"We know to the gallon how much gasoline is burned in Southern California - it's taxed. We know the efficiency of an IC engine. We know the efficiency of an electric motor. We know battery charging, storage, and use efficiencies. We know how many kW-hr replace that gasoline. We know what demand brings the grid down on hot summer days. Run the numbers, then apologize." -- Uncle Al Schwartz, sci.physics, 15 Sep 2008

All on a corkboard where nobody can see

Several other Unix workstations developed and manufactured:

Callan Data Systems
Apollo
Wicat
Ithaca Intersystems

Does the source code reveal the encryption for all those top-secret Type 1 fonts? (I mislaid my copy of the Black Book.)

This exact attack occurred twice, early in 2020, and again 11/2020 on my personal Web site that has been around for over 20 years but which I only lately hosted on GoDaddy. Worse, my content is strictly old-school plain static HTML, and the hackery injected PHP scripts in various new files while leaving all my genuine content alone. So there is no reason for this injection to have worked, except that the GoDaddy server had activated a PHP feature which I never asked for or used.

Worse still, the hack was unknown to me for weeks because it only served the malware pages when the access came through certain referrers. Since I only checked status with direct URLs, everything looked normal to my regular monitoring. It was only when a kindly customer told me something was wrong that I first knew there was this insidious attack. I had noticed a slow decline in engagement and contacts, but I though that was some kind of COVID social effect.

The hack itself was easy to correct; I simply deleted a few mysterious .php files. I assumed it was due to some password leak and tightened up the site security with 2FA. Little did I know the injection was exploiting some backdoor in the hosting service itself, which I could not have discovered, defended, or secured.

Then it happened again, and I failed to detect it for quite a while. I was too sure that the upgraded security had protected the content.

My site's credibility and search rankings are ruined, after 25 years of accumulated reputation from honest, meaningful, freely-available content. I never paid a dime for search ads, or played SEO games. I earned the asset of "goodwill" the oldest way possible, organically, but the big-search company was the custodian, and they are not in the business of restoring assets lost to goodwill thieves. My living comes from my engineering work product being publicized on my site. So my business is ruined as well. It is a criminal devastation, so there is no recourse. I can't get my career or online credibility back.

Hypothetically, would 'print to pdf' scrub this fingerprint?

No, not necessarily, depending on how it's implemented.

For example, a unique ID could be coded by simply scrambling the order of appearance of a series of elements necessary to the document. There are limitless ways to hide information inside PDFs, and no filter could possibly detect them all.

reruns (noun): the treasure trove of intellectual property in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop

I applied on the FCC Web site and got approved, after two tries and a week of fussing over bureacratic paperwork. They actually demand you upload tax returns and electronically sign a perjury affidavit. For a nominal $50 monthly handout that may or may not materialize, and for who knows how long.

So I had a magic approved application ID, a code number. I expected I would simply have to type that code into my ISP's online account management, and they would handle the rest. I don't wanna disclose who my ISP is, but they have a death star logo.

What I then discovered is that I had to call my ISP on the phone and talk to a human. Uh oh. I got an eager individual who didn't speak English very well. So we spent about an hour trying to validate my EBB credit, because they don't use the magic number, but instead have to match up name, address, and SSN with proper spelling, feeding into some kind of FCC backchannel challenge-response validation system. This took several tries and failures before success, with the threat that all of it would be a complete miss. But in the end success! Congratulations!

I was very careful to dictate that none of this would change my current plan, and the agent assured me it absolutely would not.

When I got the actual paperwork back from the ISP, sure enough, my plan was the same, but ... I now have a $10/month equipment fee that I didn't have before. This was excused as you're getting $40/month off your old rates, and $10/month going against the new fee. So don't complain, citizen beneficiary.

But I had very carefully set up this plan and rate years ago, to not have the equipment fee, by originally buying the modem from the ISP under their promise to not charge a monthly fee if I paid up front. Instead now I have a perpetual monthly fee as a side effect of getting a temporary bit from the FCC.

In this case the ISP is nominally honoring the "won't change your plan" promise, but instead changing the fees for the plan to "current terms". In the old phone landline days we called this cramming, an abuse. And here they are doing it again.

I suppose you must haggle with them again to correct their "accidental" increase. In the end it's not worth $50.

The Congress appropriated $2.2 billion for this credit, at $50/month each. If some significant fraction of American households apply, then this amount will be spent in 1 or 2 months, meaning your expected value is $0 to $100, with the median outcome being $0.

... as if millions of shopping carts suddenly crashed to the ground and were suddenly immobilized.

This is the voodoo economics of bureaucrats tabulating value as "not taking away the intangible good things of life."

How much ransom would you pay to get your kids back? That's their value! Add it in, Mr Green Eyeshades.

How much would you pay to get the Bill of Rights back, if we hypothetically take that away? (And is it even hypothetical any more?) The founders that secured "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity", what's that worth as an asset on the balance sheet? That intangible asset is paying intangible dividends, and that's more GDP loot! Just like good will counts in business! Like consumer surplus!

When a calf is born, the per-capita GDP goes up. When a baby is born, it goes down. So clearly humans are negative value in the GDP.

These economists always confuse theories of reality with models of behavior.

Light IS an electromagnetic field. There's no tricks in an electromagnetic field that can magically fix photons. They're not different things that can be worked against each other. It's like expecting your wife to fix the woman you're married to.

Long ago, college dorms were more like Army barracks.

They still have those. They're called fraternities. Well, minus the hygiene, discipline, and charm of the US Army.

I see no dress at all. Check out the Emperor's New Clothes.

This policy comes from the fact that Social Security recipients die but often their next of kin do not report the event to the SSA, and a month or more of ineligible benefits wind up in the hands of some survivor in the family. This is not quite theft, but the fact is: Some family member fraudulently cashed a DEAD person's check that was legally void once the beneficiary was DEAD. This can only work due to the family's failure to notify the SSA promptly that the beneficiary was DEAD, which is the duty of the family. Now maybe everyone is too bereaved to be telling the government that grandma has passed, but in that case you ought not to be cashing a DEAD guy's checks. It is not reasonable to expect the government to make a federal investigation of who in the family wrongly took this money, whether it was deliberately or somewhat innocently taken. They take it back from the next of kin, and if the fault was with somebody else, well, you sort that out within the family. Sure that is messy, but it is a family mess and not a government mess. That the government takes it back from a refund, and doesn't affirmatively prosecute you, seems quite kind and gentle.

"I know all mushrooms great and small,"
Said William Harvey Snooks.
And passed from the parlor to the hall
My how natural he looks.