One of our guys tried those with some success but he didn't like it, and he's moved to using his phone on vibrate under the pillow. (At PagerDuty we get a lot of alerts, but most of our wives and girlfriends just learned to deal with it).

Yes, disabling JavaScript stops the paywall, so does disabling cookies or referrer spoofing. The only reason the media cares about my hack is the narrative of "3 lines of code over my lunch break" is more interesting than "the paywall doesn't work with certain browser settings".

Agreed, the price comparison the NYT used was "$15, less that the price of a martini in Manhattan," they aren't targeting people who are willing to twiddle with their browsers, they. (I tried to say as much on my 3 minutes on NPR this morning when they asked me about this)

I semi-agree. I think the worst part is that when I wrote the test "What do you do at a stop sign?" and "How much do speeding fines increase in a construction zone?" counted for *exactly* the same. One of those should be an insta-fail.

I remember those ads for HSBC bank (but I forgot the name of the bank as soon as I left the hallway, and I was in that airport twice a week for months).

And I remember thinking "wow, that bank must make a great deal of profit on every customer... I don't really want to be one"

That's an interesting point. The test files for our software include 100% random files of 1k, 2k...2^n k bytes, which I imagine is exactly what random noise could look like on the hard drive.

And who knows what they would've been able to trade for food (which is the standard model for an expedition landing in a less technologically advanced area). At an antelope for a metal bar, they could survive quite a while (try building metal bars with Y-150K technology).

> though easier at the end of the series than the begining

That bothered me too, my best explanation is that the Marines would normally have police-style bullets (slower, emphasis on not ricocheting) to put down mutinies on an aircraft carrier. As the show progressed (especially after meeting Pegasus) they could be replaced with armour piercing bullets when needed.

Once upon a time, I rigged my Guitar Hero controller to play 32 different chords: guitar poseur (requires a USB guitar hero controller plugged in, error handling is non-existent).

I used to live a short walk from downtown in a Chinese town of several million, and one day my walk to work was blocked because a donkey cart spilled and covered the dirt road. One building I worked in had no running water, a bowl in each room was filled with water carried by hand. This was 3 years ago, everyone had cellphones and plastic shopping bags were slowly covering the entire countryside.

90% of China is so different from the west that comparing city sizes is near-pointless.