Posts by Pat Harkin 120 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Nov 2016
I had a Baconator in a Wendy's on the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls. I can only describe the tase as being like what you'd get if you beat a cow to death with a pig, and then tried to hide the bodies in a bun. The menu said a Baconator included lettuce, but there was nothing green in mine. I had the meat sweats for the rest of that trip
It's a close call, but I think I'd have to go for 1947 and the invention of the transistor[1].
John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs set us on the path to the future - via Clippy, Windows Vista and Windows ME.
So much potential. Such a waste.
[1] OK, Microsoft didn't yet exist n 1947 but this has Gates' fingerprints all over it. I don't know how he did it - perhaps Copilot can tell us...
This is very reminiscent of the mechanism the late Sir Terry Pratchett created for transmission of images by clacks (the Discworld equivalent of a telegraph) for his book Going Postal in 2003. In his design (never explicitly described in the book) images were recreated by the placement of wooden cubes in a tray - but each cube had a black face, a white face and four shades on grey on the other faces. Even at low resolutions, the resulting images were adequate for the transmission of a "wanted poster quality image". I still have some of the test images I generated for Terry to show this was indeed the case.
....just fill it with wrong usernames and passwords, and use a password vault.
Many moons ago (1975? 1976?) Nat West issued me with an ATM card. It could only withdraw £10, was always retained by the machine to be returned in the post and was protected by a SIX digit PIN.
I wrote an incorrect PIN on it in pencil, just to be evil.
About once every 3 months I'd get a letter from the bank advising me having my PIN on the card was bad practice - but I couldn't tell them it wasn't my pin, because that would up their chances of guessing to 3 in 999,999! We're both less paranoid these days - I don't write PINs on cards and banks reckon 4 digitis in enough.
"The monolith was originally designed as a crystal tetrahedron pyramid beacon, which is mentioned in Clark's The Sentinel. During production it became a large wooden block painted black with a graphite mixture that had to be swaddled in plastic sheeting to keep it free of fingerprints and dust. Why the change?"
I asked Clarke this in the summer of 1975 - he said they're tried transparent but they couldn't get it optically pure enough and it looked terrible and though a tetrahedron sounds good to nerds it doesn't look very impressive in the flesh.
I wanted to talk about The Great Egg Race but as soon as he found out I was a doctor, he just wanted to talk about his new implantable defibrillator, of which he was immensely proud! So we talked my shop rather than his - but I enjoyed it greatly and still remember it clearly.
A great communicator. Sadly missed.
