I was pulled over by a town that uses ALPR (not Flock) on their cruisers. I was returning home after purchasing a new car, and MA allows using the plates off the old vehicle for 2 days, so I had some explaining to do. Luckily, I had all the appropriate paperwork, so not an issue (I'm also an older white male), and after checking my paperwork, they let me go.

Here's the weird part: the cop said the plate was supposed to be on a white van. I have never owned a white van. After thinking all of this over, I realised their plate reader didn't distinguish between regular plates and {TAXI, HEARSE, COMMERCIAL,...} plates, which have an additional line of text at the bottom of the plate.

Additionally, the same sort of thing caught my daughter up. This time it was EZPass. If you don't have a transponder, they use ALPR to figure out who owns the vehicle and bill you that way. She had been getting intermittent bill-by-plate entries in her statement (not unusual if the transponder doesn't read or has an old battery), but we didn't think anything of it. Until she tried to get a new transpoder and they told her she couldn't get one because she hadn't cleared her bill. Turns out, she had been paying for a white van with a COMMERCIAL plate, who had the same digits on their plate, and no transponder.

Same van? Who knows. But I have enough experience to know that those plate readers are not perfect, and the company behind them is less concerned with accuracy than making as much money as possible. What a surprise.

Seems an odd place to choose.
Inside job or weirdo looking for sweaty workout gear?

Still around, but...

Shortwave radios are not as common as they used to be, so they might look a bit more suspicious than they used to.

There was a Russian spy ring busted in the US some years back (2000's ?) and they were getting their instructions over The Internet, and using some specis software to decode them. I don't think the details were published, but ISTR something about steganography in images.

TFA also says this wasn't communication to agents, but key distribution. Keys for what we don't know...

Cruise ships blow bubbles out the sides of their hulls to reduce friction...I saw them and asked, learned it's a "thing". I believe the same thing is done on high speed torpedoes (though we're probably not supposed to know that)

(and I just *knew* shark skin would be entering this discussion)

Years ago, I paid extra for a Sony Trinitron TV. *Just* outside the 30 day warranty period, the power button failed. Would they replace it under warranty? No. Best they could do was give me a break on the parts cost. So I schlepped the damn thing down to their service center, waited a few weeks for them to get around to fixing it, and paid a significant fee for the labor.

I swore then, never to buy another Sony product.

Yes, they are good products, but the company;s attitude to their customers absolutely sucks. Ref: the CD rootkit, etc. Sadly, Sony seesm to have been a forerunner for the industry/ Start out by sellingl a better product, treating your customers well, then when you achieve enough market penetration, start to enshittify the experience for your users. This includes removing features, putting others behind a paywall (monthly, of course) and generally making the customer wish they had not bought into the system in which they are now trapped by the sunk cost fallacy.

Certainly the funding from the monopoly allowed the Labs to hire the best and turn them loose on problems that didn't have immediate potential. This translates to "get a bunch of PhDs in a room and turn them loose, pretty soon you have a world-beating operating system that will last for decades"

There are books by Labs people which give a pretty good picture of the atmosphere. Jon Gertner's "The Idea Factory" is one, Michael Noll's "Memories: A personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories" is another.

Hire good people, guide them into creative work, and utilise the results. Contrast with Xerox PARC where the Corporate Overlords had a very restricted view of the business they thought they should be in.

Ultimately, The Telephone Company had a similar problem -- they had a huge capital investment in the telephone infrastructure and so were unable to pivot to the new data-centric world. Still, the remains of The Phone Company seem to be exploiting the same weakness as it applies to the old cable TV providers. I saw Verizon pulling new fiber cables down the main street of my home town. One might assume that it's for more Internet bandwidth.

I lived that book! Not on that project, I worked in Comm and Networking. One of my designs was a terminal server board for the MV8000. I knew a lot of the guys in the book, and worked with some of them on later projects.

My copy of SoaNM has Tom West's signature stamp on the flyleaf -- he made it know that he wasn't going to sign copies, so a couple of us came in hearly, found his signature stamp on his secretary's desk, and saved him the effort. He later managed the joint development of the DG/One with Nippon DG.

Orange carpet for life.

It could hardly be worse...

Could have been worse...
- Italians or French (known for their scrupulous obedience to traffic laws)
- British (left? right? It's OK, guvnah!)

Worse, the backup lights are not next to the backup camera, so reflectors don't show up at night (because they reflect in a narrow beam back to the light source).

My finger size is incompatible with screen keyboards. My patience is incompatible with autocarrot.

Why, yes, I am typing this on an IBM Model M.

CSB: years ago, I was responsible for character generator and keyboard design for foreign keyboards. It's not all QWERTY, and you haven't lived until you've tried to type an (English) email to your boss on a French AZERTY keyboard!

My Toyota RAV4 and Jeep Wrangler both use "projector" single bulb incandescent headlights. Subjectively, they are far dimmer than the old sealed beam reflector units we used to drive with.
How did the US go from headlights you could drive with to headlights you can't see with, to LED headlights that blind you even on "low beam"?

I very much dislike screen keyboards. I use a tablet to read books and for very limited browsing, but never browse on my iPhone. That's for phone calls, texting and the various apps I use.

Browsing on an iPhone is a pain, because no ad blockers. My fingers are far too fat for the keyboard, autocarrot chooses poorly and the multiple keyboard mode switches to enter numbers and symbols is wearisome.

Give me my IBM Model M and a full size screen any day.

Yeah, I know, it's all about the Benjamins. But JFC, the FBI just busted a huge SIM farming operation, claimed it was the Chinese trying to bring down the cell infrastructure, and here we have a US company doing pretty much the same thing "legitimately" (while the other hand tries to implement STIR/SHAKEN to *prevent* this sort of thing)

I'm sure many corporate "leaders" are thinking that way -- "let AI do it cheaper". Since the old way of working your way to the top seems to have gone by the boards, now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...

The illogic of the above approach probably doesn't even dawn on these Captains of Industry.