At first I thought that the name Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments was a bit redundant until I considered the ramifications of calling it Littleton Electricity and Water Departments.

Sure, there is plenty of systemic failure within the legal system. Good luck stamping that out, and I would welcome the news. However, the sheer hubris of Mrs. Holmes applying herself to the task as if she were any kind of victim doesn't sit well with me. The hallucination she's presenting makes me wonder if she uses some AI copilot for making her press releases.

I suppose they'll copyright my hosts file next?

Wow. How do you have an e-commerce site with an improperly configured robots.txt file? It sounds like they learned a relatively inexpensive lesson. Perhaps robots.txt should have a configuration to limit bandwidth and/or access frequency. That would allow crawlers to have responsible access without having to lock them out entirely. Still, a large crawler like OpenAI also needs some self-throttling heuristics to keep from crushing poorly-configured Websites. It's pretty easy to tell when your latency suddenly increases or packets start getting dropped that you might be stressing a target. For that matter, why not interleave queries rather than dropping the bomb site by site?

Anyway, it's good to see these stories every once in a while so that those who learn by example have some grist for their mills.

Oh, this might be worth disabling flaresolverr (or waiting 10-15 minutes for it to get counterstriked again), if only for the nostalgia. Brilliant play, but unsustainable.

I was working with a large manufacturing company at the turn of the millennium. They had invested in IT early and broadly. By the late 90's, we had a couple hundred VAX/PDP/Alpha clusters and a couple dozen Windows NT-based systems, with 30 years worth of custom code from assembler to FORTRAN and Top-down to OOP. We had FMS Forms, Visual Basic using ODBC, Pathworks, and custom network stacks. COBOL and QNX, RSX with overlays, and DEC everything. We had DCS and other PLC-based systems and interfaces. Automation, both logical and physical. All of it supporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment and annual revenues.

Around '97 we began Y2K testing on our systems and uncovered the alarming fact that we stood to suffer a cascading failure which would shut down our operation for at least a couple of years, put 5k people out of work, and upend our market segment globally. This had more to do with the sensitive nature of our chemical processes and custom DCS controls, so I wouldn't call it representative of industry as a whole, but at least for us, Y2K was a real horror story. No planes falling out of the sky or satellites crashing to Earth, but it would have resulted in thousands of miles worth of seized pipelines, vessels, and precision machinery that would have to be cut out and totally replaced.

We had an IT team with roughly 60 professionals across the spectrum from telecom to applications, though, and all the code was ours. Still, by the time Y2K rolled around, we were all at home (but carrying pagers). Most of us had dedicated up to half a year doing testing, remediation, and mock runs. Just setting up the testing environments kept us busy for quite a while. As an IT professional, I can testify it was the best of times. There was a lot of hype, and much of it was undeserved, but I hope those coming after realize it wasn't all smoke and mirrors.

Hold on, you're reading this all wrong. Microsoft is saying if you install this precious update, you never have to worry about ever getting another annoying forced update ever again? I'll buy that for a dollar!

So, apparently some folk claim to have needed these ill-gotten goods to facilitate their personal growth. I myself admit to having taken great advantage of my public library in my youth since I wasn't able to purchase all of the periodicals and other reference books that I needed to further my self-education. Sure, there's a difference in the fact that using a traditional library is legal and using a Z-library probably isn't, but the need was the same. Anyway, I'm curious. How many of those Z-library users will return the favor after they benefit? Do they plan on sharing their own contributions with the underserved, pro-bono? I really hope so. For my part, I turned around and ended up buying thousands of books and other sources of IP when I finally hit my earnings potential. I've donated time and money to my childhood library too. Paying forward isn't too bad, when it's all you can afford.

If you go down one more level into the Tom's Hardware link, you can find this in the comments section:

"According to the conversation with the police, an email was sent to the police and another to other rescue workers saying that I had killed my wife and now wanted to take my own life."

I'm not sure why Engadget is so hung up on "can/can't" when the problem is "won't." Apple's here to make money. What's not to get about that? I'd probably be upset if I had an Apple 15 and wanted to use the feature without getting a device upgrade, but I wouldn't be confused about why I would be gouged, especially by Apple.

I'd say just open the bottle from the bottom instead or have your kids open it, but that would be giving this claptrap too much credit. Who even bothers to read shrinkwrap anyway? This is completely absurd.

Well, more like deception. Here's a question. When is 20GW not 20GW? Well, if one is power plant output and the other is battery output, the answer is simply that you are comparing a continuous rating versus instantaneous. One is backed up by a deep pool of reserves, and the other...isn't.

What would have been more helpful and less deceptive would be to mention something about how battery backup is only good for maybe four hours of continuous output at the rated capacity. So, 20GW of constant power versus 20GW of power for four hours, increased by any gains from charging activities. In other words, adding an equivalent, or even 10X amount of battery power can be quite a bit less than its gas plant counterpart, depending on one's point of view.

Some of the biggest draws for traditional stores are location and convenience. They get a decent lock on a certain geographical range of customers. If they do their job well, people will flock to them rather than seeking other outlets. However, it is also very convenient to shop online these days. If I'm at a physical store and find that I need to hunt down as associate to unlock a display for some insignificant product, I won't even bother. Next time I'm at home and think about it, I'll just order one off the Internet and it almost always comes from a competitor.

It isn't out of spite, but the lost sales are real. I don't have a better answer than to tighten up law enforcement, but even that isn't as popular an option as you might expect.

I'm only a software engineer, but let's do the math. Figure maybe 350 KWH per thousand miles and 600 miles gets you roughly 200 KWH for an almost full charge. The article's links mention a special 1 MW charge cable with internal cooling. 200 KWH on a 1 MW charge source takes 12 minutes, so they're probably calculating an 80% charge from 10% rather than a full charge. Still, it's pretty impressive if they can make it happen. As for amps, 1 MW at 1000V is 1000 amps.

Needless to say, that's about two straight days (48h) of house charge per fill-up for many people with only a 10A outlet. Suburbanites will be able to do better at about 18 hours for a fill-up with their current level-2 systems. So, building charging infrastructure is still crucial for EV adoption in America. What really excites me about the weight per KWH reduction is that it makes hot-swapping that much more attractive. I'd love to see that take hold after all of the false starts in the industry, although a 9-minute charge time is a pretty compelling use-case against.