Actually, it's a royal PITA even when not in the military.

I worked for NASA, and when a unit had to be sent in for repairs, we'd have to wipe the disks of anything that might be SBU/ACI (sensitive but unclassified / administratively controlled information).

Then you had to get the machine taken off of the inventory control (as they didn't depreciate anything, ever, so if it went missing, you had to pay the full original cost). Then you had to get it crated up, and shipped back to the company. .... then whatever their turn around was ...

Then when it finally came back, it'd have to go through the customary scans (x-rays to make sure it's not a bomb) and entering into the inventory system, delivered to our building (which was only Mondays or Thursdays), unpacked, racked, OS re-installed, re-hardened. Then scheduled for a security scan (which usually took a few days lead time before they finally let us have some non-public staging IPs, as before that it had to be air-gapped), then we could restore our backups, run our internal testing and then finally put it back into production.

On a good month, it was 3 days to ship it out, and a 6-7 business days before it could be back on the network. But usually it added 3 or 4 weeks.

I even told one company that I'd rather they took their time to fix a problem and make sure everything was good, rather than having to RMA it a second time ... but I don't think they listened. We didn't even put the machine into production after the second RMA, it just sat as a warm spare / test machine, rather than load balancing, as we didn't trust it.

Could you put something in your contract so that you charge them for downtime -- so they either have to make them reliable or field serviceable, or they start owing you money?

I mean, in the IT industry, you have SLAs -- if the company didn't give us a spares kit, then they'd be on the hook to have a service person with the part in hand within 24 hours of us notifying them there was a problem. (which often meant they had to get the person there to diagnose the problem before that, in case they had to get the part).

The only time I ever ran into a problem was when I was working at NASA/Goddard, and they sent the part via what I think was a courier service. (for some reason, shipping and receiving didn't like it when a brown person showed up in a beat up white sedan and tried to give them a box at some ungodly early hour ... so when I got in around 8am, I had to go meet him outside the gate to get the parts) ... which itself is odd, because usually all parts go through them so they can x-ray them and such ... and I wouldn't thought it'd have been just as easy to just send a package via fedex or UPS w/ a GPS activated timer.

And ADHD -- there are some theories that part of the issue with ADHD is that your mind doesn't automatically filter out things that aren't threats. (which might be why I notice spelling mistakes, litter, and other annoyances that other people gloss over).

But when you have an office mate that makes loud phone personal calls... it really, really makes it difficult for me to get work done. General hallway noise wasn't nearly as much of a problem as someone specifically talking, and even worse a one-sided conversation (maybe it was my mind realizing that no one else was talking, so maybe I was supposed to respond? And she'd try to talk to me when I was trying to get code written even after I told her I didn't want to talk, so it's hard to differentiate until after you've lost your train of thought on your work to pay attention to what the conversation is)

Of course, I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until after she started work ... and didn't know that it can be considered a disability and I could request "reasonable accommodations" until after I started having bad annual reviews and was let go. (after 12 years of good reviews, and regularly winning awards for my work)

There was a period when I had cable, and it'd turn to random channels in the middle of the night and record ads to try to show me, but I'm using it for over the air now (with a D2A box).

I guess that's one less reason to update to a modern TiVo. (that and having to give up the DVD burner ... not that I've used it at least a year, but it's been a nice feature to have, and they haven't made them in 10+ years)

The article is rather lacking in details.

I assume LinkedIn had a robots.txt file, and hiQ tried to get around it. LinkedIn would also have had some sort of EULA.

For those who haven't managed web servers -- robots.txt was from the early days, where you'd list the pages that you didn't want web crawlers to scrape. It's roughly equivalent to 'no photography allowed' signs in a museum. You could you specify the name of the bot, and then the pages that bot was blocked from looking at. It wasn't supposed to be so you could favor one search engine over another ... it was because there were some that were well behaved, and others that would just run amuck and DOS your server)

The problem was that you ended up listing all of the places that you *didn't* want people looking. So it might be that you were blocking off a bunch of CGIs that were expensive to run if they weren't called with the right POST, but most people would also list the password protected bits of their website. (and in those days, there were a ton of sites using basic auth)

But there were lots of unsavory scrapers out there (eg, ones looking for e-mail addresses), so some of us would do things like redirect them to a page saying that we know they're a bot, and they should go away ... and then give a long loop with sleep() and slowly printing out bogus e-mail addresses. (with some that had a legit server, but if anyone ever sent e-mail to it, we black-holed the server it came from)

It wasn't until many, many years later that someone came up with 'sitemaps' to tell automated tools what pages there were on a given site, and how often search engines should check them.

To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a court case to say that robots.txt is legally binding, and if ignoring it counts as trespass or otherwise stealing services. But you'd also have to make a judgement on EULAs on websites that allow you to get information without creating an account. Is it like a 'shrink wrap' agreement, where you're automatically bound to it? How obvious or in-your-face do websites have to make it so it's enforceable?

Anyway, there are lots of bad analogies out there for what's being done here. I'm not sure which it closest -- it's not quite like taking pictures in a museum and selling prints, unless we're dealing with stuff so old it's out of copyright. Maybe it's closer to taking pictures through someone's windows. ... but without knowing what LinkedIn tried to do to stop the other company, and what the other group did to avoid LinkedIn's measures, I can't tell if hiQ was in the right, downright obnoxious, potentially illegal, or just a little bit sleazy.

About 15 years ago, a hurricane hit Virginia near Lake Anna. A friend's dad lived on the lake, and had a number of leaning trees (but the property was owned by the power plant, who had tagged the trees but not removed them).

They made it through the hurricane, but it stayed wet for a few days, and then we had some strong winds within the next week or so ... and the trees went down, taking other trees with them.

I don't know if 12 hours is enough time for the water to soak in far enough to do this sort of damage, but I suspect that just loosening the top foot or so of soil with continued hurricane force winds could be enough for a lot of problems

I'd say it's more 'obscure' than underappreciated.

But in a similar vein of good French movies that most Americans haven't seen, I'd include Brotherhood of the Wolf.

But if you watch The Punisher, when you see a scene where there's someone being attached to a limo, just stop it there.

(I think there might've been the uplifting scene after that, but the bad special effects then blowing everything up to make a Punisher symbol was just stupid. Why would Frank Castle waste explosives when he could save them to kill people later? And think of all the time he'd have to spend and risk getting caught to set it all up)

I saw both Leonard Part 6 and Ishtar in the theaters. I still don't understand how the Rassie went to Leonard Part 6. Maybe it was because I was 12 at the time, so maybe there was some actual funny part in Ishtar was over my head.

From what I remember, Leonard Part 6 wasn't high-brow humor ... it was more campy, and I grew up with Get Smart and the like. I haven't seen it since it came out, so I have no idea how it holds up (especially with what we now know about Bill Cosby)

But a 2.2 on IMDB? Maybe people went in with high expectations and so judged it badly, but I don't think it was *that* bad. (I'm not saying it's 8/10 or anything, just it's better than people said.)

If you sorted movies by quality, I'd put it in somewhere near Bubba Ho-Tep or Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam.

Just look for the times when people are using Siri mutliple times in a row, without accepting whatever it is that she gave them the first time (eg, not looking at the links she gives, etc.)

I'm sure you'll find a few of of me cussing out Siri. Maybe also look for phrases such as 'you suck, Siri'

WebOS had a setting where it'd prompt you when the application tried using it, and you could allow it for that run of the application. (so once you closed it, it would have to get permission again).

This was useful for things like mapping websites, where you could grant it permission only when you were actually using something that should have your location, and then shut it down so it wasn't always leaking info.

Now that iOS can let me have more than one e-mail open at a time, I just need a calendar program that lets me look at my monthly schedule at a glance (not just 'yes, there's something on that day, that might just be some holiday that you've never heard of') and I'll finally have my main complaints from HP killing Palm fixed. (although a copy & paste that wasn't a PITA would be nice, too).

My mom had a Radius ColorPivot back in the early 1990s. It was useful for desktop publishing, as you could see a whole page at a time, but you just moved the monitor and it was back in landscape.

These days, monitors have a high enough resolution that you can just look at two pages side-by-side, so I really don't see the need for this.

The only useful feature on it is the ability to be rotated on demand. If you just want a portrait mode display, you can do that in software easily enough with any cheap monitor. I know windows supports it (a useful april fool's trick)

You can also get rotating VESA mounts ... I just don't know of any that also send the appropriate signals for the OS to change the display as the display is physically rotated.

Their economics were basically other people get engagement by posting stuff, and they ride the coattails to make money off of it.

Years ago, when the service was moderately popular, they could've just implemented a system by which people who have a *lot* of followers have to pay money to tweet to them.

Set up something like people get 100k points a day, and you can store up to 1M points. If you have 10k followers, you can send 10 tweets a day for free ... anything over that, you pay for. And you can tweet for free to 1 million followers if you're only tweeting every 10 days.

But those people paying for bots to follow them *also* have to pay twitter for the right to send messages to those bots. Corporations and people getting paid as 'influencers' have to give some money back to twitter for using their network to send messages to their followers.

I'm just throwing out some numbers here ... maybe you don't have a hard cap, but you have it so you can carry over a percentage from day to day. The basic idea is that those people who profit from your service have to pay in ... and those people still trying to build a following get to participate free 'til they hit some threshold

Linzey Rae's Metal Kitchen never fails to make me smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's only a handful, but it's taking death metal songs, and changing the lyrics to cooking lessons.

I'm more of a heavy metal / thrash metal person, though ... Ministry, Gwar, and Prong are typically the closest to death metal that I regularly listen to. (although I *do* have Napalm Death's Utopia Banished in my library)

Why did all of us who have data in SQL databases have to convert over to use noSQL type logic in web browsers?

Because every browser used SQLite to implement WebSQL. That's only one implementation, and therefore, w3c dropped it ... so we all had to convert over our code to use IndexedDB instead.

This would basically leave us with WebKit and Chromium ... if they didn't both agree to implement something (and do it differently), you couldn't have a w3c recommendation.