computator

Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.

Not a bad idea, and I used to save lots of web pages as PDFs in the distant past, but I've noticed that a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days. I see myriad problems these days: the page is truncated on the right (no matter how much you zoom out), or all pages come out blank after the first page, or the PDF gets rendered as an image (taking many megabytes per page) rather than as text, or the outer frame prints but inner frames with the actual content are missing.

The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.

And then build from source. And make sure it doesn't auto-update so no new malware gets in. This is my idea of a lot of extra work.

I'd like to use it, but I'm hesitant to use anything that isn't a reviewed and approved package in my Linux distribution. Even if the chance is 1% that a program I download has malware or security problems that even the author doesn't know about (eg., due to libraries used), odds are that my system's going to be compromised if I run 50 such programs. This extends to browser add-ons, bookmarklets, and extensions too.

How do other people handle this dilemma?

Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.

Although I liked the video of the artist working, I didn't appreciate that they took away the controls to pause, play, seek. Is there a workaround to get back the playback controls on websites that disable it?

> if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher

But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?

Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:

  Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem

Suppose you're saying that the link between the ISPmodem and the HomeModem is a bare unfiltered copper wire. In that case, I have a different question: Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

I hope you can clear up my confusion.

The Costco one uses household current (as can be seen in one of the photos that shows a cord and a plug) and the AliExpress uses USB. I doubt that USB can supply enough power to do more than a trivial amount of heating. USB 3.1 has a max of 15W, and I can't imagine that a $25 blanket is going to use the more sophisticated USB Power Delivery connections where even the cable & charger can cost more than $25.

While trying to find the actual power consumption of the Costco model, I found this very useful comment on the Costco site: "The power consumption is not listed anywhere - product packaging, website, or included manual. I went ahead and made the purchase and hooked it up to my battery unit once I got home. I can confirm, the blanket uses an average 99W regardless of which mode it's in. I left it in each mode for about 5 minutes. There's no difference to the touch of the blanket and there's no difference with the power consumption. In other words this blanket has one heat setting and it's not very warm."

So disappointing.

> But oh what a difference it makes in the accounting! In the first case, where Autodesk sold the copy of AutoCAD to the dealer, that was the whole transaction; whatever happened to the copy of AutoCAD after the dealer paid for it has no effect on Autodesk’s books. Autodesk sells, dealer pays, end of story. But in the second case, when Autodesk sells to Spacely Sprockets, that appears on Autodesk’s ledger as a sale of AutoCAD for $1000. The instant the $1000 shows up, however, we immediately cut a check for the commission, $500, and mail it to the representative, leaving the same $500 we’d get from the dealer. Same difference, right? Not if you’re an accountant! In the first case, Autodesk made a sale for $500 and ended up, after expenses and taxes, with $125, and therefore is operating with a 25% margin (125/500). In the Spacely sale, however, the books show we sold the product for $1000, yet wound up only with the same $125. So now our margins are a mere 12.5% (125/1000).

I'd like to know how an accountant would respond to the above. Based on his two examples, it seems like accounting rules really distort the financial picture of a company.

Can someone recommend a completely local English-language dictionary for Debian?

> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)

> the last link is also a lie

I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:

“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”