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Comment Fond memories (Score 1) 46

Visiting their original storefront in Chicago was one of my favorite excursions when I was young and in need of science fair inspiration or just "stuff" for one of my personal projects.

Pretty much all the B&M and online surplus electronics stores I used to buy from have faded away or moved to a purely eBay existence.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 37

Generally those traditional crawlers are well-behaved, and will follow the instructions given in robots.txt, though not all follow suggestions like crawl-delay. And if not, they tend to originate from fixed source IP addresses which can be blocked or throttled by the site operator or their CDN.

Back in 2020 IETF released a draft document "RateLimit Header Fields for HTTP" providing rate-limit headers which well-behaved clients should respect.

Comment Re:If you're not familiar... (Score 1) 337

Higher income families received fewer A's (under the new system).

They seem to be suggesting this is because students from "higher income" families were better able to adjust their behavior to work with the system, including lower absenteeism, turning in assignments on-time, and completing extra credit assignments. Oddly I was one of the lowest income students in my high school, and yet I managed to meet these minimal standards!

Oddly enough, these same behaviors (showing up, on-time-delivery, and going above-and-beyond) are also desirable skills for nearly any employer, thus "Grading for Equity" does a disservice to students by explicitly removing them from the grading equation

Looking at Joe Feldman's defense of GfE, the one thing he seems to get right is his suggestion that a student's grade in a given course should be most influenced by whether she mastered the subject matter at the end than how muchs he struggled with it at the beginning, middle of the term

Comment Re:So change the rules then (Score 2) 113

Just if one other person had won they would have still lost a bit of money. It would be hilarious if two groups did it at the same time, guaranteeing record profits for the state lottery, and also guaranteeing that both groups lose more money than they win.

They spent around $24.5M on tickets (assuming they were able to keep the 5% sales commission), took home $57.8M (the lump-sum payout of the $95M pool).

If one other person had won each winner would take home $28.9M, still a small net profit.

Comment Discard the second fix (Score 3, Informative) 38

In college we explored replication the GPS algorithm, your final calculation would always give you two position fixes -- one in space, the other within the earth's atmosphere. Your algorithm would discard the orbital result and return the second answer.

Scratch that, reverse it, and you've got your answer for a lunar fix /s

Comment Re:"Ghost gun" is a propaganda term... (Score 1) 199

I’m wondering why the 2A crowd is so silent on Hunter Biden...

See also: Philando Castile.

The reason your self-constructed strawman suggests is just your personal biases showing, not the NRA's. Rather Castile's case and Biden's had one thing in common -- the person at the center of the case was a drug user. Also the NRA rarely has much to say about law enforcement shootings, regardless of the ethnicity of the victim

OTOH, " the 2A crowd" (which is a lot larger than the NRA) did actually have quite a bit to say about Castile and about Hunter, yet were mostly ignored by the major media.

Comment Re:Yawn (Score 1) 166

Hell, the whole "bad coffee" trope is because traditionally workplaces used economy brand coffee.

The "free" coffee at my former Fortune-500's office kept declining in quality, at one point our jump server had "ping" aliased to set a payload of 4BAD0FF1CEC0FFEE.

It was almost a relief when they stopped providing free coffee on each floor, instead of taking a 1 minute detour to pour a cup, the whole team would troop down to buy some actually good coffee across the street at Intelligentsia, where sometimes we'd get to chatting with the competition...

Comment Re:Is this about Carplay's UI, or about revenue? (Score 1) 235

For something emergent want to fix right now, like the monthly screeching EAS tones on the radio or closing off the 3-days-dead skunk smell coming in from the "fresh" air vents, I vastly prefer a physical button.

Nothing stops the automaker from also offering voice control as an option, but there are some controls which it just makes sense to have direct hotbutton access.

Comment Is this about Carplay's UI, or about revenue? (Score 1) 235

How much of this animosity towards Carplay is because drivers might actually prefer Rivians user experience, and how much of it is because Rivian is missing out on all that additional monthly Connect+ subscription revenue?

Some things, you really do want a button for. If I'm looking to turn down the radio or turn off the mixing of outside air, I don't want to have a conversation with my car to accomplish those basic tasks.

Comment Re:As the saying goes (Score 2) 104

That said, there is another case, which I can't find, where the woman was abused by her husband/boyfried by him beating her and dragging her by her hair, she kills him, and now she's going to jail.

There are a couple of such cases in the news, the key factor in each being that, at the moment she killed him, she was not in fact in immediate danger of death of grievous bodily harm. Sometimes the woman is acquitted by a sympathetic jury, other times convicted. In one example of the former, Marcia Thompson, a 44-year-old U.S. Customs agent, shot her husband in the back while he lay unarmed on the living room couch, then walked free.

Comment Re:PO Box, not a clustered mail box (Score 1) 103

Stealing from apartment-style "cluster mailboxes" is much more lucrative as you only need to get past one lock (or steal a master "arrow" key) and you have access to all the mail and packages in the cluster.

The PO Boxes inside a post office are each keyed uniquely and do not have a master key. It is much more difficult & risky to gain access to the backside to loot the boxes en masse, as that is within the "secure" side of the post office. You'd pretty much have to be a USPS employee to successfully and repeatedly steal mail and packages from within a post office. I strongly doubt anybody is getting away with raking open multiple boxes inside a post office, assuming those locks are even that easy to open

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