Lots of houses/apartments in places like Boston, etc. have old, drafty windows that landlords don’t bother to improve. Lots of hardware stores here sell kits containing double-sided tape and sheets of a special type of plastic. You surround the window with tape, place the plastic over it, then use a hot hair dryer to shrink the plastic until it’s snug. You can hardly see the plastic if you do it right, and it does a great job of dealing with drafts.

I’m in New England and have had a Tesla for 3 years now. Two years ago we drove it down to South Carolina & back. No issues at all thanks to their supercharger network.

Haitch

Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.

Same. I’m one and done with my Model Y.

Play paintball.

I started playing back in the 80’s when I was in college and everybody used paint guns that could only hold about 15 rounds, and fired one at a time.

I’m way too old to run around in the woods like I did 40 years ago, and the game has completely changed as well. People have guns that can hold hundreds of paintballs and shoot incredibly fast, so the whole strategy is unlike it was. I just don’t find modern paintball enjoyable at all.

IANAL, but I believe these laws cover audio recording only. OP shouldn’t have an issue if they use something that records video only.

Think about it a second. I live in a two party consent state, but I see security & surveillance cameras everywhere. If two party consent was required for video then they wouldn’t be there.

Professional hitmen don’t actually exist.

Sammy “The Bull” Gravano would probably disagree with you. He’d likely consider himself a professional since he admitted to involvement in 19 murders. Granted they were all mob related, and not “for hire” by anybody with a pile of cash and a grudge…

Smarter bots know how to easily avoid being detected based on the speed of their requests by simply adding a random delay to them. A few years ago we discovered a very slow speed credential stuffing attack (testing usernames & passwords) against my employers site. It was only testing one set of credentials every couple of minutes.

Once we discovered it we didn’t block it though. We were able to spot the attack fairly easily once we knew what to look for, so we updated our system to always return a login failure no matter what credentials they sent.

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New Zealand. The wife & I spent 3 weeks there earlier this year. The people were all very friendly, and the range of things to do & see is just amazing if you’re into the outdoors at all.

I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

Getting rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. Had all of about 1 second of warning when she slammed on her brakes and started skidding.

My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.

The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.

A well thought out and implemented backup system, along with a good security setup is how you deal with malware. If backups won’t protect you from malware then you’re doing backups wrong. A proper backup implementation keeps a series of full backups plus incremental backups based on those full ones. So say your data doesn’t change very often, then you might do a full backup once a month and incremental ones twice a week. You keep 6 months of the combinations of full & incrementals, you don’t just overwrite the backups with new ones.

If you’re doing backups like that and you suffer a malware attack then you have the ability to recover data as far as 6 months ago. The chances you don’t discover malware encrypting your data for 6+ months is tiny. If you’re really paranoid then you also test recovering files from random backups on a regular basis.

My employer has detected and blocked multiple malware attacks using a combination of the above practices plus device management software that can detect unusual NAS activity and block suspect devices on our networks. Each time our security team was able to identify the encrypted files and restore over 99% from backups.

Suppose you’re hit by a ransomware attack and all the data on your NAS gets encrypted. Your RAID “backup” is just as inaccessible as everything else. So it’s not a backup. A true backup would let you recover from the ransomware attack once you have identified and removed the malware that allowed the attack.

Including my employer being bought out by another company? Ten since 1990. Shortest stint was under a year. Bern with my current employer 11 years now.

I started out doing software development. I’m now a devops engineer.

Back in the 90’s Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” and not a search engine. They had teams of human editors that would curate answers for popular questions. During the dot com boom of the late 90’s they realized they needed to automate that system so they started buying other small startups that were doing more with search technologies. They acquired one search company in New Jersey called Teoma and another in Massachusetts called Direct Hit.

The executives at Jeeves at the time were not very smart though. They were very hands on with these technologies they didn’t fully understand and made some stupid decisions. For example, Direct Hit had a simple advertising platform they had developed where anybody could sign up and bid for ad placement on search results pages. It was largely automated and generated a lot of revenue. The Jeeves CEO said “we’re not in the business of advertising so get rid of it”, so it was sold off. It was sold to that scrappy little startup you mentioned and transformed into AdWords. Jeeves squandered other tech advantages in similar ways.

In a similar vein, they had a huge internal project for many months to create an adult (porn) search engine that they were going to co-brand alongside the Jeeves character they used to use. They planned to call it “Ask Mimi” and had registered domains, created a French maid character to go along with the Jeeves butler character, etc. After a huge push the company decided they didn’t want to tarnish their image with porn and dropped it all pretty much overnight. There used to be an article about all this archived on CNet’s news.com site but I can’t find it anymore thanks to their terrible search engine….

Source: I worked for one of those startups that Jeeves acquired.