do incremental and full backups at different intervals, and others which "prune" out old backups after an extended period of time. Another good AWS thing is the ability to specify what kind of reliability you need - and also the ability to migrate/mirror/copy data to servers in DIFFERENT geographic regions. All said, it took some doing, but it is VERY cheap, safe, and extremely robust.

I'm reminded somewhat of "The Bible Code" - the theory/idea that there is a bunch of stuff hidden in the bible, visible when viewed different ways (like when skipping characters, etc - Google it) The reality is - the bigger the dataset - the more patterns - even false patterns may be present in it. If I had a billion money's, what would they type...

What's the exploit?

PT Barnum said it best....

If your into this kind of thing - check out this in-depth video of how an old US Naval WW-2 mechanical computer works. Absolutely amazing - totally old-school. https://m.youtube.com/watch?fe...

Snap circuits are neat - but I'm not a huge fan. They are generally fairly very "high level, complex" building blocks. Even most of the definitions of what the pins (of the modules) do aren't described, nor referenced in any instructional way. (Though people have reverse-engineered and posted online). It's a long way off from the radio shack circuit kits of my childhood. They would be a lot better if they didn't dumb it down since much. My 11 year-old still prefers messing with my old Radio Shack kits, where he can understand what's going on enough to be creative, and build his own stuff.

It depends on the kind of shit. From cows, earthworms of herbavores is completely different from that of humans, or other carnevores. It depends on the gut bacteria of the creature taking said shit. You cannot fertilize a field with human waste.

If you want to code, code. If you don't, don't. Of the women (and men, for that matter) who do - it's a bug they picked up in middle school or highly school. From their, they decided to go into college for it - and ultimately the workplace.

The idea that women or girls being uninterested in getting jobs in engineering due to masoganistic workplaces or hiring practices is putting the cart 10 years ahead of the horse.

iTunes (or to remove the need for it), Orbiter, Final Cut Pro, Word and Excel (and not the free clones!)

...or this is just a giant rouse to convince us all the iMessage is an end-to-end, secure, PKI system that we should all trust, when this may not be true at all. Very hard to tell if it is a closed-source system which is not publicly auditable. Would you trust it with your secrets? I wouldn't (if I had any).