Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

This is actually why they include the personal anecdote. Supposedly it’s easier to copyright a recipe when some sort of creative writing is attached. Because the bare recipe isn’t creative or unique enough to be considered copyrightable.

My favorite way of doing that was asking them when I could expect HR to send me the new employee paperwork so I can sign onto the health insurance. Because if they’re going to treat a contractor like an employee, the least they could do is offer employee benefits. And if a manager thinks they’re about to get called into HR to explain why they hired an additional employee without permission, you’d be surprised how quickly their attitude changes.

Yup. They can’t take out interest-free loans to pay off their almost-interest-free loans. So now they’re scrambling to save money and build value the old fashioned way.

Being Hindu is relevant because Hindus believe cows are sacred. They believe that in the cycle of reincarnation, cows are the lowest form of creature that you can be reincarnated into. So taking care of cows is seen as a holy act, the same way taking care of the homeless or stray animals could be considered noble and selfless. Lots of their religious imagery and stories also involves butter and cream. Eating beef is taboo, and many Hindus take it a step farther and are fully vegetarian.

So with context, it’s sort of like forcing a Hasidic Jew to eat pork; It serves no purpose other than to humiliate them and denigrate their religion.

If you drink it straight out of the bottle, the whole thing only counts as one drink.

The entirety of Wikipedia is only like 50GB. You can literally carry it with you on a thumb drive.

It’d be hell to actually view since that’s only counting the raw text info, but you could conceivably do it. If you include things like XML and edit history, that climbs to something like 20TB. A lot, but still technically possible. Especially if you compress it (which drops it down to like 200GB) and only decompress it when you need it.

Give every single doxxed GJ member secret service protection, and make Trump pay for it.

Make declaration of war a mandatory vote for every citizen. Anyone who votes “yes” (or illegally abstains) gets registered for the draft. Anyone who votes “no” is unregistered.

I know it’s not really feasible because governments need to be able to react swiftly in times of war. But these days with computers and cell phones, there’s very little reason that the government couldn’t push a “go download our secure voting app/visit this link to cast your vote” notification via the emergency alert broadcasting system.

It isn’t compressible at all, really. As far as a compression algorithm is concerned, it just looks like random data.

Imagine trying to compress a text file. Each letter normally takes 8 bits to represent. The computer looks at 8 bits at a time, and knows which character to display. Normally, the computer needs to look at all 8 bits even when those bits are “empty” simply because you have no way of marking when one letter stops and another begins. It’s all just 1’s and 0’s, so it’s not like you can insert “next letter” flags in that. But we can cut that down.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to count all the letters, then sort them from most to least common. Then we build a tree, with each character being a fork. You start at the top of the tree, and follow it down. You go down one fork for 0 and read the letter at your current fork on a 1. So for instance, if the letters are sorted “ABCDEF…” then “0001” would be D. Now D is represented with only 4 bits, instead of 8. And after reading the 1, you return to the top of the tree and start over again. So “01000101101” would be “BDBAB”. Normally that sequence would take 40 bits to represent, (because each character would be 8 bits long,) but we just did it in 11 bits total.

But notice that this also has the potential to produce letters that are MORE than 8 bits long. If we follow that same pattern I listed above, “I” would be 9 bits, “J” would be 10, etc… The reason we’re able to achieve compression is because we’re using the more common (shorter) letters a lot and the less common (longer) letters less.

Encryption undoes this completely, because (as far as compression is concerned) the data is completely random. And when you look at random data without any discernible pattern, it means that counting the characters and sorting by frequency is basically a lesson in futility. All the letters will be used about the same, so even the “most frequent” characters are only more frequent by a little bit due to random chance. So now. Even if the frequency still corresponds to my earlier pattern, the number of Z’s is so close to the number of A’s that the file will end up even longer than before. Because remember, the compression only works when the most frequent characters are actually used most frequently. Since there are a lot of characters that are longer than 8 bits and those characters are being used just as much as the shorter characters our compression method fails and actually produces a file that is larger than the original.

but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution to society they may be able to make to society.

Yeah, I touched on that with my last sentence:

It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

There are two problems with that. The first is that “maximizing contribution to society” can easily be interpreted as “being forced to stamp license plates for 16 hours a day.” We already know this is a possible interpretation, because that’s how our system already interprets it. Either way they’re locked up against their will, and are being forced to perform labor to someone else’s benefit. The very nature of their confinement means that any contribution they make will be for someone else and not themselves. And the simple word for that is “slavery”. The second problem is that it’s still prison. We haven’t actually solved the prison problem at all in this scenario; We’ve simply given it a mask so we can say prisons have been abolished. Like if we don’t call them prisons, we can say we don’t have any prisoners.

Prisons will still be necessary for the most egregious and irredeemable criminals. The sad reality is that there are certain people who simply need to be sequestered from the rest of society for the general public’s safety, and no amount of rehabilitation or intervention will solve that. But that should be the exception, not the norm. The massive prison population is absolutely a problem, but it isn’t something that can be completely abolished. It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

Chaotic evil is encrypting, compressing, then encrypting again.

Not only that; You have to pay for updates too. Supposedly it’s because Apple takes time to verify that the app is legit and not going to do nefarious things. So they don’t want a bad actor to get a legit app on the store, then later push an update that infects everyone with a virus.

But apparently a company did a study and realized that app testing rarely made it past the main page, with testers spending ~15-20 seconds per app. They’d basically open it and if it looked like it did what it said, they didn’t bother digging any deeper.

Sure, but that wasn’t the question. They asked how to opt out of Intel’s telemetry gathering, since that’s the topic of the article. The article just happens to also mention nvidia and AMD, since they’re competing companies with similar products.

The installer has a checkbox for CIP, which is the data collection tool. Don’t install the CIP, and it won’t collect telemetry.