Posts by Spamolot 32 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2021
Some "unnamed" USA hotel card door lock manufacturer has a Y2K-type problem. Numerous reports started rolling in as 2025 swept across the face of the Land of the Free.
Detailed on this Reddit thread "All our locks died at the stroke of midnight".
Under modern Open Banking systems the existing incoming and outgoing arrangements are ported to the new financial provider so the consumer doesn't have to deal with cancelling and redoing debits and credits. It's seamless so it increases account portability leading to increased competition between banks to retain customers. Banks know that most customers are ignorant of better offers out there and customers are loathe to change providers; many customer don't realise that they can have multiple accounts at different banks, credit unions or fintechs.
I have it on reliable authority that the Great Orange orator is Satoshi Nakamoto. He's running false flag operations so he can pretend to be influenced into pressuring the SEC and Wall Street to adopt crypto into the mainstream when he's mysteriously re-elected come November. There will be another 'staged' assassination where his double will be killed. Thus the Orange man can fade into the annals of American political history, avoiding the looming disaster of divorce, while he quietly offloads his trillions in Bitcoin...
>You can throw a lit match into diesel, it will just go out.
Except in every film and USA crime drama you see the criminal stuff a rag or shirt into the gas (petrol or diesel) filler. They light the wick with a metal flip-top lighter, then proceed to light a cigar or cigarette and casually walk towards the camera and "Kaboom!!!" (Alternately they flick the metal flip-top lighter or cigarette into a pool of fuel.)
>But you can market potent detergent as a delicious drink, if you add tons of sugar and a catchy name like Coca Cola…
Are you saying what I think you're saying? Having I been doing my washing wrong all these years. Should I toss in some caramel nectar into my next wash and see the whiter-than-white results... and is flat carbonated drink better than fresh from the bottle?
So if a 'merican woman is hit and injured by a car or a round from a gun - she'd sue the car manufacturer or gun maker? She can't sue the gun makers as Congress has made them a protected class. Most car makers including Tesla are still grappling with the liability angle of self-driving cars, let along the current meatbag-driven (non-AI) ones. Currently they're only on the hook if their cars are inherently and provably defective.
I can understand going after the deepest pockets: Apple and the stalker's insurance provider, but that's civil rather than criminal law. The stalker is the one at fault.
An old acquaintance, let's call him Derek, was taught that the correct way to open an exterior door was to fire a solid shotgun slug to the hinges from his pump action, then to stand clear as his balaclava wearing mates stormed inside. That was the overt entry method back in the 1980-90s. His employer later upskilled him via the services of an old gentleman from Wormwood Scrubs who taught him the finer points of covert entry i.e. lockpicking, alarm bypassing and how to open several types of commercially-popular safes through physical manipulation with some electronic wizardry thrown in for good measure.
Friend has a similar problem - had hidden the key around the home somewhere but forgotten where. Batteries were totally dead. Took a hammer and smash the plastic next to the keypad, carefully inserted flat-head screwdriver and pulled back the solenoid. Took all of five minutes...
Does anyone remember a few hobbyist students in Cambridge selling a kitset joystick interface for the ZX? You could also buy it assembled but it wasn't as cheap or fun as the kitset. It plugged into the ZX backplane and had a standard joystick connector. It was configurable by DIP switches to adjust the joystick for different keys in games.
The very earliest Adobe Fonts were distributed on special floppy disks - you could only install said font family (Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc.) on five Macs or PCs. When you installed them, they were locked to the serial number of that particular computer to prevent piracy. Thankfully that particular sales model only lasted a year or so, and later floppy disk releases could be installed without restriction. The early releases were exchanged by Adobe for the free-to-copy versions at no charge.
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