I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.
I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.
Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.
My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.
I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.
> When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.
This is one of the reasons that responsible disclosure exists. Their tune will likely change after sufficient bad publicity.
If the Apache Solr devs can be convinced to add authentication to their product instead of hand-waving about reverse proxies or other add-ons, anyone can.
I've seen plenty of systems along the lines of what you're describing where unauthenticated clients can submit jobs. Sometimes the developers even claim that's intentional. Either way, it's a vulnerability, because it compromises the underlying hosts.
> The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.
Do you know if this is why looking through a true green-blocking (pure magenta or purple) filter (e.g. Wratten 32, 33, or 34A) is such a different experience than a digital photo taken using the same filter?
Looking through those filters is extremely surreal for me, but I've not been able to capture anything like it with any camera.
If you haven't already, you should do some tests to see if you can see UV-A now. Some replacement lenses are UV-transparent.
Dandelions in sunlight are an easy option, at least in my part of the world. If your replacement lens is UV-transparent, dandelions should have a very distinct colour difference between the center and outer parts of the petals, instead of a mostly-uniform yellow.
> And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators.
It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped:
"On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation."
When I was very young (around 3 or 4) I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to climb into my parents' bed.
After some time, I could see a small-scale but very extensive science fiction space base on top of the bed covers, as if the bed covers were the surface of a moon or planet.
It was populated, and in motion - rockets launching from gantries as I watched, etc. I know it wasn't a dream, because my parents remember me describing it to them as it happened.
I've never experienced anything like that again, and never heard of anything like it until reading about these mushrooms last year.
It definitely seems like an odd quirk of the brain that it apparently has a ”1990s god video game" (e.g. Populous) visualization mode.
There's some neat sci fi novel potential there, though, like it being a remnant of some kind of distant ancestor with a hive mind that could synthesize the visual input of multiple members into a disembodied third-person camera point of view.
It was an interesting thoery, but IMO his habit of making similar claims every time an interstellar object is discovered cast doubt on that original theory.
> Also, the "can't radar, plz don't ITAR" is horseshit.
My assumption is that they're trying to avoid crossing a legal line, as opposed to being personally invested in the idea of preventing radar use by a determined hobbyist.
> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
> Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales
I have a thermal imager. They can't see through walls in the sense you're imagining. If there's an electric heating element inside a wall or a ceiling, you could get an image of that. If there's a camera or other active electronics hidden in a wall or object, you can see the heat from that.
You wouldn't be able to see a person in an adjacent room through the wall between the two rooms, unless the wall was made specifically of thermally-transparent material.
I've heard rumours of "see through walls" equipment in the US military before. If they really have something like that, it would have to be using technology other than thermal imaging.
> At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but that hasn't been my experience. I've had one MRI and one CT scan in the 25+ years that I've been a full-time employed adult with insurance.
I'd have been happy to sign up for more so I could have proactive health information and the raw data to use for hobby projects.
If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.
Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.
Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.
Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
They weren't that high frequency. I could hear computer monitors into my twenties at least. I'd guess somewhere around 20 - 22 kHz. CRTs were largely replaced by LCDs by my late 20s/early 30s, so I don't have a good sense of when I stopped being able to hear frequencies that high.
I'm a little surprised to see the company that locked employees into their buildings during night shifts[1] in your "more ethical" list.
[1] https://archive.is/Fx9S