I've thought of something similar. I tend to buy cheap cables off ebay (and elsewhere) and I've had some bad ones (and a lot of good ones). Generally, it's been a risk I'm willing to take but it would be nice to know ahead of time the bad ones (and some work fine in one situation but not in others)

Have done this myself wiring up a USB port with the pins the wrong way around and smoking a USB drive. Fortunately, nothing of value was lost.

Just realized that that would probably require a second push of the button so not so user-friendly.

Correct. The way to do this would be to take the lowest 5 bits and if it's 20 or over, re-roll.

If it at all interests you, I'd recommend looking a little closer at QM at the academic level. It's almost 100% mathematics.

It looks like it is random. For controlled conditions, there's no room for any hidden variables that would affect it. Einstein famously said "God does not play dice" but it looks like he does.

Now, it's possible that some new physics could open up that might show differently but there's no reason to expect it will.

And as much relevance as your comparison of an act of voluntary association to one of compulsion. Which was the point.

Yep, moved to the Ingram building. Wish I'd have known. I went quite far out of my way to visit last time I was in the area.

Hmm. I may be mistaken. It may just have moved. I didn't see any signs for it though. Oh well...

It doesn't even have a physics department anymore. Sad to go back to where I spent so many years of my life and find it replaced by an architecture department. I think they abdicated their claim to have a say.

Or try opening a business in a gang run area then demand all the benefits of the gang's protection (i.e. not having your store burned to the ground) while paying none of the dues.

Voluntary association. It either is or it isn't.

He's still in power.

Definitely. I remember being excited going from a 486 to a Pentium and how much it sped up the X session (which was already snappy enough to work with). It seemed like zero lag user interaction was just around the corner. Instead, we joined Windows in its laggy unresponsiveness. This wasn't just PCs either, even an Atari ST could run a usable monochrome X server. Instead of thoughtful coding, it's frameworks all the way down now.

Man, this explains a lot. Mainstream Linux GUIs have been going backwards for a long time. But at least we have, uh, well, we already had most of it back then, come to think of it.

Woot, Slackware.

I upgraded from 10.something to 14.1 a while back and I'm loving the changes.