JStanton617

At long last we've created Wintermute from William Gibson's classic 1984 novel Don't Create Wintermute

Definitely justifying this by helping my nephew with his Pinewood Derby car next year

India (among other countries) have passed so called "hostage-taking laws" that require large social media companies to have in-country employees that can be strong-armed from ways small to large (threats of being convicted of treason and executed).

This is a specific policy to allow them to enforce their censorship laws in other countries.

Payroll is one of the very few (only?) things that "pierces the corporate veil" - that is, the principals / board members are personally liable even in the event of corporate bankruptcy.

You could engage a labor lawyer, but if this was pre-series A and the founder was self-funding, there might not be any personal assets there either.

If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.

This exactly. For most small non-profs, basic IT upkeep - i.e. cleaning adware, patching vulns, getting backups set up and tested - is going to be so much useful than occasional airdropped code with no regular/timely maintenance plan

What an absolute incineration of time, effort and skill

The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1% of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have commercially relevant "net gain"

You need an MDM to manage it remotely. Something like Jamf Now is $2/device/month. Not sure how much the shipping costs, but might be break-even

I was taught basically this same method as the "Princess Bride" plan:

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya (who I am)

You killed my father (why I'm reaching out)

Prepare to die (my ask / expectation)

For those unfamiliar, the rumor is that Ferrari was somehow detecting the sample rate of the fuel flow sensor (which is a black-box provided by FIA and standard across all the cars), and increasing the flow rate only when the sensor "wasn't looking".

So doing a side-channel attack on the sensor, and designing a pump system to dynamically adjust the rate dozens of times a second. Hacking at its finest

EFS allows you to connect to the filesystem from multiple web front-end machines. Doing the same with EBS would require you to manage some sort of clustered filesystem, or run a separate storage tier server.