What you're talking about is YOST.

https://yost.com/computers/RJ4...

The problem with it isn't the signaling at the port, it's getting the serial part to work on the host PC or other device being used. Almost nothing has RS-232 DE-9 port anymore, and even USB-A is becoming less common. Plus the FTDI scandal with cloned chips and nonfunctional drivers is another major problem.

I've had MRSA in my forties. I was lucky, my primary care provider caught it before it had gotten bad enough to require hospitalization, strong, STRONG antibiotics took care of it. When I had it, it manifested in a fashion that I thought was allergies, mostly localized swelling. I ended up trying to treat with antihistamines but that didn't accomplish anything. As it got worse I went in and was immediately sampled for testing and started on both oral and topical antibiotics.

So yeah, it can happen naturally to someone that's otherwise healthy and doesn't have a history of this sort of infection. The trouble is, it's not especially common either, so when the second whistleblower dies during a short span of months once investigators are actually paying attention, it's not something that should be ignored. Unfortunately given the budget that Boeing and its rich execs and board members have, it would probably be trivial to find a way to pay an assailant to do something to whistleblowers that doesn't easily tie back to them so long as they're not stupid about how they transfer funds.

You're right: the cloud isn't going away.

What should go away is for-hire cloud services from monopolistic and abusive vendors. My hope is that people will eventually be able to deploy and manage their own clouds without paying a fortune to, or having your data pilfered by Big Data giants, thereby giving the Microsofts, Amazons and other Googles the middle finger they so richly deserve.

Maybe, just maybe, just like in the 80s when the personal computer finally broke the mainframe monopolies and freed us from insufferable BOFHs on power trips and insane pricings, someone or something will come along to break the cloud monopolies.

And then we'll be free again, until the next bunch of suckers lets history repeat itself once more. But I'll be long dead by then.

Bad Data meaning "anything I don't agree with or like"

That works until it is gamed by bad actors.

It's been my experience that delivery speeds have slowed, and I've gotten quite an increase in late deliveries. I just picked up a package today that was supposed to be here yesterday. Rather pissed me off since I could have used it yesterday but my next opportunity is next weekend. And I was offered a $1 "no rush" digital reward if I had let them deliver a little later. But since I wanted it for Sunday, so I passed on the digital credit so I would have it on Sunday, but they still delivered late anyway. I feel a bit cheated by that.

IMO they should give you an automatic $1 digital credit every time they're late, at least to Prime members who are paying extra for faster shipping.

I might buy that when SoC is required due to how goddamn small the device is for things like phones, but laptops are orders of magnitude bigger than phones.

It's a little wrong to comment that XPS were upgradable, my XPS-13 is not upgradable. So I bought the max RAM when I purchased it so that I wouldn't have as much of a problem with inadequate memory later. I wish it was upgradable but it was my experience shopping for small computers that vendors simply weren't doing that unfortunately.

And why again are we unable as a species to organize to put solar on our rooftops in a way that is beneficial to the property owners rather than breaking new ground?

Hell, even farmers are experimenting with solar panels as fencing, and they're finding that east-west orientation for panels that can generate electricity from either side are working out well. Seems like there's a whole lot of infill possibilities available to us without tearing up a bunch of pristine (as in untouched) land in the process.

Wind, yeah, that's going to likely require breaking ground, since most people don't want the risk of living near a wind turbine given the occasional RUD.

At least on laptops I've bought since 2016, there's been a metal flap on the underside that the sticker is behind. The flap could theoretically be torn off I suppose, but it's held with a magnet and is recessed enough to make that reasonably unlikely.

My guess is that manufacturers will just add an initial-setup subroutine that won't allow setup to proceed until the default password is changed by the person doing the work.

One issue with requiring each and every bit of hardware to have a unique password will be more e-waste if these devices are less useful on the secondary market. A common technique to work with old hardware is to perform a factory reset on the bench before reconfiguring it for one's own purposes.

Then again, since most devices, even cheap devices, have their MAC addresses printed on them, it wouldn't be all that difficult to populate the same table used for that with the factory unique password in the printing system, and to then include that unique password on the label. It would still be a good idea to force the user to change the password, but if they don't then it would at least require someone to have gained physical access to the device in order to get that password. I suppose a dictionary attack could be used if the vendor password list leaked to the Internet as well, but that's a whole new level of failure.

Yeah true. Minnesota never gets that hot.

Even Ford manages to make EVs that survive Minnesota winters for a few weeks.

And that's better... how?

India simply traded Chinese social media mediocrity and corporate surveillance with American equivalents. But America isn't the enemy, so it's okay I guess...

Well, we all have retroviral genes in our genomes; so in one way there certainly has been "mergings", at least at the genetic level. But the nature of the two organelles being referred to; mitochondria and chloroplasts, in indeed different. Mitochondria originated as free-living Alphaproteobacteria that could, apparently, produce ATP through oxidization. Chloroplasts are the descendants of cyanobacteria, who could produce ATP from photosynthesis.

Both mitochondria and chloroplasts weren't merely enveloped by more primitive eukaryotic cells, they're division and reproduction is timed to that of the host cell, so that when the host cell divides, so do to these organelles. Additionally, both mitochondria and chloroplasts have lost a lot of genes over the 1.5 to 2 billion years that they have been incorporated into eukaryotic cell lines. Another critical aspect of both these types of organelles is that their genomes are not merely honed down to what look like the essentials for producing energy, but that those genomes are very conserved even as compared to the host cells.

If this is the case, even it's early in the evolution of this endosymbiotic relationship, it is a significant discovery.

Heh. I was in the cablemodem pilot neighborhood in the mid-nineties, and somehow managed to convince Dad to sign up for it. A few months later COX called trying to upsell, they got down as low as something like $1.50 more per month for cable TV on top of our Internet service and he still said no.

It was probably a good thing really, we already watched too much TV and that would have only compounded the problem, but I couldn't help but be amazed at how cheap he was being at that particular moment.