As in coal-powered steam trains? There’s a moderate number in tourist service around the world.

Diesel or electric trains carrying coal are still very common.

Unfortunately, Project 2025 is a whole book/organisation devoted to getting effective permanent revenge.

I feel dumber having read that.

Banning a whole country because you disliked a company?

Dealing with stuff that’s ‘almost working’ is often harder than starting from scratch; ask any tradesperson.

They also apparently cannot get their heads around the fact that people might give you a discount if you advertise their brand. Ad-supported pricing has been around for a long time; it’s not some voodoo.

Until the day comes that I get a letter in the mail from the government saying, “Here’s how much you paid in taxes, if you’re cool with that then please disregard”, I will not be satisfied.

NZ does that. More accurately, they email you to tell you that there’s a letter available online - I don’t think they send physical mail by default.

Then they pay any refund straight into your nominated bank account.

It’s also torches and everything after the regulator, which run at much lower pressure. At least in NZ

I think it might be because they’re connected and disconnected regularly so misconnection is a common problem, even with colour coding. Gas work on houses involves actually putting the fittings on pipe and is done by people who should be concentrating more on that rather than on what they’re about to weld/cut.

I’ve heard flammable gas uses reverse (left hand) thread to prevent cross connection. At least for welding gases in NZ; not sure about natural gas.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

I don’t remember if they fully closed the loopholes, but there are inputs that programs cannot catch unless you actually replace the OS.

You don’t normally need to specify that the sides are parallel if you specify four right angles.

Here in NZ they do a factory reset on your calculator at the start of every exam.

Yes. But my point is that the IRS has a process for declaring and paying tax on income that you got illegally, whether it’s from being a mobster or working without the right visa.

Capone didn’t follow that process, so got done for tax evasion.

These illegal immigrants are paying their taxes, and therefore a) they aren’t exposed to prosecution for tax evasion, and b) the IRS won’t rat them out to ICE.

In a follow-up statement this afternoon, Potaka clarified that, in keeping with the Government’s policy, he’s changed his name to Tim Pawlenty.

*A current version of this story incorrectly referred to Tim Pawlenty as “Tama Potaka”

Yes, satire ‘news’ site, hence being posted to The Onion.

As with all good satire, there’s a very tiny kernel of truth at the bottom of it.

When you download a torrent, you’re downloading it from someone else’s computer. That ‘someone else’ is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It’s a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.

While immigrants in the country without authorization do not have Social Security numbers, they can file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN.

Reports about 3m people file using an ITIN each year, and the number of people expected to legally use them is very small.

Also says they see about $12B more paid into social security by illegals than paid out.

As Al Capone found, the government is would rather you pay tax on illegally earned money.

Even 95% is on the low side. Most residential-grade PV grid-tie inverters are listed as something like 97.5%. Higher voltage versions tend to do better.

Yeah, filters essentially store power during one part of the cycle and release it during another. Net power lost is fairly minimal, though not zero. DC needs filtering too: all those switchmode power supplies are very choppy.

However, the governor will not be apologizing for calling it ‘bags’ instead of ‘cornhole.’”

Oh, indeed. I’m just pointing out that terrible & illegal DRM is hardly a new practice.

You can’t really have effective copy protection on any disc that can be played in a basic CD player; they’re just too simple.

So Sony’s approach was to put an autorun installer for a ‘music player’ on the disk too. If installed, it attempted to lock your CD drive from being used by any other software and couldn’t be easily uninstalled. And they pirated open-source software (yes, that’s possible) to build it.

SMH My Head.

Try the Sony BMG Rootkit, contained on music CDs:

In 2005 it was revealed that the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.