Gordonjcp

I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade...

> threatening to have him deported to China while specifically calling out his public criticism of the CCP with a disgusting "who knows how he may be received"

I think you're overstating it a bit.

How about you tell the whole story?

Well, it still seems to be sitting up top, so I had to pick on this comment when I made a demo of the proggy:

https://youtu.be/jDwy8Js4FiU

If you think they're really going to do that and not hand over keys, I can give you a great price on this bridge I'm keen to move.

About 15 years ago I was using telephone banking, when you had to put in a 4-digit PIN to access banking. I could still hear background call centre noise so I asked the operator if they were still on the phone when I put the PIN in, and he confirmed he was.

"Okay, so you heard me type in the PIN? So now you can know my PIN?"

"Oh no", he said, "it's just beeps, like this - ", and pressed a few digits.

"Right so you typed 1 6 3 2 4, there."

"..."

"That's what you typed, isn't it?"

"Uhm... yes, how did you guess?"

"I didn't guess, I could hear the beeps. I've got a reasonable ear for pitch, so I can tell what the numbers are from the tones. Any chance you could escalate this to your manager after the call, and tell them to give me a phone if they've any questions?"

They rang me the next day, and I explained the situation to them.

Now, at least in the UK, you get transferred away from the call handler when you put your PIN in.

There was a *phenomenal* series called How To Be Cool in the mid-80s, written by Philip Pullman, about a rather disturbing group called The National Cool Board (a play on words from The National Coal Board), profoundly weird shit.

Unfortunately it had Gary Glitter in it playing a fairly major character so unless someone dumps a ropey old VHS of it onto Youtube it's never going to be seen outside of Granada Television's deepest murkiest vaults.

You own a bunch of high-def video cameras already.

Go make it.

I wonder how hard it is to get at the bit that drives the screw pin, and just wind it back with a wee battery?

You know, the way you get the "security locked" electric handbrakes on high-end cars to release, when the electrics are dead?

A roughly fist-sized lump of your brain seems to be responsible for all the vision processing. It is as power-hungry as its size suggests.

Ever wonder why you can't really seem to read properly when you're hungry and tired? That part of your brain is in power-saving mode.

> Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one

[citation needed]

The font looks good but I find it really hard to read C code with the ligated symbols.

You also get Shinty/Hurling matches between Scottish and Irish teams.

If you don't know what Shinty is, imagine if you took Ice Hockey, got rid of all the ice, allowed people to swing from as high and back as they like (golf swing, rather than "keep your stick on the ice"), and just in general made Ice Hockey really fast and violent.

If you look at this the opposite way round, then you discover why the Apple II and Sinclair ZX Spectrum had such a bonkers screen layout.

The 4116 DRAM chips were arranged as a 128x128 grid with seven-bit row and column addresses. By scattering the RAM like that, different "pages" could be hit by the screen updates, solving the problem of refreshing the DRAM. If you read them sequentially, the RAM would have decayed by the time you got to the bottom of the screen.

What was the climate you grew up with, and how long ago?

> I'd expect self driving cars to have much better sensors and reaction times than we do

That is never going to happen.

Maybe so that if you live in a house where the "street address" doesn't actually match the street you're on, because 1950s town planning conflicts with 1590s town planning, the delivery driver can phone you before your "Special Mixed Kebab" - a bulging 16" pizza box full of doner, kofta, shaslik, shawerma, fried chicken, burgers, pakora, four Naan breads and half a litre of hummus, for 25 quid - gets cold?

Your reward for shovelling the most shit is a bigger shovel.

Frankly, it sounds like you're the problem here.

How well do they conduct? At the moment aluminium is kind of the "sweet spot" between weight, cost, and conductivity.

> In actuality, the reverse is true — Disney, Target, and Bud Light being examples of where catering to that mythical minority power cratered a company.

Oh yeah because Disney lost all its money and went out of business because they decided to have some black and gay characters.

Actually no, the right-wing snowflakes lost their tiny fragile little minds because there was a gay black person in a film instead of someone straight out of 1950s propaganda.

Can you give an example of that?

Ooops, triggered one of the last dozen or so folk still using EMACS.

There used to be a black first-gen BMW X5 that parked up near my partner's house in the Glasgow's South Side.

Scuffed 22" alloy wheels, mismatched half-bald no-name tyres, bubbly black window tint film, bubbly Gucci-print gold-on-carbon wrap on the bonnet and tailgate, "Arabic prayer" CD dangly tassley thing hanging from the mirror, huge exhaust pipes.

No tax, no MOT (last MOT failed quite comprehensively on various serious defects), no insurance.

Like, come on, guy, try *not* to be the reason that stereotypes exist, eh?

> Your home is private . You have an expectation of privacy there.

Yeah, but if you put your illegal drugs and illegal guns right there in the window where everyone can see them - be that on the dashboard of your car or on your front room windowsill - you can't really say they were "private", can you?

Given that it's an idea that has been in production vehicles for 40 years, I doubt you'd need to spend $1.2M to "develop" it.

> There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a system and reasoning out this defense strategy. There will be value in preliminary productization of something this for mass production,

https://a.allegroimg.com/original/03e206/1de3f26447d79428246...

Optional extra on Series 1 Citroën XMs, an immobiliser keypad programmed into the engine ECU. It cost about 100 quid in 1990 money, on a 40 grand luxury car. Most V6es and 2.5 diesels had them, few 4-cyl petrols or 2.1 diesels had them.

There's no need to spend $1.2M developing something that's already existed for a long time. This was actually a development of a similar keypad fitted to most Citroën CX Turbos, from the mid-1980s. The idea is nearly 40 years old.

It's inexpensive proven technology, and it works well.

You'd have to eat a lot of solder. Metallic lead reacts with fuck all, basically, which is why it's such a good material for things like roof flashing. It doesn't even react particularly with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach, producing only lead chloride (which will make its way out of your body fairly quickly) and hydrogen gas (not enough to do anything fun if you burp while smoking a cigarette, but let's not take chances eh). Metallic lead is about as bioavailable as sand.

No no, if you want to get lead into your system you've got to really try quite hard. Taking some lead and mixing it with tin won't get the job done, oh no, not even a little bit. You're going to want to make it into an organic salt, maybe by welding on a lovely big acetate and then getting that into your stomach.

Now why would you want to do a thing like that?

Well, you might be an ancient Roman, with a fondness for "defrutum", a sweet sticky confection made by boiling soured wine and grapes in a lead pot until all the water is driven off. The acetic acid rips lead out like nobody's business and gets well and truly stuck together. Oh, and it tastes really sweet too, this lead acetate, which is just the thing to liven up any Roman party if the wine's gone a bit funny in the sun.

Now you've got a lovely big sugar that your digestive system will happily squish into your sensitive tissues, where it'll break up and be on its way leaving a big fat lead atom right there with nothing to bind to, until it finds something. Oh hey, you know that sugars - even with a great big lead atom weighing them down - cross the blood-brain barrier just fine, right? You couldn't design a better way to get lead poisoning.

Now toss in some ergot mould because you won't eat the local wheat because everyone is going mad from something and it must be those wily locals poisoning you so you only eat rye shipped over from Rome in mouldy sacks, and pretty soon - between the brain damage from lead acetate and the hallucinogenic mould - you're ready to turn horses into senators, and tell your soldiers to blunder into midgie-infested marshes in the North of Scotland where they sink out of sight never to be seen again.

Lovely.

Yeah, they don't really have crumple zones, that's kind of the problem.

"Look at how strong this truck is, it survived an accident with barely a scratch!" just means it transferred all the energy to the wet squashy piles of mixed meat inside.

You know what EMACS stands for?

Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping.

Isn't it a problem that carbon is mostly one of the things you make nearly every resistor out of, instead of wires?

How would it become aerosolised?

The CDC believes a lot of fairly bonkers stuff that does not match up to reality.

If you heated solder up to the point that lead was boiling off, your circuit board would be on fire.

You cannot get lead poisoning from using leaded solder.