Just finished installing a 11kw system with 2 Powerwalls in MA and it was closer to $70k. Rebates, tax credit, etc. will help a lot though.

I remember the last attempted assassination - that of Reagan by John Hinkley back in the 80’s. In my opinion those Secret Service agents reacted much quicker & better than Trumps detail did.

I was shocked that their initial reaction seemed to be to just stand there like human shields, letting him try to mug around them. They should have physically held him down and immediately start pushing him off the stage. Trump was largely a motionless target for a prolonged period of time, which the Secret Service should have not allowed.

20+ years as a technical director at a theater where among many other things I’ve had to deal with the safety aspects of:

• Prop firearms
• prop knives & swords
• stage combat
• fire & smoke effects
• objects like hammers, bricks, rocks, etc. thrown or swung at actors
• Bricks and other objects falling onto actors from heights up to 15 feet
• Sparks & other electrical effects
• collapsing sets, sometimes with actors on/under them
• falls through trap doors
• glass bottles, ceramic vases, etc. broken over actors heads

Through a number of these I’ve also consulted with film & theater safety experts, fire departments, building/electrical inspectors, etc.

Really, these guidelines would have prevented the use of real bullets allegedly mixed in by the prop supplier?

Yes, really. Among other things the guidelines prohibit any real live ammunition on the set. There should be an armorer on-set whose sole responsibility is checking guns in/out and ensuring they are unloaded, or properly loaded with blanks only when absolutely necessary. Only people who have been trained in the safety guidelines should ever handle them. Each person who handles a gun, right down to the actors, should also inspect it, and treat it as loaded even when it isn’t.

You cannot reasonably argue that it’s safer that an actor should read and learn what 40 years of experience and numerous accidents have taught an expert

I never said they did. It’s the responsibility of the producer(s) to ensure all regulations are followed. So they should have made sure the armorer did. It’s the job of the armorer to know the OSHA and other regulations involving firearms on-set, and adhering to them. The armorer should be instructing both the relevant cast & crew on established safety procedures. That should include how to safely check if a gun appears to be loaded, and if not 10000% sure, to check back with the armorer. Not with a random crew person but the person directly responsible for their safe use.

Obviously a prop weapon shouldn’t even be able to shoot real bullets.

I know a guy who teaches stage combat for live theater and have seen him on more than one occasion talk directors out of using prop firearms that fire blanks (think something akin to a starters pistol). These guns have filled barrels, etc. so there’s no way they could ever fire an actual projectile.

One of the huge problems with these sorts of guns is that they’re very prone to misfiring. For whatever reason the manufacturing quality of both starter guns and the blanks they use just isn’t as good as real firearms. The last thing you want in live theater (which I’ve seen more than once) is for an actor to pull the trigger and hear a click instead of a bang.

Granted they could just re-shoot a movie scene if this happens, but that costs time & money, which they absolutely hate wasting.

Your idea of using smaller caliber bores, etc. likely wouldn’t prevent this sort of thing because either the quality would again suffer due to the lack of demand, or some idiot would still produce real ammo for it, or at least a projectile firing blank.

Movies like Rust use revolvers because that’s what cowboys would have used. They want the guns to look real, which means the cylinder should look like it has real bullets in them and not blanks, especially in close-up shots where you can clearly see a gun. That’s ultimately what killed Brandon Lee on his movie set. The special effects team botched rigging the bullets so they wouldn’t fire. They removed the powder but didn’t remove the primer cap, and at close range that was still enough to cause trauma when Lee was shot.

I also know a guy with 40+ years in the movie special effects industry who actually writes OSHA safety regulations for the industry. They’re “written in blood” due to events like Brandon Lees death, and when followed properly everybody is safe. He wasn’t involved in any way with the Rust production, but he was extremely pissed when he started hearing what’s been reported. He said it sounds like pretty much everybody involved from the producer on down ignored those regulations, and he had no problem with folks like Baldwin facing charges as a result.

Redaction means it’s still classified for some reason. Makes me wonder what they think might still be sensitive on a 40+ year old lecture like this, when DOJ guidelines call for automatic declassification of “records having permanent historical value” after only 25 years unless they fall into a handful of very specific categories, like divulging the identity of an active agent.

GPS wouldn’t be effective at all for drones dropping munitions on infantry moving around on the battlefield, nor on FPV drones trying to fly into moving tanks or other vehicles.

And how do you turn a drone away from an infrared beam of light that would damage the drones optics almost instantly? You’d have to spot the laser system from hundreds of yards away, recognize it’s aimed at your drone, and turn away before the laser is fired. And then what? Just avoid turning your drone back the way you want to go, hoping another strategically positioned laser you didn’t see doesnt fire from a different direction?

Might still be powerful enough to blind the optics, which would effectively cripple them. Without a video feed neither FPV drones nor grenade-dropping ones would have the necessary precision to be effective.

I graduated college in 1990 and one of the places I interviewed for a job was with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. They build the submarines for the US Navy.

During my interview they told me that the computers on the current generation of subs were programmed by punch card. The punch cards were sent to the one contractor that had the ability to convert them to the magnetic tape actually used to load them onto the subs systems.

Perhaps by now they have indeed upgraded from punch cards & mag tape to floppy disks of some sort…

Yup, the Supercharger network is great. Last year my wife and I did a road trip up a down the east coast in our Model Y, and thanks to the superchargers and their integration with the Tesla navigation system we never had any issues.

Having said that, I’m hoping that the rollout of other NACS networks picks up steam. 5 or so years from now when I start thinking about a new car I’ll be taking a hard look at non-Tesla options for both vehicles as well as charging.

We did that (with Rackspace) for years before migrating to AWS. AWS is still far better from a service & flexibility perspective.

My employers website has certain times of the year where we see a huge increase in web traffic. When we had a hosted solution it took weeks of preparation to provision additional web servers to handle that load. We had to submit formal requests for additional servers, document how to wire them into our network & required firewall rules, etc. Then we had to wait an arbitrary number of days for them to do the work. And then we had to repeat that whole process when we no longer needed the additional capacity.

With AWS we just define an auto scaling group and additional web servers are spun up automatically when demand is high, and frees them up again when no longer needed. Even if we didn’t use auto scaling we could easily automate this sort of thing via terraform or other tools and spin up additional instances in minutes instead of days.

Having done everything from building my own servers 30 years ago to managing hundreds of servers in data centers to now managing hundreds of instances and other services in AWS, I’ll gladly stick with AWS. The hardware management alone makes it well worth the overhead.

25 or so years ago I had to troubleshoot a hardware issue in a SCSI-based server with 6 hard drives in it. A drive appeared to be failing so I replaced it and immediately another drive failed, then another, and so on. After almost a full day of troubleshooting later and we realized the power supply was actually the culprit and could no longer provide sufficient power to the full set of hard drives.

20 years ago while managing 700+ servers in a datacenter we had to manage a recall of about 400 of them thanks to the Capacitor plague that caused a handful of our servers to literally burst into flames.

Hardware failures like the above and dozens of others were mitigated in most cases thanks to redundancies in the software we wrote. But dealing with hardware failures and the resulting software recovery was a real PITA.

With AWS I may occasionally have a Linux instance lock up due to a hardware failure but it’s usually fairly easy to reboot the instance and have it migrate to new hardware. It’s also trivial to migrate a server to run on more (or less) number of CPU’s, RAM, etc. with only a couple of minutes of downtime.

The more advanced services AWS offers like object storage, queues, databases, etc. are even more resilient. We occasionally get notified that a replica for one of these services had failed or was determined to be on hardware that was failing, and it was automatically replaced with a new replica.

I’d much rather work this way than the way I did 20+ years ago.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there might be one or two porn sites outside of Spain that would not be required to implement this…

IF Trump actually wins the election then I hope Biden goes full scorched earth with the powers that the SCOTUS granted. He’ll have nothing to lose at that point.

It’s not currently in the best interest.

IF Trump wins the election then it would be in the best interests of the US. It would be akin to a judge throwing out a juries verdict because the jury clearly made the wrong decision.

My wife recently reconnected with a friend from college (20+ years ago) who is legally blind & living in MA. And I recently worked with a MA resident that is legally handicapped. Both of them have, through some state service, access to some number of free Uber rides each month. I know in the Boston area there is/was a state run car service for the handicapped, but using Uber apparently provides much more coverage & flexibility.

As long as the Uber drivers are being paid appropriately for this service I see it as a great service for the handicapped. I’d hate to see them lose it…

Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

Sending messages like this isn’t uncommon.

Back in the early 1960’s my dad had a high level security clearance at a defense contractor. He was one of a handful of people who knew the full details of a project to “identify, track, and destroy a hostile satellite”. This was in direct response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The President of the US was another one of the handful that knew the full details of the project.

After a lot of R&D work a test was performed. A rocket was launched from somewhere in the South Pacific. It tracked a derelict satellite used as a target, closed on it, and disabled it. At that point my dad’s involvement on the project ended.

A few months later while at home he & my mom were listening to a speech by the President. In the middle of the speech he announced to the American public that the USA now had the ability to identify, track, and destroy hostile satellites. My mom says all the color drained from his face but she had no idea why since the entire project was still highly classified. In fact when my dad got to work the next day there was a memo waiting on his desk telling him that he was not to confirm, deny, or even discuss anything he may have heard on the radio or tv the previous night.

The President didn’t make that announcement for the benefit of the American people. He was sending a very public message to the leadership of the USSR.

(And my dad never told this story until well after the 25 year time frame established for routine declassification of such materials.)

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.