Most don't spam texts, but those that do I've switched out. And yeah, I should probably use a fake number so whoever has Jenny's number in my area code doesn't get messages about how a toilet tank gasket is being delivered from Home Depot to my house...
"Currently undergoing some sort of 60 days appeals process, but who knows."
.. and the op said:
"I have tried to contact Microsoft through various channels but I have only received automated replies and bots. I was unable to reach a human."
... which is a roundabout way of saying you did not spend lawyer hours and you did not contact them through channels that they cannot ignore: registered, physical mail, from a lawyer.
I'm sorry for these difficulties, truly, but don't tell me you can't reach a human when you most definitely can reach a human. From my own experience with an organization at least as calloused and indifferent as MS[1], as soon as I sent a real, legal communication I had real live humans lining up to talk to me.
Microsoft hasn't managed to burn down entire towns (But Copilot is probably working on it), so I suppose we do have at least some kind of gauge of callousness to work off of thanks to PG&E. Which was also the company behind that whole slightly famous Erin Brockovich thing, amongst so very many others.
"If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch."
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
"... throughout my house and observed that other than a few large appliances, the majority of powered devices in a typical home in 2026 could be supplied via PoE DC current as well!"
We installed 120 LED ceiling lights in our home circa 2020, all of which were run with high voltage (romex) and accompanied by 120 little transformer boxes that mount inside the ceiling next to them.
Later ...
We installed outdoor lighting with low voltage, outdoor rated wiring and powered by a 12V transformer[1] and I felt the same way you did: why did we use a mile of romex and install all of those little mini transformers when we could have powered the same lights with 12V and low voltage wire ?
I then learned that the energy draw of running the low-volt transformer all the time - especially one large enough to supply an entire house of lighting - would more than cancel out energy savings from powering lower voltage fixtures.
You don't have this problem with outdoor lighting because the entire transformer is on a switch leg and is off most of the time.
So ... I like the idea of removing a lot of unnecessary high voltage wire but it's not as simple as "just put all of your lights behind a transformer".
> I then learned that the energy draw of running the low-volt transformer all the time - especially one large enough to supply an entire house of lighting - would more than cancel out energy savings from powering lower voltage fixtures.
That's not a constraint of physics, you can absolutely build a DC power supply that is efficient in a wide load range. (Worst case it might involve paralleling and switching between multiple PSUs that target different load ranges.) But of course something like that is more expensive...
> But of course something like that is more expensive...
More expensive than an inefficient unit, but it should still be a lot cheaper than 120 separate units, right?
And I expect one big fat unit to do a better job of smoothing out voltage and avoiding flicker than a bunch of single-light units. Especially because the output capacitors are sized for the entire system, but you'll rarely have all the lights on at the same time.
Though for efficiency I'd think you'd want 48v and not 12v.
These days, you should not be using transformers to power small loads at all, you should be using switching power supplies. They have negligible power draw when there's no load attached.
I am flying from SFO -> DEN in a few days and I see that Denver wait time is 4 minutes and, as is well known, SFO does not use TSA or federal security staff.
Denver does, however, so I wonder why there is no wait at DEN and hundreds of minutes at Houston/Atlanta/JFK ?
I’m a frequent flier and flown into all of the above, the ones with TSA issues have been perpetually mismanaged under the best conditions, it’s not even remotely surprising that they are having issues under pressure.
I encourage you - and anyone - to read the excellent book:
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ [1]
... and, in this case, to pay special attention to the multiple chapters describing in painful detail just what is involved in refining and extracting Uranium. As in, cubic acres of land mechanically and chemically processed to extract ounces of material ... which is then sent to enormous production facilities, at tremendous cost, only to begin the refinement process.
It is an incredibly long, dirty and energy intensive journey and I am not sure if the ledger of carbon expenses properly accounts for these steps.
I have spent a lot of time in areas that have been impacted by uranium extraction, including wandering around the four corners area and discovering old uranium mines.
Combined with seeing how the extractive energy industry has treated old wells, where they do everything in their power to abandon them and put the burden of cleanup and mainteance of that remediation onto the public, I simply have no faith that nuclear power is "safe" as long as it's private industry doing the work.
I wish that mark pilgrim had not taken his blog off-line… He had a very insightful and moving peace about alcoholism and described it in a very striking and understandable way.
"0-click example: receive an MMS with a malformed image that exploits a bug in decoding ..."
Consider a SMS firewall that:
- flattens text to ascii-256
- recompresses, noises and slightly resizes images and video
... and only then passes the message onto your real (SIM card) phone number.
This, of course, requires that you host your phone number somewhere like Twilio which has other added benefits like additional protection from SIM-jacking and being invulnerable to theft or loss of your handset, etc.
If this firewall is available as a commercial product, eventually it be infected, so there won't be any need to hack any client devices. Since this is clearly a niche product, the device manufacturer won't be able to identify and fix bugs as effectively as companies like Apple do. This follows ROSKOMNADZOR recommendations: to install a middleware device that decrypts, stores, modifies, blocks and redirects all traffic depending on rules submitted from external party.
You can just enter a fake prefix+number with plausible NPA.
You should use a fake prefix because you don’t want some poor random person getting your delivery updates…
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