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Comment Independence Day (Score 2) 63

Americans: Fireworks are illegal? Fuckoff, I'm lighting them in the street then.

Worse: some dumbass caused a fire near LA by buying professional show grade fireworks without knowing how to use them.

If he had access to a fireworks store (like I shop at in New Hampshire) he probably would have just bought those.

I buy consumer mortars and those are *plenty* big for home use.

Much kudos to the Chinese who make very reliable pyrotechnics at quite a fair price. I only spent $160 this year despite the tariffs.

Comment Fuel or electrical? (Score 2) 50

Two theories that seem reasonable from what I've been hearing:

1. Contaminated fuel combined with high temps causing the fuel to become gaseous before getting to the engine.

2. Apparently a solar storm hit exactly at the time of the crash, raising questions about induced currents causing an electrical failure.

The emergency turbine shouldn't have deployed if it were bad gas, so that leads to the sudden electrical failure causing the crash.

That turbine works fine at altitude but not at take-off because at least you can glide to a landing if you have electrical/hydraulic power.

Comment Re:sudo-rs (Score 1) 19

The systemd version takes a similar approach - only handling the 99.9% use case of running a local command as a different user based on some basic rules and only really providing a userspace implementation without suid.

IIRC that use case is about 15% of OG sudo's code but most distros carry around all the features. I dunno, maybe it can be compiled without those but I don't see that in distros I've used.

Comment Re:What the fuck?! (Score 1) 29

Corporatism is a distinct concept from Capitalism. That's the one you're describing. There's been a psyop by Socialists to describe corporatism as capitalism so they get more of a merger of business and State (fascism).

Corporations are creations of a government in which governments get a cut and politicians get bribes in exchange for protection from justice for the corporate actors' crimes.

If you read Adam Smith he described this as Mercantilism in his time and recommended free market capitalism as its antidote with an emphasis on the accumulation of capital and investment into more competitive production.

Von Mises fleshed this out more a couple centuries later (followed by Hayek and Rothbard). The definitive work is /Man, Economy, and State/ which breaks it all down in tremendous detail.

Notably corporations in the early USA were limited to public works projects and had time-limited grants (e.g. for building a bridge or later the railroads).

JD Rockefeller bribed Congress during Reconstruction to make corporations permanent, so he wouldn't lose his charter for Standard Oil. He later wrote the Sherman Anti-trust Act to hurt his competition.

Today we have immortal psychopathic corporations with a legal mandate to be depraved and with legal personhood. The Dulles brothers created the CIA to fight wars and conduct assassinations on behalf of the corporations. cf. United Fruit or the Pepsi War.

After the Revolution remember to forbid corporations. The Gini Coefficient is too damn high.

Comment Gaza? (Score -1, Flamebait) 38

After an Iranian missile hit, at least, the parking lot of Microsoft Israel, several reports came out saying that they were helping the IDF with genocide operations in Gaza.

I don't know if it's true but those are the real reports.

The timing and 'quiet' character suggests Pakistan might have told them to get the hell out.

"Developing story" as they say.

Comment Soham Parekh? (Score 0) 34

How common of a name is Soham Parekh in India?

At one time I was in a tech group with three Mike Johnsons. Assuredly different people, though slightly confusing.

But I don't really feel sorry for these startups going for global minimum wage and getting burned.

Hire an American named Steve from Akron and you'll be less likely to be scammed.

Comment Re:OMG! What are the chances...? (Score 0) 67

Probably depends on its characteristics.

He had quite an amusing series of papers popping the bubbles of all the 'debunkers'.

He never proved what it was but he sure proved many things that it wasn't, as claimed by ThE eXpErTs.

Midwit scientists abhor an unknown and run to bad ideas like a safety blanket.

FWIW his grad student at the time had the better ideas, involving relative motion of solar systems within the Galactic Plane. His models were the best fit for the available data.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 93

CD players were standard until 2019, when luxury brands started to phase them out.

The last manufacturer to have them standard was Subaru, through 2023.

You must be a lessee?

My truck never had a CD player. I replaced the head unit with a cassette player with a $30 Walmart bluetooth unit a few years ago, and it's legit the fastest bluetooth connection I own. About a second after it gets power it's linked to the phone.

It's good to own multiple paid-for vehicles.

ThriftBooks has great deals on DVD's and CD's.

Comment Re:How would you exfiltrate data? (Score 2) 37

The way they used the "Crowdstrike Outage" to hide crimes was to reboot into a WinPE environment and 'do recovery' while wiping evidence.

I haven't used a Mac in a while but it used to be booting from external media was easy.

I can imagine ways to require keys from secure boot and hardware to decrypt the main drive but I haven't seen those deployed myself.

So, reboot from external, copy data, reboot normally.

Somebody can tell me if Apple already provides a way to avoid this.

Comment Re:Trump (Score 3, Insightful) 156

We don't have Patriots or THAAD near most US cities.

Our role, per DC, is to pay for the defense of other countries, not our own.

If Trump were worried about China he wouldn't have renewed the visas of 300,000 Chinese students in the past week or so.

China hardly has the money, population, or inclination to go to war. They do have the "excess male problem" but their population crash due to OCPF is so large they need them all to keep the economy running.

But the hypersonics are a good deterrent to war-mad nations where the legislators are all bought off by their military industry.

Comment Ask about locales (Score 2) 57

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

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