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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • It isn’t going to be one or the other (if they don’t offer a 401k, then you can use IRAs), unless you just make a bad choice. An employer can contribute to a 401k and also provide a pension (mine used to but I’ve been around long enough that I get both the pension and 401k with matching) but if I had a choice, I could pick a pension for example but also put money into an IRA for retirement that would normally go to a 401k.

    If you absolutely had to pick one, it isn’t going to be the same answer for everyone. Amounts, what you’re able to contribute, matching, risks and tax situations are going to vary from person to person and their employer.

    As far as controlling your money, some 401k’s allow some extra control, some don’t but most have a middle ground except for their company stock which you can usually directly buy. If you’re 401k allows general different ‘markets’ and/or ‘lifecycle’ buckets (they get more conservative on investment risk the closer you get to your retirement age) is, at the end of the day, all controlled by a broker and they are making the actual decision as to what to invest and how. Some plans may allow you to invest into individual stocks through the 401k’s brokerage though.

    At the end of the day though, if all you had was a pension offered which you aren’t going to be contributing your income to, then you should invest in some sort of retirement plan yourself, be it an IRA, money market, bonds, CDs or whatever.


  • Step 1: License the technology for very cheap or free to competitors.

    Step 2: Include features but its free because ads. Pay small monthly fee for ad-free.

    Step 3: Revise CANNBus or replace it with new system. Make it a ‘standard’ so that aftermarket units can provide features but will also serve ads from the original car manufacturer and its DRM. Anyone reverse engineering the system gets sued into the ground for DMCA/Copyright laws because now they are bypassing DRM.

    Step 4: Everyone gets ads regardless. Also, you must pay subscription fee to basically use the car. Ads are to “keep costs down” for features and/or car purchasing price.

    Step 5: After everyone is mad, give slightly higher cost for subscription for ad-free.

    People that complain are told 'It’s just one coffee a month. No big deal."

    Step 6: Offer a 5-year (non-transferrable or refundable) plan that you can just roll into the price of the car loan and ‘locks in the price’ and 'You don’t have to worry about it anymore." Maybe toss in lame very small discounts for certain branded charging stations while on the plan. People already sign up for credit cards, give away their personal info. and become loyal customers to gas stations to save single digit percentages off on fuel.

    People that buy new every 5 years usually buy the package.

    People that try to save money and buy used cars pay the subscriptions.

    Step 7: Double monthly price for ad-free tier and market it to “we had to raise prices for those that want a premium experience but kept the ad-based subscription fee cheap. We had to pass the cost somewhere.” This will increase the demand for those 5-year plans.

    Overall new car purchase demand increases a bit because of those plans.

    Over the course of 15 or 20 years there will be an entire generation of drivers used to ads always being in cars and will just accept subscriptions and ads are just the way it’s always been that way and that it must be that way.

    For the EU, it’ll probably be different where the car can perform basic functions without ads but ‘premium features’ for stuff like traction control, auto lane following, etc. will probably still be behind the system I’d imagine.





  • This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.







  • I used to do this on one of my sites that was moderately popular in the 00’s. I had a link hidden via javascript, so a user couldn’t click it (unless they disabled javascript and clicked it), though it was hidden pretty well for that too.

    IP hits would be put into a log and my script would add a /24 of that subnet into my firewall. I allowed specific IP ranges for some search engines.

    Anyway, it caught a lot of bots. I really just wanted to stop automated attacks and spambots on the web front.

    I also had a honeypot port that basically did the same thing. If you sent packets to it, your /24 was added to the firewall for a week or so. I think I just used netcat to add to yet another log and wrote a script to add those /24’s to iptables.

    I did it because I had so much bad noise on my logs and spambots, it was pretty crazy.






  • Well if you want to hand wave stuff for a story, sure. The issue with the beacon is a few fold though. So, let’s say they use something close to the speed of light to communicate like a laser and there happens to be no obstructions and the beam is so narrow and powerful it just works. Being even a few light years away just isn’t accurate enough to know exactly where something is going to be in space. Sure, if it travels in an exact straight line (so it’s not near any massive bodies) there’s likely to be some sort of drift, even slightly angular. That’s going to translate into likely at least kilometers in the 10k range between the time it takes the data to be known vs. how many years have already passed from that last bit of data.

    Sure though, take away any need for inertia or fuel and yeah, they can just stop somewhere, figure it out and go again and grab it or better yet there’s just some technobabble thing that can instantaneously keep Sol updated in near real-time but also the ship coming to get it. That’s just plot devices for a story though and an author can hand wave away anything they want, so there’s no need to say that if we just talked about a problem in advance, we would just figure it out and make it happen because that only needs to be done in some made-up fantasy if that’s what the author wants to do.


  • How would a space beacon be detected by an FTL ship? Unless there’s some sort of weird quantum entanglement communication with some paired exotic material, whatever data (probably a waveform of some type) would be so fractional it is unlikely to be useful or even detectable.

    But on top of that, if we still contend with inertia, a ship has to slow down precisely to the velocity of the slower ship or do it multiple times to detect it somewhere and then speed back up again.

    But then, we’d also have to figure out why the resources are even worth it to spend and weigh the chances of success and the risks of failure.

    Unless the problem is arbitrary for everything involved it is doubtful that regardless of what the future holds for technology that we just wouldn’t pick up the other ship/passengers.


  • There are a couple of OEMs like System76 and Starlabs that sell laptops with Linux on them, provide tech support for customers and so on.

    And no, installing most distros aren’t hard. You just click the buttons to proceed and fill out the username and password box, select your time zone and select your wi-fi network if you’re using wifi.

    You can do manual partitioning but why would you if you don’t know what you’re doing?

    Installing software in the GUI is as easy as installing software from the Microsoft Store. Just search or look around and when you see something you want, just click the Install button.