Should be torrenting “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

I was notified about 3 or 4 breaches just last year, some from companies I’d never even heard of but had my info.

The decision by CFPB to cancel the rule comes days after the Financial Technology Association, an industry lobby group representing non-bank fintech companies, wrote to Vought in his capacity as the White House’s budget director. The lobby group asked the administration to withdraw the CFPB’s rule, claiming it would be “harmful to financial institutions’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud.”

Sure. The only way to detect and prevent fraud is to make it easy for the fraud to happen in the first place.

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

Maybe the kind of people/organizations who do karma farming on Reddit haven’t figured out that’s meaningless here

It sounds like right now Lemmy needs the Lemmy users donating to Lemmy!

They’re only looking for $250,000. That seems like it should be achievable. Really, a handful of corporate sponsorships from big companies, where $50,000 is almost nothing, could be all they need. Or 50,000 people giving $5 once a year.

The investors want it, for now

Why is Palpatine on the Enterprise?

I forgot in Europe the license plates stick with the car throughout its existence, so if you see a different plate on the back you’d assume it’s a different car

I seem to recall in the past Microsoft pressured manufacturers to not sell computers without an operating system, arguing that unscrupulous consumers would install pirated copies of Windows on them. A ridiculous argument, but it was the excuse they used.

I usually get the thank you when they want to bring me to the next round of the hiring process. Maybe the thank you acts as a kind of signal that a party is interested in keeping the process moving? I’m sending a follow-up email if I’m eager to keep things moving (and it’s not simply “thank you for the interview;” I’m including a couple brief points reiterating why I think I’m a good fit). If I’m ambivalent or not interested I wouldn’t put the effort in.

I’m going to need to save this link. I saved a Power Mac G5 from an old job that was being disposed, but it’s just been gathering dust in a corner. The reporters said it wasn’t working anymore, or at least wouldn’t run long enough to edit their stories, so it might need some work.

I remember as a child my cousin’s siblings would sometimes call her “lizard breath” instead of Elizabeth

I don’t know if anyone still makes the pencils. IIRC they used a special formulation for the graphite that reduced the dust and risk of breakage, but I don’t think there’s much market for that outside the space program since that’s about the only place the dust would float and be hazardous. The pens were in development even before the space program because there’s a market for pens that can write in unusual orientations. I’m sure the marketing of it being a pen used in space helps expands that market some, but the market would exist regardless. It’s supposed to be a nice pen to write with also, although I don’t know how much of that is kind of a placebo to justify spending $10-20+ on a pen. I’m sure it’s nicer than a 50¢ pen, though.

Felt pens can be prone to leakage, especially in lower atmospheric pressure. This can be a problem even in airliners, and definitely not what you want in space. There’s nothing in the pen mechanism to seal the ink in when not in use. A properly made ballpoint pen actually seals the ink in when not in use. That was Bíró’s big selling point over earlier technologies like fountain pens; the pen still writes even if you leave it uncapped and the ink doesn’t dry out. The Bic pen was revolutionary for creating a manufacturing process that could produce them cheaply.

Fisher’s claim to fame before inventing the Space Pen was inventing a universal replacement ink cartridge. You can even put the space pen cartridge in pens from other manufacturers.

The Soviets were using grease pencils IIRC before also switching to the Fisher Space Pen around 1969. The grease pencil eliminated the risk of graphite floating around but the writing quality isn’t great.

Virginia is for lovers!

Depending on your threat model

Your points about a cost-plus contract have merit but aren’t applicable here because the pens weren’t developed under a contract at all. Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company had started developing a pressurized pen before the space program even began (to develop a pen that could write in other orientations than on a desk), although learning of the concerns from the program gave him renewed impetus to solve the design. Fisher patented the design in 1966 after ten years of development and about $1 million in cost. Prior to the pens NASA had been purchasing special pencils at $128.89/each. The original purchase order for the pens bought 400 at $2.95/each.

The Soviet space program bought the pens in 1969, and besides the Americans they’re still used today by the Russian and Chinese space programs. You can buy one yourself for as little as $7 if you don’t care about it being refillable. On the one hand that’s a lot for a disposable pen, on the other hand that’s not terribly expensive for a pen that writes upside-down if you need that, and might not feel too bad if you’re prone to losing pens.