I strongly disagree that memorization is important or foundational to advanced math. It definitely is useful, but you don’t need it. And the more advanced your math gets, the less valuable it becomes.

My experience is that university-level math explicitly tells you to not memorize values and formulas, but to get comfortable finding solutions directly, because then you actually learn what is going on and have methods that are universally useful.

In the real world memorization is even less useful. You will never be as fast and accurate as a calculator, or remember as many values as a precomputed table has. So why bother?

Shouldn’t that happen automatically if the drive is identified as removable? And the real solution should be to tell the OS that it’s removable?

Software architects that don’t write code are worse than useless

Moose are very tall, so their large bodies, which weight upwards of 700 kg (1500 lb), are at or above the height of the windshield of most cars. When hit, the front of the car will take the legs out while the body goes through the windshield, a-pillars, roof, driver, front passenger, and whatever else is in the way. This kills the moose.

Nothing is protected from those willing to pry hard enough ;)

Yes, darkening your room and then pushing a bright light up against the one-way, taking care to not have it leak into your room, should make the other room brighter so you can see it.

Not that this is a one-way mirror anyway.

Surely you could just put another sheet of clear glass on your one-way to avoid this though? Wouldn’t want someone to accidentally scratch the coating and reveal the whole thing anyway

I had this happen in a hotel, and being curious I removed the mirror, and yes there was a hole in the wall behind it, no there wasn’t a camera there. It was just were they had ran the wiring for the lights on the mirror.

It would make sense that it serves like an access hatch to a terminal block that feeds the whole room. It’s simple, costs nothing, is easy to get to (compared to having it sealed in the wall), protected from splashing and prying guests, and close to where you want most lights and outlets.

I doubt these tools would help you. They are primarily for pulling data off devices, spying on them, or controlling them.

Even if you could buy them as a private individual you wouldn’t want to pay that cost. There might be pirated versions, but most who have use of these tools have no interest in pirated software.

There are extremely skilled people who make a living finding vulnerabilities, so there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit left and those who find serious vulnerabilities have generally worked hard to do so.

When a single exploit can pay enough that you could pay off all your loans, buy a house, or not have to work again for years, or maybe ever. Why would you go through all the trouble of finding it to release it publicly and get nothing? Especially when it’s going to be used by these shady companies either way.

I’m not saying exploit selling is morally right, it certainly isn’t, but if I was offered millions of dollars to do the wrong thing, I’m not sure I would turn that down.

My guess: The blocklist is the only way they have of removing it for all those who download it from them when they previously distributed it. And they do that so they can not be held liable for those copies.

A company like News Corp might go “This was downloaded 50 000 times from you and can be used to bypass access control on 10 000 000 of our articles which would otherwise cost $20 each. So we are suing you for 10 trillion dollars in losses. See you in court.”

The purpose of this add-on is solely to circumvent access restrictions to copyrighted works. It is clearly a circumvention tool under the DMCA and therefore illegal to distribute in the USA.

The policy violation is that it breaks US law.

Guessing here, but Mozilla likely blacklisted it to disable it for all those who had it installed and cover their ass legally. Nobody can accuse them of aiding in the distribution of this illegal tool anymore.

While uBlock could be used for the same thing, it has a different primary use (blocking ads, which is still legal), so a similar charge against it might be successfully fought.

The DMCA is a fuck.

My kryptonite is du which reports disk usage, and df which reports disk file size, or no, wait, du is file size and df is disk usage.

Most of the time I can only remember whichever one I don’t need at the moment and futilely hope that its man page will mention the other (which it doesn’t).

Ah, damn it! I’ll look it up next time. *sudo vim /etc/passwd*

My old mother, who is completely disinterested in technology, has used a Linux desktop for a decade now without major issues.

If you aren’t a power user the differences between it and Windows are minor. You have windows, icons, menu bars, x closes the application, the box makes it big, right-click to open a menu, left-click to select, it’s all the same stuff. Besides, most of your time is spend in a browser anyway.

Yeah things break some times, but no more than in Windows. Being on a very default Ubuntu installation she can just search for her problems online and blindly run some random console command that probably fixes it, just like on Windows.

Hardware is easier because drivers are generally just magically there. Software is easier because it’s mostly in a repository which automatically installs dependencies and updates and doesn’t come with malware.

By far the biggest problem has been documents and executables that can only be opened in Windows. Mostly PDF forms (fuck you Adobe).

Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.

You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.

The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.

Butter is rather low volume, so maybe it’s doable. But it’s very hard to compete with self-replicating organisms that have evolved specifically to use the energy sources, materials and conditions that are abundant on this planet. I’d be more more interested if someone had made a plant make butter.

Having a bunch of machinery sit idle waiting for power to be cheap isn’t particularly good use of resources either. We’d be better off trying to store the power.

“Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water”

I’m no expert but direct air capture of Co2 and water electrolysis both use a lot of power. So using them for this purpose is likely just a marketing gimmick that doesn’t make any sense either economically or for the climate.

I was considering putting scare quotes around “communism”, but refrained in order to avoid an argument about what is and isn’t really communism. Yet here we are. So much for left unity! ;D

In a fascist dictatorship, they have a lot more in common than opposition.

But if the dictatorship is a communist one they have more in common with the nazis! Or if your country is invaded by Russia you might find yourself fighting side by side with the Azov battalion.

There are libertarians who genuinely care about free speech and might make useful allies on those issues.

Just because someone is the enemy of your enemy, or an occasionally useful ally, doesn’t mean you want to unify with them.

The idea that all “leftists” should just work together is stupid.

Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to “leftism” that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict. The people who follow them disagree with each other because they want and value completely different things. If they were to put aside their differences there would be nothing left.

That doesn’t mean arguing on the internet about ideology is meaningful, or that there can’t be common goals or enemies, just that you should give up the idea that all “leftists” are somehow natural allies, because it doesn’t make any sense.