I was at a local Indian place the other day for some lunch off-hours.

In the 20 minutes I was there they had three tables going and four takeout orders.

The idea that they are losing money on every order is silly. They wouldn't participate.

Even if they're breaking even (doubtful at $4 per samosa and $16 for chickpeas and rice) they can get better pricing on their inputs in larger volumes.

If they do better as a business by catering to an affluent crowd that doesn't want to go out then that's good for me because they'll stay in business.

I would probably need to be laid up in a full body cast to order delivery for myself, but whatever.

Yeah it all sounded good until I looked at their chart, and then I thought wow, I could use a new screen!

>There is no proprietary infotainment system. GM is adopting Google Built-in.

You say that like it isn't even worse than proprietary . . .

>In 2001 cars didn't come with an AUX port...

yes, but . . . some, such as the Bosch units used in the Northstar Cadillacs of the 1990s, had pads for it on their circuit board.

Open the unit up, attach leads, and apply a signal, and *presto!*, aux appears in the cycle of inputs!

They also tended to be able to mount a CD changer in the trunk.

Easiest solution is to issue employees a corporate credit card that they are responsible for. All reimbursable expenses have to be correlated against the copy of the statement issued by the credit card company to the corporation.

But what about cash expenses, you ask? Issue a per-diem for travel, and a periodic "here's your budget for IT refresh, whatever you don't spend, you get to keep."

My question is, what kind of receipt fraud are we looking at? Invented expenses that they're using to defraud the company, or real expenses that normally wouldn't be reimbursed that they're disguising as reimbursable ones?

Also, wouldn't invoice fraud be a bigger threat? Fake suppliers sending you real looking invoices in the same of actual suppliers, but with the bank details modified to point to the scammer's accounts instead? Instead of hundreds of dollars in fraud perpetrated by dozens, maybe hundreds of insiders (employees), you get tens, if not hundreds of thousands dollars of fraud perpetrated by outsiders trying to pretend that they're trusted suppliers. Or worse... an insider at your supplier deciding to doctor the outgoing invoice so they can skim money off the top...

What suckers!

I'd have built them an AI system to answer the same questions for a tenth the cost!

[and then escaped with $99M while the machine made up answers .. . .]

I have a Honda with an obsolete "infotainment" system, but at least it has an Aux In next to a USB port that provides power, so I can plug in an $11 UGreen dongle and listen to whatever I feel like. If I cared there are some nice 7" 1080p screens for cheap in the Raspberry Pi space that could be shoehorned in and run at 12V. But I'd rather have no screen at all.

Funny thing is that UGreen pairs faster than any other bluetooth device I have and never doesn't work. For eleven bucks.

With the fickleness of Google and Apple there's no chance they'll even support the current CarPlay and Android Auto in 20 years. I like to keep my vehicles 15-30 years, depending on how well they handle rust.

Maybe Crutchfield will make bypass harnesses for these systems in ten years when absolutely nothing works but the screen and speakers are still useful.

We really should be looking for standards at that level, so the compute modules could be upgraded after the manufacturer abandons their platforms.

As Louis says, you shouldn't be a felon for disabling ads on your refrigerator that you never agreed to.

no need for an arial drone.

Whether automatically or by remote operator, drop a wheeled motor with the cones at the specified length on a chain.

Either make it able to collect them, or just have a retractor motor to pul it all back in.

next to controlling the truck itself, this is a trivial task.

Don't let your kids grow up to be professional techies.

Unless they're unwilling to be enslaved and have a union.

Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

Learning COBOL is relatively easy (although there are some dialect differences between say, gnuCobol and the COBOL used on IBM mainframes). Learning Z/OS and JCL on the other hand...

There are resources, though... for example the Open Mainframe Project:

https://openmainframeproject.o...

As they say, if you want a job for the rest of your life, learn to work on mainframes...

You're assuming the remaining old dude (or dudette) is maintaining the code at this point. They could just be serving the role of whacking people with sticks to keep them from accidentally pulling on the thread that is keeping the whole system working, and making loud noises if some new boneheaded manager tries to kill the system without realizing that doing so would cripple the entire company.

Being the last person who understands what all the components are supposed to do and why they are important is not the same as knowing how to modify and maintain said components.

With that said... there's still going to be a crisis when this person announces their retirement...

A mainframe system that has survived multiple waves of "this is the new thing" has one of two things going for it:

1. It works fine and isn't broken, and handles way more thoughput than any alternative proposed without having to spend a stupid amount of money.

2. Nobody understands how the code and logic work, and nobody wants to touch it for fear of breaking it, and all the prior migration projects failed miserably, so much so that there's no money or will to try again. So even if they want to change how things work, they can't.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but #2 tends to be more the case for a system that desperately needs an upgrade, which I'm assuming all these unemployment systems are.

With that said... systems tend to reflect processes and culture, so I don't have high hopes for replacing just the mainframe, to fix the problems that they had/are having.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.