Silly me for thinking the mag stripe had a unique 128-bit number on it, tied to your stay dates and room number.

What Summer intern came up with a design where possession of the card's information would permit entry after you've checked out?

There's the kind of smart that gets you a tech job. Then there's the kind of smart that knows better than to go balls deep financing a Bay Area home and a luxury car. There's the kind of smart that knows the cops can crash your party any time. I know I've got it, but I kind of wish I'd had the 3rd kind of smart that pounds just a little while longer; but that brings us to yet another kind of smart: The kind of smart that goes in to work the day after your doctor says your blood pressure is high, and makes you think about how all the money isn't worth it if job stress kills you before 50.

Games are fun. Put $5 million in prize money on the line, and games are business. From a certain PoV, hacking the game just for fun reclaims the purpose of gaming.

That human brain is the product of millions of years and way more Watts of energy input, coupled with the threat of knowing it'd be killed if it didn't perform adequately.

GPUs don't even know they're going to be obsolete. The first chip that can fear may have an advantage.

They selected the very best from a pool who were already way above average. They had a profile of fitness, flight experience, military experience and intelligence that those in charge deemed would make them most likely to succeed at the mission. It's not surprising that they'd also be long lived.

I must take exception to that. I am not a crook.

I asked Amazon what I need to start composting at home, and it referred me to a suicide hotline.

IIRC, plastic recycling did "work" for quite a while. I'm putting work in quotes because the way it "worked" was to bundle that stuff up and send it to China, where something could in theory be done with it--but as labor costs rose and the quality of the feedstock failed to improve it became impractical once again. Even if China was always land-filling the stuff, our "recycling" program "worked". Now it doesn't.

The Boeing hit doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory--yet.

I define a conspiracy theory as: A belief that a conviction should occur, in the absence of a credible indictment.

Since the coroner hasn't even issued a report yet AFAIK, this can't be a conspiracy yet. Note also that in order to be a conspiracy theory by my definition, mere suspicion is not sufficient. You must *believe* whole heartedly that the crime occurred. Thus, you can be suspicious of Epstein's death and not be a conspiracy theorist. It's only when you assert with authority that you *know* he was assassinated that you become a conspiracy theorist because to reiterate, you can't prove that assertion. You have no credible indictment. The professionals who do that for a living couldn't come up with one, and neither can you.

That brings us to Covid. There are a lot of ideas floating around about it, and not all of them are equal. BiLL gATEs pUt 5G iN yOUR aRm. Is not the same as "They released this on purpose to sell vaccines". The former flies in the face of all reason, whereas the latter lays out a reasonable motive and opportunity; but it still asserts without an indictment and is thus still a conspiracy theory--it's just that it's not as crazy as the first one.

So. Apples and oranges. At this point, a suspicion that the whistleblower was assassinated doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Real investigators who don't live in their Mom's basement are looking in to it, and they're not crazy. They're not conspiracy theorists. If their reports don't satisfy us, that widens the net of potential participants in a conspiracy, and as real conspiracies get large they tend to unravel. It takes time, but it does happen; so I'm not in denial over the fact that some "conspiracy theories" do in fact become "conspiracy fact"; but in the meantime you're better off (and less likely to be regarded as a nut) if you express suspicion rather than certitude that something evil has occurred.

7, but I can't tell you how I know. Feel free to verify.

After a certain point, they could fill drives with the output of a real random number generator? Who's gonna check?

Ha-hah, only serious; but there's actually a really good answer for this. There is an algorithm for finding the Nth digit of Pi, and it's *fast*, not requiring you to compute previous digits. Thus, spot-checking the data for accuracy is very doable.

This reminds me of the good ol' days when Rob Cockerham sent in spray-painted trinkets to Cash 4 Gold. (warning expired cert).

He also gave out his Safeway card number to see what would happen if you spent $100s of thousands on one card. Not sure how that played out.

I miss the old Internet that didn't even care about SSL, and where pranks involved making companies looked silly instead of sucker-punching people.

Anyway, I hope they keep sending weird shit to companies. We need this.

You didn't actually comprehend what I wrote. The "next door" rule extends to "next office", and "adjacent activities". You should have inferred that from my proposal that they be BARRED FROM THE FINANCE BUSINESS FOR LIFE AND NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY.

The next door rule is a colloquial way of expressing the idea that incarceration should be based on their odds of causing harm if living outside of bars, not a literal idea that release is only contingent on harm to immediate neighbors.

I don't care about punishment. I think it's petty. I go by the "would I want them next door?" or "what's the harm of letting them out?" rule. Also, I believe in humane economic confinement and listening to science on recidivism and such.

Anyway, it will cost a lot of money to incarcerate somebody that long. If he's next door to me, he's not a problem because he wasn't convicted of playing his music too loud. If he's able to participate in finance, that's the real demonstrated potential for harm so I say release him NOW, but don't give him a passport or let him participate in any kind of financial operation where he handles money, not even running the cash register... OK, maybe that; but you get the idea. No employment at any financial institution of any kind, not even as a temp or consultant. He's going to have to find another line of work, but I don't feel like feeding and housing him for the next 50 years.

Because New Jersey is approx. 5.8 times the size or Rhode Island. Kids these days. Probably doesn't even know how much a boatload is.