Yup. Djinn were, at best, mischievous. At worst, they were outright adversarial and would only begrudgingly grant wishes if you managed to force them into it. Basically, they had the ability to grant wishes, but didn’t want to. So you had to find a way to force them into it, usually by trapping them and striking a deal to release them if they granted your wish.

Yup, I work with 4/0 (0000) cable pretty regularly, for things like generators or powering large systems. We have a few trunks full of cable, and it takes a crew of 2 or 3 to actually lay it because it’s so heavy. Usually one person pushing the trunk along, one focuses on uncoiling it from the trunk, and one focuses on actually laying the cable. We use five conductors at a time (one neutral, three 120v hots leads, and a ground,) so it’s a big bundle. Each cable weighs a little over a pound per foot, and there are five bundled together. So a 150’ coil can easily weigh 750-800 pounds.

EICAR test strings are strings of text that can be used to test an antivirus. Basically, you bury the file somewhere, and see if your AV picks it up. The joke being that if they’re storing your password in plaintext (a big no-no from a security standpoint) then their AV will clamp down on the database once you create your account and the test string is embedded.

It wouldn’t work in this instance, unfortunately; EICAR test strings are only meant to work when embedded in files that are shorter than 128 bytes. And every database is almost certainly larger than that.

One group at work refuses to do it

Sounds like a huge liability to the company.

and they always get away with it

Until they don’t. All it would take is one malicious actor (competing company, spurned employee, data thief, etc) wrecking/stealing their entire database with an injection attack.

It’s an SQL injection joke.

Basically, when dealing with databases, you can use SQL to search or modify the data in that database. By default, you can do this by polling the database with an SQL query. But this introduces a vulnerability called SQL injection. Basically, imagine if instead of filling in a name in the “Name” field, you filled in an SQL query. If the database admins haven’t protected themselves against it, then the database will happily run that query; You have just injected an SQL query into their database. Maybe you’re a malicious attacker, looking to get a virus onto the system, or looking to extract the data.

Protecting the database from injection is done with something called sanitizing. Basically, you set up filters to disallow SQL, so it can’t touch your database. In this comic, the database admins didn’t do that, so they were unprotected.

The actual SQL uses the student’s middle name to search for any tables named “Students” and permanently delete it. The joke is that when the school admin staff enters his name into their database, it will delete any tables named “Students” and wreck their database.

This is something that has always interested me. Let’s say a group of specialists (in different areas of study) go for a walk through the park together. They’ll each have entirely different thoughts about the walk, simply because they have been trained to notice different things.

Maybe one is an avian biologist, and notices a rare bird; The other specialists don’t even notice that it is extraordinary.

Maybe one is an architect, and notices how the trails are snaked through the park with careful consideration to a specific design style.

Maybe one is a child development specialist, and notices how the playgrounds have been designed to encourage kids to play together with group activities, rather than isolating them with individual activities.

Maybe one is a civil engineer, and notices how the entire park is a former landfill that has been buried, and they can identify many of the strategies that builders used to safely manage things like off-gassing, water runoff, or low spots as garbage breaks down below the park.

Maybe one is an artist, who notices several idyllic spots they could return to with an easel and their pastels.

But the point is that even though they all went on the walk together, they all had vastly different experiences simply because they were trained to notice different details.

I gave up TV for a while, but built an automated Plex server about a year ago and have fallen in love with it. I find myself watching more shows than in probably the past decade. My wife was less than thrilled about the initial cost (and the fact that she lost some closet space to the server) but now she uses it every day and refuses to ever let me get rid of it.

For the unaware, Plex is a program that allows you to self-host a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu. You add media to the server, and it will automatically match it to the relevant show, download metadata, and make it available to your client devices to stream. The free version is fine for most small setups, but there is a paid license you can get to unlock all of the functionality; Most users opt to just get a lifetime license, so it’s not an ongoing cost.

If you prefer open source, Jellyfin is a good alternative. There’s a little bit more of a learning curve, because the client apps aren’t widely available and it often requires using something like Kodi to stream instead. But the idea is the same; Host a server, throw media at it, and be able to stream.

Automating the media collection is possible, and is what takes it from “this is a cool side hobby that I’ll abandon in a few months because the upkeep is a pain in the ass” to “this is now my go-to for shows I want to watch, and the upkeep is minimal.” Programs exist that allow your server to automatically search for media Linux ISOs, download it, and add it to your server. So adding new media Linux ISOs is simply a matter of requesting it to be added, and then the server handles all the rest automatically and you’ll have it available as soon as the download finishes.

My one big complaint about Plex is actually the lack of live IPTV support. You can integrate a digital TV tuner into your server to be able to automatically DVR live content. But Plex used to support an IPTV extension, which allowed you to add your own IPTV channels and stream them on any device. Plex did away with that extension support, because they have been pushing their own IPTV channels and they didn’t want to compete with the extension.

More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.

When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.

If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.

Even with integrations, a lot of the automatic replies basically boil down to “yes, thanks” and “no thank you” to every text. It isn’t even like… A longer message. It’s just two or three words, tops. If I’m going to use AI to write my texts, it’s going to be for something longer than a “yes lol” text.

To expand on this: You can migrate accounts fairly easily. You can export your subscribed communities, and import them into your new account. So the only real thing you’re losing is your post history, but even that is seen as a bonus by many users who are looking to burn their old account.

£80 for 60 days of full coverage would be fantastic rates for an American. Many are paying $350/month for insurance, and still have +$5000 deductibles.

Worth noting that the masks in the cabin aren’t designed to keep you awake. They’re just designed to keep you alive. They’re basically just hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst, which mixes when you pull the mask down. The resulting chemical reaction produces a small amount of oxygen for a short time. This is also why the instructions say to put your own mask on before helping any children; You only have 15-30 seconds of usable consciousness before you pass out, so you need the mask to stay awake long enough to help anyone else. The pilots are the only ones who actually have masks good enough to stay awake, and that’s why they immediately dive to a breathable altitude.

Also, the entire cabin would immediately fog from the sudden pressure and temperature change. We’re talking “can’t even see your fingertips when your arm is outstretched” levels of fog.

And while we’re talking about it, the cabin would suddenly be cold. Like absolutely fucking freezing.

Lastly, your ears will painfully pop, and will likely ring for a while afterwards. The sudden pressure change will feel like you got slapped on the ears.

Wrong on both counts; Apple does support RCS, and RCS doesn’t support encryption. Google messages can be encrypted, but that is done using a proprietary handshake that Google implemented on top of the RCS protocol.

Yup. Voyager/Wefwef is basically the new Apollo. It’s not 100% there in terms of feature parity, but it’s damned close and is being actively developed.

Yeah, New Mexico IDs and license plates both say “New Mexico, USA” for exactly this reason. So many people have almost been illegally arrested and turned over to ICE by incompetent cops during traffic stops. Cops will pull New Mexico plates over, see the New Mexico ID, and demand to see visa paperwork because they think the person is from Mexico.

Or just get a GLi.Net router, and get the OpenWRT firmware right out of the box without even needing to flash it manually.

As a bonus, if you ever have the need for one, they also have some badass travel routers that can use your phone as a modem, take a SIM card natively, or just connect to an Ethernet/public WiFi to create your own secure network. Super handy if you do a lot of traveling, because they can be used in hotels or cruise ships. Know how cruise ships sell internet access per device? Yeah, your travel router only counts as one device. Set that bad boy up, and now all of your devices have internet.

I’d argue that having them be 30 or 40 years would even be fine. An author who starts in their 20’s should reasonably expect to keep profiting off of their early work until they retire in their 50’s or 60’s. But the current state of copyright is just asinine, because it is basically written by and for corporations.

Yup, Washington was wildly popular at the time. He easily could have stayed in office indefinitely, as long as nothing horrible happened. But his reasoning was that they had just rebelled against a monarchy, and he didn’t intend to start another one.

Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.

Depends on how busy the laundromat is. In an ideal world, yes you’re correct. But there are some days where you’re lucky to grab a single washer and dryer.