Fair.

Remember to turn off all biometrics for unlocking your phone, if not now, then at least when traveling internationally. They can scan your face or your fingerprint without a warrant. But they can’t compel you to provide potentially incriminating information including passwords, codes and patterns. Self-destruct codes will likely get you arrested for obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence though, so use those at your own risk. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Best to never keep anything you wouldn’t want a cop or fed seeing anywhere on your device. If you have any materials that you wish to keep private, store them elsewhere as much as possible. Either never store them on your device or regularly back them up somewhere secure and wipe your device clean. Make sure all remote access to those materials are behind secure encrypted password protected connections.

Remember, know the law so that you may follow it to its letter and no further. If you must comply, comply. If you can, don’t comply. Know your rights and practice them. Never volunteer information to law enforcement even if you’re innocent. You don’t know what they know, what they are wanting to hear, what can be misunderstood, confused or contorted to put you into trouble. Every day is shut the fuck up Friday. Nobody will protect you but you.

From a consumer freedom standpoint this is shitty. And it does allow them to sell an enthusiast model at a premium without competing with an after market modder.

But two things can be true. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable for the company to want to protect the integrity of the brand if unreliable after market sellers start releasing bad product indistinguishable from your own with your logo slapped on it.

Even if you have authorized resellers entrusted with doing the upgrades and audited for quality, if you leave the door open, there will be unauthorized mods on the market too. It does hurt not only Raspberry Pi, but the entire resell market if you can’t trust the product to have their expected standard of quality. It still sucks, but I at least get the justification.

A few years back, I worked in an assembly plant for a car company. One time when I was doing a quality containment, I found out that something like 30-50 cars were found to have a very slightly misaligned roof piece when it was welded, and it causes a slight, but visible warp in the roof. It was otherwise fine. Still water proof, still structurally sound, just a cosmetic defect. They were all quarantined to be stripped of any easily removable components and then the remaining parts and body would be scrapped.

I asked why? Even if they didn’t want to put them out to dealers with a visible defect, they were still safe and functional. They could still offer them to employees for sale at a discount and make far more back for them than its value as scrap. The answer was that it could hurt the value of the brand as a whole if low quality cars were put on the market, even if only for resale. It was worth the loss of these 30+ cars to maintain a consumer’s high expectation of quality.

I still think it may have been better to allow employees an opportunity to get a new vehicle at a great price with only a cosmetic defect. But I do get the competing concern there. You do want things you buy from a big company to have reliable quality.

Quasar burst?

IT: “Did you verify that your data cable is connected to the outlet in the wall?”

Client: “Of course I did. I’m not an idiot!”

Could be. I dont think my wife has much of a mind’s eye either. But she was a cancer kid and also had a viral flare up in her eyes while she was immuno-comprimised on chemo that hurt her eyesight pretty bad when she was like 2 or 3. Her eyesight has actually improved significantly over her life as her retinas healed, but it is still pretty bad. I think everything was blurry for her when that part of her brain was supposed to be developing that recognizes faces so it just compensated best it could. Anyway, typical asshole husband, I give the former cancer kid a hard time sometimes about her disability. Out of love.

Nice. Haven’t watched Queen of Queens in years and only watched sporadically so I don’t remember Doug’s neighbor. But I always love a surprise Bryan Cranston. He’s also Ted’s boss in How I Met Your Mother.

Nope. White as the driven snow.

I know it didn’t really want an explanation but you’re gonna good and gosh darn get one.

Both words predate cars.

“Parkway” used to always be literal. A way/path through a park. A wide landscaped scenic route through parks for carriages. Those scenic routes eventually became roads with the arrival of cars, often existing beyond parks and even sometimes stretching between cities, but kept the same old timey name.

And driveways weren’t just the often car-length bit of pavement where your car sits. They were long private drives, roads that connected a manor home to public roadways across an estate. They were primarily for driving carriages upon between the public roads and the private manor, so the name made more sense. With the advent of cars, homes that weren’t on massive estates now needed a paved or gravel path for their cars to travel to a garage nearby or attached to the home. They used the same name despite being far shorter, only needing to cross a more typical yard, requiring little driving.

And while we are on the subject a “park” as in a green space used for conservation and/or recreation and the action, to “park”, as in a car, have the same origin. They both come from the French word “parc”, which means “an enclosed piece of ground”. The origin of the connection for that word and modern public green spaces goes back to medieval royals building fenced-in areas of wild greenery for royals and nobels to hunt in. As for what that has to do with parking a car, it goes back to a military preparations where wagons, weapons and horses would be stored and organized in designated enclosures, “parcs”, thus “parking” them for later usage. When cars came about and needed organized storing, the word already existed for such a thing.

So too does “wherefore”. In old English, “where” meant “what” and “fore” meant “for”. So “wherefore?” meant “what for?”, i.e “for what reason”. “Therefore” is the opposite of “wherefore”, meaning “that for”, i.e. “for that reason”

That one has confused many a teenager reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time because it’s not commonly used much anymore apart from some versions of the Bible, and the idiom “Whys and Wherefores”. When she says “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”, Juliet isn’t asking where Romeo is. She’s asking “Why are you Romeo?” As in she’s lamenting that the boy she met is specifically Romeo, a Montague, a family enemy. She wishes he weren’t. Which is why she followed that sentence with “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.”

P.S. “how come” means “why” because it’s a shortened phrase. It could stand for something like “how did it come about that he died?” Or “how comes it that you know my name?” That is a bit of a mouth full, so people just casually dropped most of it to “how come he died?” and “how come you know my name?”

My wife is truly face blind. She doesn’t recognize actors in different roles. Even if she just watched a whole series staring someone, if she watched a different show where they appear, I’ll asked her if she recognizes them. She almost never does unless they look very similar. She says stuff like she didn’t recognize them because their hair was different, like that is a valid excuse. When I see someone in the wild and say “oh wow, they look just like so and so don’t they?” She says no their hair is totally different. 😮‍💨

It’s giving Hot Wheels