See?

Now this is where I assume that most people are like myself and try NOT to stand in front of a truck....

Self preservation and all that...common sense some folks call it.

Until you recognize those tall hoods have a huge blind spot in the front and many people do not realize how big it is. On a pickup, it's about 21 feet. Yes, feet. And yes, Europeans know they can park 3 normal cars in that blind spot.

You also see it with cars that stop a huge distance away from the stop line at a traffic light they stop line disappears and they stop, not knowing there's a rather large blind spot in front of them.

Pedestrians and other traffic make use of those spaces and now are inadvertently in a place where the driver really cannot see them, but they don't know that because it's something that doesn't apply to normal vehicles.

It's why semis may have long tall hoods but they are extremely narrow to minimize the blind spot

And yes, the blind spot is so big other cars can zip in especially sportier lower slung cars.

All it would take to fix it would be a requirement for the blind spot to be reduced to say, 3 feet - if you want the tall hood, you must have a camera or radar system in the front that be unobscured in all weather conditions.

It's why Europe likes cabover trucks - when you're navigating around tight roads, not having a blind spot really helps. But even the long nose preferred in North America really tries to minimize the blind spot.

For those who don't realize it, 40 years ago the Mac has existed for 2 yeras. This is well into the era of 8-bit Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, alongside 16 bit machines like the IBM PC. Console wise, we're in the NES era.

The years of the old 8-bits like the VIC-20 and TRS-80 have started to wane, as had hobby computers you built yourself. Perhaps it's the era of modern computing as we know it today where people just bought boxes off the shelf for their computers more so than soldering computers together.

Anyone who remembers building their own PCs for burning ROMs for them is officially old.

GHG went up because of all the gas turbines deployed in a rush during the wind/solar rollout blitz. But it should not be ignored that making the cement for both the nukes and the wind turbines generates huge amounts of GHG. Why I excluded the material fabrication emissions in the discussion. Sadly, no free lunch.

Nuclear cannot replacce gas turbines. Gas turbines are dispatchable power, nuclear is not. A nuclear plant takes hours to ramp up and ramp down production - so it works the opposite of solar and wind, which are also non-dispatchable power sources.

Dispatchable power sources accommodate changes in load instantly (within minutes) - battery, hydro, and gas turbines are dispatchable as they can be brought online and their output adapted within minutes (or in battery, seconds).

Nuclear is called "base load" because they can only run below demand - if demand suddenly drops below a nuclear plant's output, disaster will happen because there will be too much power.

Of course, the problem is using gas turbines for base load power - that is polluting and expensive.

Where Canada has an advantage though, is that they've been able to deliver new nuclear reactors on time, on budget. Canadian built reactors are coming online on time or early, on budget or less. Canada has a demonstrated capability for this - all other nuclear projects are late, really late, and way over budget.

Nightmare Eclipse showed us Bitlocker is a joke. It's not remotely real encryption and easily breakable .. on Win11/2025 server, NOT Win 10. This wasn't an exploit. It was a backdoor. Meanwhile Veracrypt needed a public backlash to get their dev signing keys reinstated so people could get their updated kernel drivers on Windows (and remember, TrueCrypt its predecessor mysteriously disappeared in 2012 with the former author telling people to use BitLocker instead!)

No he didn't. He didn't break Bitlocker. He found a set of circumstances where Windows unlocks the disk and dumps you to a shell prompt without authentication. Yes it's a fault, but it's just like a lock screen bypass on your phone.

But it's a problem that affects all disk encryption - if you encrypt the OS, you need to decrypt to boot. Now some early systems required you to enter your password on startup - they needed to unlock the key. Of course, it also means every reboot must be attended - you could not reboot a system because someone must be there to enter the password.

Then PCs started getting TPM devices, and this allowed them to unlock the disk by encrypting the disk key with TPM keys kept on the chip. But the problem now is that the disk is unlocked. So any authentication bypass will get you access to the encrypted disk, and that's what Nightmare Eclipse found. (The problem affects everything).

Of course, if you steal a drive from a PC, none of Nightmare Eclipse's vulnerabilities would work - because the disk needs the Bitlocker key to unlock, which is contained in the TPM module of the original PC, so it's only useful if you take the whole machine.

But what it is is an authentication bypass - which means it's just another way to bypass the login dialog. Bitlocker unlocking comes as a side effect.

At least in my neck of the woods, we have ZERO spare water. We're in a 'negative water' situation. Using any water is a problem. That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

And many places where they put them up, they don't have enough power infrastructure either. So power bills go up as well.

There's nothing in Linux that demands you use SystemD. You can choose to use SysVInit if you really want to. Indeed the only kernel requirement is something called "init" is either in /, /bin, or /usr/bin

But the init scripts are really just faking what init was doing - watching processes and restarting them as necessary. The SysVInit scripts are a crude re-implementation of inittab.

C doesn't have strings, but sometimes people like to have some bytes with a 0 on the end. Some of the memxxx() functions are useful with C's fake strings. For example, memchr() is good for when you have a null-terminated string but it also some upper bounds. And stuff like strncpy() doesn't appear to have anything at all to do with null terminated strings, and is grossly misnamed.

strncpy() copies a string to another location stopping when it reaches a NUL or the end of the buffer.

The problem is the second case doesn't NUL terminate the string so you either have to make the buffer one smaller and terminate always or terminate always. Or try to handle it. The other problem is 'n' is unintuitive - it's the size of the buffer in characters. Easy peasy with 8-bit chars, not so much for Unicode strings. (UTF-16...)

I've personally be more of a fan of the BSD "l" versions - strlcpy and strlcat - both take the size of the target buffer in bytes - so a sizeof() is the proper way to use it, and both properly NUL terminate the string. strlcat has the added benefit that it computes the size it needs to copy based on the existing length of the string, so you can use strlcat() to concatenate a bunch of strings without computing the remaining buffer sizes (as you would in strncat). Luckily the BSD versions are in libbsd because they aren't in Glibc. Much nicer and much easier to use functions.

On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.

It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.

And how often does that actually happen? Because it's a super common myth perpetuated by those who want a car-first lifestyle that public transportation is unsafe to promote their vehicles.

And yes, it does happen. But you know what? We have surveillance cameras already on buses and other public transit. Taxis have dashcams that face both ways.

And this has been true for decades.

The only difference now is facial recognition, which we already know is already problematic and full of false identification. And if necessary, people do run facial recognition on the surveillance video all the time - be it from a bus, workplace, public street, business, etc.

The car equivalent would be to put up more license plate readers everywhere snapping photos of everywhere you go. But we already know how that's going, and really, this should go the same way as well if you dislike license plate readers.

The difference is you were buying a license. The software maker couldn't really revoke your license to use it.

With PlayStation, Steam, etc., you aren't buying a license. You're renting one. That is, you get a license to use the software, but PlayStation, Valve, Microsoft, etc may at anytime decide to revoke that license from you for whatever reason. So at best, it's a long term rental without a clear return date.

And all the other stuff relating to owning the license versus renting the license - like being able to transfer the license to someone else. If you owned it you could sell it to someone else (e.g., "used games"). Something PlayStation pummelled Microsoft heavily on, even though Sony never really intended to follow through since they pushed digital sales harder.

It would be quite useful to have a database to search and find out what devices I own have been shown as guilty.

The problem is that it varies a lot. And basically it comes down to names - things that require internet access especially.

Things like streaming boxes - if you buy one of those questionable boxes at the mall that claim "never pay for cable again" and such, whilst offering full access to paid content, those may or may not come with a side helping of a VPN endpoint. But it's hard to say because the manufacturers of those boxes make them and put in clean firmware, and other companies buy them up and modify the firmware with their pirate apps and then add other stuff in as well. So you can buy the same box from 10 different vendors, have 10 different firmware on them, and 7 of them have the remote access service on them.

Likewise, that IoT camera you buy may come clean, or may have passed through a dozen hands which may have altered the firmware to add the remote endpoint into it. But again, the same problem remains - the camera is sold with a dozen different firmware from a dozen different companies.

And yes, isolating them is the first step because the remote endpoint software is just a VPN endpoint software - it allows some user to use your device and internet because it's endpoint software.

I grew up in a country that adopted PAL rather than NTSC, so never saw the hue and saturation settings until my family relocated to Canada. I was baffled by how backwards NTSC was.

NTSC is only backwards if you consider it had to work with TV standards that were around since the 1920s or so. It was nicknamed "Compatible Color" because its signal format worked with existing black and white TVs just as well as color TVs. The only change was a slight slowing from 60 fields per second to 59.94 (1000/1001) to accommodate a few cycles of the color carrier.

PAL came afterwards as a full color standard from the get-go - there were other TV standards but all incompatible. TVs that could not display color dropped the color information but it was there and didn't have to be worked around.

PAL worked through delay lines on the color carrier which meant the color sync would be locked on because the color carrier would be present. NTSC didn't have this luxury and the only color sync available was the color burst signal which meant you synced a clock to it, and that clock was used to figure out the color carrier. As the clock drifts through the field (because all clocks will drift) the color will drift as well because the color information is based on the phase difference between that reference clock and the signal. But since the clock drifts, the phase does to. The tint control adjusts the phasing of the signal.

Since PAL had an AM carrier it could be synced. NTSC had the carrier suppressed.

It should be noted that other than timing and the phase alternation, the TV signal formats are basically identical - an NTSC TV will be able to view a PAL signal, but in black and white as the color carriers between NTSC and PAL are different (3.58MHz vs. 4.43MHz) so it won't be able to actually get the color signal.

In Asia, multi-system TVs were basically standard - they could receive NTSC with 3.58MHz color carrier (North America, most everywhere using NTSC), NTSC with a 4.43MHz carrier (basically Japan, sometimes noted as NTSC-J), PAL and SECAM (both using a 4.43MHz carrier). The only real difference is the electron beam timings and how to decode the color - where the carrier is, and how to sync to the carrier - using an internal oscillator (NTSC with colorburst) or an external carrier (PAL/SECAM). Other than that, the information is identical.

And yes, you can run into this if you stick a PAL VHS tape into a NTSC VCR or vice versa. You can get a recognizable picture, though the timing might be off so your TV might be unable to sync properly. (VCRs only have a single sync source - the horizontal sync and the head reads the signal from there and each line is read at output at the appropriate rate).

With the right hype, and a high enough price tag on the machine, the coffee snobs will be all over this.

Well, cold coffee drinks are popular these days. An espresso that is made at room temperature means you can make a cold espresso drink much quicker and with less energy since you don't have to boil water only to cool it back down again.

This would be something you'll find at Starbucks, fine purveyors of sugary coffee drinks. Honestly, they aren't far removed from soft drinks nowadays given the amount of sugar in them. Especially their cold coffee drinks. Cold espresso mixed drinks? Sugar bomb

What's next? Screwsharks? Shit usually exists for a reason, even if unclear and sometimes bad ones. Taking a chainsaw to all of it has caused havoc and probably cost more than it saved.

Screwworms prevention was a mission of USAID. The US was giving aid to many countries which meant that screwworms were being stopped in those countries before it came close to US soil.

The research into screwworms was part of the whole "trans mice" research they openly mocked as they proudly cut funding to. The "trans" refers to transgenetic - i.e., genetically modified mice. The kind of thing you use to do all sorts of research into (especially things like cancer).

The "FO" part of DOGE cuts is coming up. A lot of those programs were humanitarian, but also practical in keeping disease off US soil

The whole point of the C64 Ultimate is to combine what was basically about a dozen or more individual C64 retro projects into something that is consumer friendly. If you ever tried to acquire these things, you'll quickly find out they're often made in small quantities by individual hobbyists all over the world, and buying each piece separately you'll find will cost more from all the individual shipping and piece costs.

The company basically scanned the Commodore retro landscape, picked the components that were the best and most manufacturable, and built it. Then put up a company behind it where they package it into a box and then ship it around the world. Instead of someone having to piece it together from dozens of small time indivviduaals, you can basically buy it in one go with effectively free shipping and it's all integrated and ready to go.

What they are doing is capitalizing on the "Offline" part of the brand. The C64 heralds from a time when computing wasn't online and when you aren't bombarded with subscriptions and alerts and other things. And they're leaning heavily into that with the phone - you use it to communicate with others, not doomscroll.

And anyhow, putting together a real C64 already costs a fair chunk of money - working units are several hundred dollars, plus a disk drive, or other parts like an SD-IEC and adapters to modern TVs and replacement power supplies (because the originals have a tendency to short out now and provide more than 5 volts to the 5 volt line, popping all your rare and now unobtainable chips).

While I probably won't get the phone, I did buy a C64 ultimate. It's just nice having it all in one place. It has modern conveniences that get rid of the stupidly slow disk and tape loading (which were slow even when it was contemporary - basically it was software handshaking serial).

And to be fair, at least they're doing something on brand. Not like the dozens of brands bought up by Chinese companies selling all manner of crap bearing RCA, Zenith, Westinghouse and other old school brand names from companies long dead.

If it's in the CPU I bought, how should it never have had that feature that's clearly in the CPU I bought?

This is the CPU equivalent of those car makers wanting a subscription to enable the heated seats. Maybe AMD will enable it for $5 a month or something.

It's basically buying a car and having heated seats installed even if you didn't pay for them. They did it because it simplifies production. If you choose to enable it yourself, it's unsupported - so if you activate the heated seats yourself that sets your car on fire, they may not warrant the vehicle against the damage and insurance might deny coverage. And yes, usually the heated seats are just left unconnected, so people have hooked their own power connections and switches to manually turn them on and off.

Likewise, producing a a die is very expensive - it's like $100K per mask, and you need 20-30 masks per chip (so about $2-3M to produce a mask set which needs ot be done before you can make one chip). Those chips are then fused so they can be customized per requirements. So one die design can fulfill several lines of processors from low to mid to high end chips and create product differentiation.

Of course, the documentation also will usually not describe features you're not supposed to have,usually those registers are marked as "must be set to zero" and configuration registers are not documented. It's why you often find missing registers in register listings.

Enterprising people who have access often can discover hidden functionality if they try misconfiguring the register and seeing what happens. But such things are unofficial.

Of course, it's entirely possible that because to fix some bugs, they may need to disconnect some blocks so they could re-use the transistors - because often you can get away with just re-wiring the transistors rather than having to remake the entire mask set. It's what makes the difference between say, B1 to B2 steppings from B5 to C0 steppings - the B1 to B2 usually just means a metal layer rework so it's much cheaper as you only need to redo a subset of masks. When they go from B5 to C0, it usually indicates that a whole new mask set was created.

But it could easily mean that they fused out the MEU so you couldn't unofficially enable it, or maybe they borrowed the transistors to fix some other flaw.