It's just a VoIP to POTS adapter. You know, those little devices you can buy that either have an Ethernet port on one side and POTS on the other. Cheaper ones have a USB port and relied on your PC to make the connection. You can even buy ones that use Bluetooth and connect the POTS to your cellphone.

Surely we're not oblivious to the fact those ATA (analog telephone adapters) existed? Cisco/Linksys was a prominent manufacturer of one. And if you want to interface to a telephone, they are a stupidly cheap way to do it - with a little bit of hacking you can get them so you can dial the other port to simulate things like a modem connection or two analog lines. Or you can adapt it to your VoIP server/asterisk setup for a cheap PBX.

They were all the rage 15-20 years ago.

not sure they still do it, but HS chem in the 70's would always take some sodium stored in oil and drop a tiny bit into water. Reactive is an understatement. I imagine lithium would make even better fireworks.

Sodium ion batteries don't use sodium the same way lithium ion batteries use lithium.

And experience should tell you sodium ions are rather boring. After all, they're one of the fundamental ions used in cellular signalling, as well as in most of the water on this planet. And you often sprinkle sodium ions on your food.

Ionic sodium is like ionic lithium - rather boring chemistry. The only reason li-ion batteries catch fire is the electrical short burning the plastic separator and the electrolyte being flammable. Sodium ion batteries use a water-based electrolyte.

Now, lithium primary batteries, especially the kind used in AA batteries, those use elemental lithium and things do get spicy.

The dealership model was anti-trust, true. Keyword - was.

Now it's a form of monopoly where the big dealerships are the ones controlling the market. You can tell because of all the rules preventing you from opening a dealership too close to another dealership - it's Joe's Dealership town and Joe owns all dealerships in town.

However, we have to realize that maybe that model no longer works. Because direct to customer stores exist - an Apple store competes with Apple resellers, for example. And many other stores do the same. Indeed, Apple sells the same products those resellers do, at the same price, but they get to cut out the reseller margins. And sure, resellers were worried that Apple would do the same thing to them once you get an Apple store.

But no, Apple stores still compete with resellers just fine. Because they're also competing against online sales of the same.

Heck, in this modern day and age, why can't I buy a car online? New cars are a relatively simple affair - I pick the model, I pick the options, I click Buy and why can't I have it at my door in a few days? Why am I forced to deal with dealerships? Because I might want to haggle? Really? Just put the price on the website, and let competition do its thing. No one's falling for the "I'll check with my manager" where you disappear and help someone else for 20 minutes trick. There's no way that doing everything should take a whole day to buy a car when it's all computer-filled forms that are filed with the DMV and other places.

I should have searched this out and included it in my comment. Here's the video that prompted my comment. Also note this video was from 4 years ago, just before the huge explosion in AI capability.

There are no details needed. A payphone is just a regular phone.

Sure it has bits that collect money and such, but those are completely secondary to the purpose of making a phone call.

You can just wire it up to a POTS line and it will work as normal.

The signalling and handling of money is done completely on the exchange end - payphones are hooked to a payphone register that handles the money part by watching the signalling on the lines (they used to be tones, but later on they were based on shorting out the lines in special ways). The payphone register would then tell the switch that it got paid and how much it got paid and to connect it as usual. The switch would tell the register what to do - return the money or keep the money and this was signalled back by sending a DC voltage of one polarity or another.

If you wanted to run a payphone for free, you just hook it up - it acts like a normal phone because the "pay" part is separate from the "phone" part. If he wanted he could use a normal phone to do the same thing, but I suspect it might not last as long.

The "liberal" media sure does a great job of shielding dear leader from any consequences. None of them ever say flat out "Fuji raises camera prices due to Trump tariffs".

Because Free Speech doesn't exist in the US anymore. Trump has basically ensured that expressing any negative opinion about any Trump policy has negative impacts on you.

CBS/Paramount cancelled Colbert as part of the $16M 60 minutes interview settlement. Colbert is well known for his opinions and you can bet as part of the settlement (which remains sealed) is "Fire Colbert". Now Trump wants "Bias Monitors" to watch CBS for any "biased reporting".

Just this past week he fired the head of the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) when they revised the job creation numbers downwards by a quarter million.

Anyone with half a brain knows the reason. The media is basically under attack for not reporting things Trump wants reported. And sometimes dancing around is the only solution.

Even 1 is too many

Do you know how many trans athletes there are in the whole United States that are competing?

5. Five.

I doubt they are "dominating" because you'd have heard of them making the news due to their superior athletic ability. But they aren't.

Want to know why? Trans people aren't cross-dressers. They're people who go so far as to multilate themselves. And that also means having to take things like testosterone suppressants which kills a lot of the "male athletic advantage". Most trans people who transition to female have lower testosterone levels than cisgender females - the drugs basically drop it to zero. They aren't dominating squat, because if they did, we'd know about it. Hell we know more about disabled people competing in Olympic sports with their equipment in the regular games and the debate that causes - do their running blades offer them an advantage?

Usually when you hear about trans in sports, it's how one team finds out then ends up mocking the player on the opposing team more than about how that player is somehow "superior" or "cheating".

I also haven't said a thing about the other way - because that too exists - there are trans males who transitioned from female out there. Of course the "scary" people never mention that, but it's about 50-50. When they do bathroom bills, it's always about "sexual predators using the women's bathroom". What about when it's what looks like a man being forced to use the women's bathroom because legally, they have to? How comfortable would you be knowing that was the case - that there what is basically a man using the women's bathroom because the law says they have to?

In the first season of The Mandalorian, when a de-aged Luke appears, I remember the complaints that the CGI wasn't great, and within days there were alternate versions using AI that actually produced much better results than what Disney spent a fortune doing. A lot of people were wondering why Disney didn't use these tools if they were available to the general public, and now it makes sense. It was the legal side of things and Disney not being sure they fully owned the result if it wasn't created by a work-for-hire human being.

Yes, because it's not about accuracy, but fear and control on the populace.

Yeah, one of the first explosives is nitroglycerine. (And yes, it's the same stuff used in blood pressure medicine).

But nitroglycerine is very unstable and just looking at it funny can make it go off. That's when Nobel (of prize fame) managed to convert it to TNT, which was far more stable. Though it isn't shelf stable - left alone especially in a hot environment and the TNT starts to decompose into nitroglycerine.

Modern explosives are far less reactive nowadays and often only explode when subject to an electronic match or a detonator. C4 being particularly nice because it basically cannot go off without using a detonator cap - you can burn it, squeeze it, etc and it just won't go.

There are also slow and fast explosives, which basically just rate how fast they convert the explosive material into gas. Sometimes you want fast explosives, sometimes you want slow explosives.

From a quick glance it appears N6 isn't going to be useful since its very unstable.

I had an original Model M many years ago. However, I don't get this line from the article: "My desk isn't large enough to easily accommodate the original Model M".

What sort of tiny ass desk do you have? The M is solid and heavy but it's not significantly bigger than today's shit keyboards.

Obviously someone who hasn't seen the shrinkflation that modern mechanical keyboards have gone through. I mean, you can easily find keyboards that are anywhere from 50%-90% of a full size keyboard, with ones in the 60-70% being really popular (these are basically just the letter and number keys and the cursor keys jammed together in a layout reminiscent of a 90's era laptop)

Finding a full size mechanical keyboard is actually a surprisingly difficult challenge these days. Sure you can get them, but they're nowhere near as many options for them and many product lines simply don't have them.

People seem to love the strange key layouts caused when you try to mask the function keys and navigation keys into just the number and letter key areas.

Yeah, it's basically that simple.

The first question is to write the constructor - basically allocate the array in memory and set its contents to a random value between 1 and 9.

The second question just asks if given a number, find one that matches in the game - either the same value or its complement that adds it 10. If there are multiple possible matches, you pick one arbitrarily.

The examples shown go through it fairly well so if you read it carefully and process what is happening, it's not a hard problem at all.

Both problems are just about how to iterate over a multi-dimensional array, a fairly basic and trivial problem that should've been covered in the first week of any CS class. Especially since Java has built-in support for multi-dimensional arrays. Some languages don't - C for example, can support multi-dimensional arrays, but only if all (or all but one) sizes of each dimension are known ahead of time. It's basically syntactic sugar for a linear 1-dimensional array that the compiler just does simple math to compute the offset. True multi-dimensionality in C requires arrays of pointers that point to more arrays of pointers until you get the value you want.

Not many. Because the people affected were using MIG Switch cartridges likely with copied games that they don't own.

And people who got their games secondhand got their consoles reactivated once they proved they have the original cartridge.

You can claim MIG Switch is for "backup" purposes, but incidents like this prove people are copying games and then selling them. It's just that before Nintendo would only catch this if two people went online with the same serial number.

And people who did properly use their MIG Switch for backup purposes likely still have working consoles because they have both the dumped cartridge AND the original.

It's a wonder how people were to stupid because it's well known every Switch cartridge had a unique serial number and Nintendo could easily detect this (this was when people started getting banned on their original Switch for playing downloaded dumps).

As for improvements - the big one is massively increased memory bandwidth - the original Switch had a memory bandwidth problem and many of the performance issues were the result of memory not being fast enough. We know this because modded switches with overclocking options discovered overclocking the RAM lead to performance gains. It's not the CPU or GPU, it's memory. Games that could barely make 20fps on the Switch could keep a rock-solid 60 on the Switch 2

It's illegal activity in basically fraud. Adult oriented things have, unfortunately, a higher risk of fraud. Either true credit card fraud where people use someone else's card without authorization, or fraud in where they consume the content, but then deny it later on.

That's the illegal activity they care about because chargebacks and such are bad.

Buying gift cards, well, there's a legitimate case for that, and if you're being scammed to pay your taxes with iTunes gift cards, that's a matter between you and the scammer - Visa and MasterCard are innocent third parties. Since the fraud doesn't involve them they don't care.

But when it does involve them, like with adult purchases, then they care a lot.

Adult oriented businesses selling adult oriented things like content put up with much higher rates because of it. And likely both Visa and MasterCard offered Itch and Valve the same deal - either accept the higher rates since you sell adult oriented content, or don't sell adult oriented content.

Itch can restore the free content because they aren't selling or dealing with purchases. And as long as adult oriented content isn't purchased using Visa or MasterCard, well, they can't get involved.

(They could take say, Bitcoin, but most likely their payment processor might have an objection. Chances are though, the solution is to simply make a subsidiary business like "Itch for Adults" that can sell those content, with the caveat that they payment developers get will be lower as the fees are higher.)

Part of the problem is that there's no way to pay "journalists" as a whole. Because of electronic payment networks' fees per transaction, online newspapers have to sell a monthly subscription, not a single issue they way they would with cash in a vending machine. And a subscription to NYT includes zero articles from WaPo or WSJ. This means readers get sucked into the ideological bubble of the one publication that happens to be part of their subscription plan.