jbuzbee

My first job out of college in the early 80's was working on diagnostics for an old NASA computer. "What language do I use?" I asked my boss. "We don't have a compiler". OK, I thought, assembly language. "No" said my boss "We don't have an assembler". "OK" I guess I'll write machine language. "What's the development environment?" "We don't have one. There's no editor. There's no network. There's no keyboard or monitor" I had to write my diagnostics in 96 bit hex using pencil and paper and then enter my program into the computer using toggle switches on the front panel. Kids today have no idea :-) And get off my lawn!

Worried about the privacy of data that the US government holds on you? It's soon to be in the hands of a quickly thrown together AI system for the entire federal government

I worked on a system at Martin Marietta in the late 80's and early 90's where we created tiled maps for use by the US Army. We had a large scanner we'd use to scan their maps, then we'd georectify the scan and slice the result up into tiles of 128x128 pixels which would be compressed before storing to a whopping 360 Meg hard drive. I participated in a number of Army field exercises in the US and Europe where we'd show the digital maps and graphic overlays off to troops who were using paper maps with little paper icons they move around to reflect the current situation. Our capability never went anywhere because Management wasn't really into map-maping and the Defense Mapping Agency started doing it themselves, distributing their maps on CD.

"Hard to find a more American article than this." Just wait until they start taking pot-shots at them and then it will be "real" America: BOOM! "Look Ma! I done got one!"

Just another example of impulsive and very poor judgment from Trump. Even though he had the right to declassify this image, his only reason to do so was to taunt the Iranians - Ha Ha, your rocket blew up. The Iranians likely corrected their issue and moved on whereas now our adversaries have clear evidence of our satellite capabilities and can adjust their behavior accordingly for years to come.

Yeah - When covered in even a moderate amount of snow, output drops almost all the way off. I had thought that being black, they would melt off quickly, but that doesn't appear to be the case. As an aside, my daughter's neighbor has solar and after a big snowstorm, a foot of snow slid off his panels, right into the side of her house destroying a basement window and blowing shattered glass 5 foot into the basement.

One interesting fact that I recall, and that I didn't see in the article, is that evolution in some Owls traded off silent flight for the inability to fly when their feathers are wet. When there's an extended period of wet weather, owl fledglings may starve because their parents can't hunt.

Yeah, you typically need some sort of hub unless you run Home Assistant. My understanding is that it doesn't need any hub for Matter support.

Yeah - you can even pass your own python, go, bash, etc. "on/off" script as a parameter to the example matter-device so you can get away with no code changes at all. You can get help at the listed discord server.

If you can do Typescript, matter.js makes it trivial to at least create a virtual matter device. Five minutes to clone the repo, build, run and pair with Google, Apple, Alexa, SmartThings, etc. The one caveat is certification. With Google you need to register as a developer so it allows an uncertified device. The others just give a warning.

See: https://github.com/project-chip/matter.js

Those bank-teller tubes are still in use in the Denver suburbs.

Enjoyed the story and it reminded me of another bridge over I-225 that I wondered about and drive under occasionally in the Denver area. The bridge is much wider than a typical pedestrian bridge and there is really "nothing" on either side. I don't know if it's true, but the story I eventually found is that when I-225 was being built in the 70's it cut a farmer's field in half so he got a personal bridge that he could drive across in his tractor! Of course now, the farmer and his fields are long gone. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6415158,-104.8783965,87a,35y...

Olathe had POpular 4 and STate 2

If you search on youtube, you can see that some F-117s are still flying. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UUOJBBNfZY&ab_channel=Youtu...

I use this in a little raspberry pi project. For persistence, I occasionally copy data to a writable partition and then at boot, after the ram overlay is mounted, I copy it back.

I don't know the answer, but are these numbers comparable? I would assume that Waymo is talking about crashes while in self-driving mode, is that true for Tesla as well or are they just talking about all miles driven, self driving mode and manual?

I was just getting ready to say the same thing and was wishing for a plugin that would replace all exclamation points with a period. That would make reading much easier

I just got done searching for an accessory for a specific model of car on Amazon. My results prominently included items (ads) for accessories for a different model of car that would not fit my car. How does that help anyone? Wasted money for the company buying ads. Wasted time for me trying to figure out what is really applicable. And if I wasn't careful, I'd have ordered the wrong thing and would have to return it wasting everyone's time and effort. I guess Amazon got their money for showing me the ad. Worth it? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not one of the richest person in the world like Bezos - My lack of vision?

I worked on a downstream consumer of a passive radar system years ago and was amazed at its capabilities. We had it set up on a tennis court outside of Farnborough UK during a bi-annual air show and it was able to track all the activities of the various planes going through their routines. And I recall seeing commercial aircraft out in the English channel, 50 miles or so away. I don't know what became of the system, but there's an old marketing brochure online here: http://www.mobileradar.org/Documents/Silent_Sentry.pdf

When Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA KGB double-agent was sent to prison, his personal library ended up in a used bookstore in the DC area and I picked up a few volumes that had his name stamped on the inside.

Iceland generates 25% of their energy geothermically https://nea.is/geothermal/

I also use the Wemo switches at home. And yes, for the most part they are reliable. I really like setting schedules based on sunset and sunrise. The integration with Google sometimes fails as the article notes (I interpret as a timeout), but if you set up scheduling in the Wemo app, it's stored locally so they can run their programmed schedule without going out to the internet. That's a plus. I also control them via SOAP calls from the local lan so if Wemo ever gives up the market, they are still usable.

I have 6 lines, "unlimited" with T-Mobile for around $130 used by various family members. Can't find a better deal than that.

"wouldn't one already know how to get to their favorite brewery?" - I navigate most everywhere I go of any distance so I get warned of traffic issues or speed traps.

You knew this was coming ;-) Back in 1993 I had SLS Linux running on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM. And that included X11 and gcc so I could compile my own kernels!

Ting brought fiber into our 40 year-old neighborhood a couple of years ago. Symmetric gigabit with no caps.

https://ting.com/internet/town/centennial

There's a difference between a bribe to win a contract or similar vs. the case where you feel in danger - e.g. you come across a roadblock in rural Mexico and an armed official wants a "clear up your paperwork" payoff to let you pass. That's the scenario the training covers.

Yep, they did and do. And we are a US company with lots of lawyers. My coworker was at a tiny island airport in the middle of the Pacific. If he didn't pay, he wasn't going anywhere.

I've gone through various "International Training" sessions at my company and one of the things they teach is that if a foreign official says something like, "hmmm... your papers are invalid, but I can help you out for $100" or similar, you should pay and immediately report (and expense) it on return. I know one coworker who went through this traveling through a small country.

Yeah - same here. I posted fairly frequently back in the late 80s but nothing comes up