Easiest way to score a retention--simply don't process the cancellation when you say you are doing so.

There's a limit to how much angry people can be. Dilute it on irrelevancies, the anger directed at the real problems goes down.

Build a system that gives you a billion piece of data, expect it to spit out one in a billion results. And then you get idiots proclaiming the odds are one in a billion, it can't be a mistake.

The Xerox problem was with image compression. The compressor would look at an incoming block, decide it was similar enough to one already noted and reuse the existing token. With small fonts and similar characters one difference was within the tolerance and after seeing something like 888 it could then decide 8B8 was the same thing. As it could only happen when things lined up perfectly the alterations would also be lined up perfectly.

Yes, this algorithm is called JBIG2.

Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much.

Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.

Or the local game of putting stuff on the ballot that on the surface is for some reasonable purposes--but when you dig into it they're actually attempting to finance stuff that should be paid out of the current budget. To date I've voted against 100% of bond proposals because of this.

Meanwhile, city hall got built without any financing. And I can't imagine how it complies with the fire code. I really would not want to be upstairs in an evacuation!

Object on "blame"--it is actually only saying that this scenario is possible, it is not establishing that it actually is the cause.

When most of your server capacity is going to answering the scrapers it matters. It's not that the stuff is hidden, it's that storefront being flooded with 10x as many customers as the fire code allows. And some of them go around asking your employees mindless questions. (Small forum I help moderate: we were getting hammered with what was probably some sort of AI that was taking search queries and feeding them into the forum search. Search is now registered users only.)

> When most of your server capacity is going to answering the scrapers it matters

I've been dealing with the web since the previous century and still haven't managed to build a website that could be hurt by scrapers visiting it.

If you went through the logs, you'd probably see that these bots are on a single IP or subnet, which can be easily detected and blocked instead of closing off search to non-registered users.

That's incorrect, they use residential proxy networks.

Botnet.

Our offending searches were coming from many addresses.

I'm sort of in the middle on this.

Some pages have somebody guarding the party line, anything that goes against that gets reverted. (How can putting an accurate link behind a piece of text be wrong??)

Pages without such guardians I've never had an issue.

What in the world is the author thinking?

We have detect/analyze/slew as three separate steps that must run in order. You don't consider whether the item is a decoy until you have plenty of tracking on it?? And if slew is even a step (I am aware of no US missile in this realm that moves it's a launcher) you can likewise do that while confirming your target.

And he's assigning a fixed flyout time--but flyout time is entirely a function of where your launcher is relative to the missile target. It's coming down your throat (launcher next to the target), flyout is nearly zero. Note that we saw Iron Beam successfully engage Iranian ballistic missiles. Targets aren't up in the sky, the missile has to come down into the envelope of the weaker weapons in order to actually hit something. (The original issue of targeting ICBMs didn't consider this because the warhead would salvage fuse. Useful if the payload is nuclear, basically useless otherwise.)