I was running a road race in upstate NY. Within 100 yards of one of the checkpoints, there was a small police vehicle towing a trailer with a bunch of antenna. Since the checkpoint had race timing, all the police had to do was download the race results and compare race timing to the gathered cell data and you'd have names matched with cell phone signatures.

Because they don't know any better. Some official looking web site says to press some buttons and do some thing, they do it. No different than amazon prompting them to type in their credit card number to buy steak knives. Even among knowledgeable people... There is an RMM I use, if you hit F12 in the browser, the hidden browser console has bright red bold font telling you not to paste anything into the console. And it's an RMM tool for IT people.

I know many people here are programmers. For those who are not, chatgpt is amazing for simple coding. If you're a jack of all trades and have a simple task, you can do this in chatgpt: Make a powershell script to use an export from the payroll system to build mail distribution lists based on job function and location, use a CSV to map the site address in the payroll file to a human-readable group name. Send me an email with a summary of the resulting group sizes. If any group would be empty, don't update it, just send me an email detailing the error. And it works, tweak the name of the CSV files and make it into a scheduled task and you're done. You can ask followup questions for more features. For people who don't code often, and every coding project starts with remembering if concatenation is a . & or + character, this is nearly magic.

I heard a radio interview, I can't remember where. RIM/blackberry had 2 CEOs who shared duties, which worked surprisingly well for years. Then the iphone came out. One of the CEOs realized that they needed to pivot to a software based company, the other thought iphones were a toy and would be no competition with their business oriented product. The hardware CEO won, the software CEO left. Blackberry then went downhill and eventually became a software company. But too little too late.

Yes, we can throw money at it and get a few more years of ever increasing production costs. But it long term, you can't fight mother nature. I'm sure someone will be willing to pay $75 a bottle for however little can be produced, but that's about it. It'll end up being a major economic disaster just the way Alaska red crab season was shutdown the last 2 years, and this year the allowable harvest is even lower then 2021. The Alaskan cities that rely on the crab season will be wiped out in a few years.

999187. I log on to ICQ once every year or so. Every contact is "seen a long time ago."

If you don't accrue vacation time, when you quit, there is no unused vacation time to pay out. It's not a benefit, it's a subtle pay cut.

They mean for storage. When the plane has people on it, it's running and can provide cooling. My grandfathers garage in Arizona had AC too.

Not looking good. Flight tracking shows it took off, went up to almost 11,000 ft, then dove over less than a minute, peaking at almost 12K ft/sec dive rate. Last tracking showed it at 7K feet, diving, and traveling at 149 kts, which is close to stall speed. https://flightaware.com/live/f...

We have a replacement, it's called TESS https://tess.mit.edu/ It's not quite the same as Kepler, but has a similar mission. Good news is TESS's imaging sensors cover a LOT more area than Kepler.

I was just talking about this the other day with some co-workers. It used to be that you could manage your work network, even a decently large network, and know everything about it in your head. Reading a manual and being a smart guy (or gal) was enough to have a working environment.

No more. People expect remote access and that everything should be working 24x7, the added complexity of building out those environments, and the merging of multiple technologies means that every change becomes a much more complex endeavor. Encryption requirements makes everything more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. There are caveats with virtually everything, and I just don't have the time to be an expert on everything around me.

Example from this year - my IP phone system, which integrates with Exchange using custom nonesense for playback in outlook, using the LLDP enabled voice VLAN on my switches, with servers running on my vmware hosts, each of which have multiple redundant connections, with handsets connected to a switch using 802.1x authentication, that's complex enough as it is, but then buried deep in the release notes was a bullet point that exchange 2013 wasn't supported, 18 months after exchange 2013 was released. That's a lot of stuff to be an expert in; a far cry from 10/100 hubs with a single management IP address and a stand alone server that send voicemail over encrypted SMTP.

Radiolab did an episode about Patient Zero http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Not just AD, but group policy, which is a decent GUI that lets you install software and push settings down to computers, users and groups. When you need to modify security settings on 5000 PCs it's pretty painless to do so. Er, most of the time

I get maybe 3 calls a week, used to be a lot more. It's either credit card scams or offering drugs to senior citizens. I put them on speaker phone, and continue with whatever I'm doing and just babble nonesense at the people on the phone. I figure my cell phone minutes are free, so I can save someone else who might fall for the scam.

The Internet archive https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz