For fun, I once plugged a floppy drive into a Samsung S7.

It worked fine. And why wouldn't it? It's just a USB host device running Linux, with a mostly Android userspace. It can do all of the things a normal computer can do.

But nobody wants them to do these things.

Two reasons: A capable computer is a very inexpensive thing and using it never takes over your communications device.

And by the time you build a dock with a screen and a keyboard and a bunch of ports, you've got all of the inconveniences of a laptop. One might as well get a laptop.

Pocket computers are awesome little portable devices, and are best used as exactly that.

A buck and a half? What kind of fancy-ass spoons do you expect people to use for takeout?

https://www.webstaurantstore.c...

How about 12 for a buck in tiny quantities?

And that's without even shopping for a deal on 500 or 1000 of them...

I've worked with a food truck that does aome of the festival circuit in the midwest, where single-use plastic utensils are either heavily shunned or banned outright.

They looked at getting disposable wooden spoons for their dishes that require a spoon, and found it was cheaper to buy cheap stainless steel spoons and just hope that they come back.

Most of them do come back. They get washed and reused. The others (hopefully) get recycled in one of the many dozens of recycling bins, or maybe saved by the patron for their own reuse.

It is not as absurd as you think it is.

Trim woody bits from peppers. Throw in blender. Puree. Add enough vinegar that it smooths out. Add more salt than you think you should, and then put more in. A touch of olive oil can be fun, too, which changes the texture a bit.

That's all. Just peppers, vinegar, and salt. A tiny bit sorks fine when it comes to consumption.

1 pound of peppers produces a bit less than a quart.

Keep refrigerated or you might get botulism and die in one of the shittier wayz imaginable.

Perhaps.

I grow Carolina Reapers. I do not eat Carolina Reapers.

Well, I mean, I do eat them: I blend them with a lot of salt and plenty of strong vinegar and freeze them in squeeze-bottles until it is time to consume. The mixture seems to keep indefinitely, once thawed, under normal refrigeration.

I've also fermented them and done the same sort of thing with them, which produces very different taste.

The sauce is a crowd pleaser and it is very tasty. But despite being made from the hottest of peppers, I've had it described as being "surprisingly mild." In sauce form, it's easy to use tiny amounts.

But I don't eat them. I've chopped up tiny slivers of one and put it on a baked potato (with plenty of butter, sour cream, and cheese), many times, and I ate those potatoes, but I don't just -- you know -- eat them as they are.

Eating these peppers as they are is a really fucking stupid thing to do. Then-girlfriend's much-younger then-high-school-aged brother liked to take them to school with him; I encouraged him not to. He used them as dare material. I feel bad for those poor bastards.

These fuckers are mean. When I had a surplus of some of these and some other scary-hot peppers one year (more than I could bottle), I tried to give some to the Asian grocery store next door who was always kind to me, just a basket on the counter of peppers for folks to -- you know -- just take for free. "Too hot," they said after a couple of days. "Nobody wants these," they added when they gave them back). A bunch of spicey-food-loving Mexicans that my Dad knows also rejected them ("too hot," they said too)..

And yes, it's "all in your head," but the body's reaction to what's in your head can be very damaging to said body.

That all said: I'm lead to wonder if the "thunderclap headaches" in TFA weren't caused directly by the violent retching. The human body is pretty fucking hard on itself when it comes to expelling (what it considers to be) poisons.

I've worked with these types of systems.

Authentication isn't really a thing for them, generally: They follow the same KISS ideas as things like SMTP.

The simplest of these systems (outdoor warning sirens) work with simple tone sequences or, if really fancy, DTMF... all in the clear with normal frequency modulation on a published radio frequency.

Yes, yes indeed. And as it accumulates this charge it still functions fully as a Faraday cage. It also functions as a Faraday cage as it is discharged. It always works as a Faraday cage.

The sometimes-resultant (though not necessarily inevitable) discharge of this accumulation is indeed a very broadband emitter of RF. It's very bad form, but being bad form does not mean that it is functioning as something other than a Faraday cage.

As I said before, dissipating this static charge is the only function of a ground connection on a Faraday cage. I will further state that it doesn't even have to be a good (ie, low-impedance at broad frequencies) ground in order do that.

Dump it through a 10-meg resistor, a huge inductor, and a wet bit of string all in series tied to the handle of a table knife shoved into the barely-conductive earth? Sure, works fine for getting rid of the nuisance of accumulated potential.

Grounding does not help a Faraday cage even in the event of intrusive wiring.

You're making shit up. Please stop.

I would guess that Netflix did in fact do this, in part due to the USPS consolidation of sorting operations a number of years ago.

In Ohio during Netflix's disc peak my mail carrier looked like a Netflix delivery agent, with an armload of red envelopes every day.

Netflix opened new centers to reduce turn-around time (it worked, too). The one nearest me was in Toledo.

Now all of Ohio's mail is sorted in Columbus, Cleveland, or Cincinatti. There's no reason to maintain any Ohio facilities outside of these locations.

http://www.cleveland.com/open/...

A Faraday cage does not require grounding.

Grounding only serves to help the thing not build a static charge. Grounding has no effect on its ability to block (rather, convert to electricity and then dissipate as heat) radio signals.

I used to have a small Faraday pouch that was lined with silver-colored conductive fabric. I used it when my employer was tracking me with GPS on my dumb phone, including logging power on/off events. (When I say I'm at lunch, I'm at lunch and that's my business. It's also my business if I've taken a day off.)

It worked fine, blocking both GPS (easy) and cell signals (less easy).

I'm not sure what you're doing wrong with your tinfoil pouch, but Faraday cages are pretty well-understood concepts.

And unlike Shrodinger's Cat, you can actively observe the behavior remotely. Look at signal levels in your wifi access point. Use ping on the device itself. Fire up any of a number of remote-access apps; see how it behaves. You don't need to see the screen in order to see what the device is doing.

They may have a contractual agreement to pay per-seat licensing for a very long time. We don't know their arrangement and have no way to know. (Why would they do this? For a better deal on licensing and royalties early on. The licensor would also adore this concept; companies love lasting residual income for zero additional effort.)

Either way, in all likelihood, all existing product was produced under an agreement that is still binding for that particular instance of product. Contracts are assholes that way.

What they could do, assuming they own the existing design completely and want to give up what may be (we do not know) a revenue stream for them, is allow the Pi Foundation and others to sell factory-unlocked versions of existing silicone at no additional cost.

Future iterations may be be different, but I do not see how the existing base of installed Pis benefits from this.

And the Pi 4 (or whatever) will certainly be quick enough to do an outstanding job of software MPEG2 without breaking a sweat, just like modern PCs. Hardware MPEG2 decoding was definitely a thing in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember being pissed when my 3dfx Voodoo3 didn't come with one (it came with a slip of paper for a mail-in offer for a free [as in beer] software decoder), and now nobody cares about that.at all anymore. Computers got fast enough that it doesn't matter.

Maybe. But will we still care enough by that point to bother with hardware MPEG2?

The baby-daddy of all of the Pi-like creations is the Broadcom catalog, not custom silicone.

What motivation would Broadcom have to use an open hardware design in their chips, instead of the existing design that works fine?

Neat, and obvious (oh hi VLC and mencoder!) but.

If you really think that the set-in-silicone hardware decoder on a Raspberry Pi MPEG2 encoder is free (as in libre), I've got a bridge to sell you.

The patents on the design expired. This just means that anyone can write their own MPEG2 system.

Specific implementations are still covered by copyright and possible licensing, just like any new implentation tomorrow.

The idea is free. The code is not necessarily free.