Sure, I'm not advocating for doing what he did, regardless how he paid for it. I'm putting myself in the shoes of a young father that just wanted to make his kid happy and didn't properly consider the bigger picture.
People buy their kids all kinds of things that are bad for them with the best intentions. We usually don't conclude that they deserve debilitating debt as a consequence.
MFW
Honestly, if you can't understand how absolutely debilitating this is over a tiny misstep, I hardly know what to say. People commit manslaughter and get off easier that this. It's in no way reasonable to say that "Oh, you shouldn't have used the company card to pay 20$ for your kid - you deserve life-ruining debt".
Blame the dad
Honestly, it shouldn't be legal to pull more than like 100 USD off a card without re-verifying the card holder. Fuck these companies that take your card once and have no fucking limit on how much they'll pull from it without verifying it's you.
Sure, you should have a limit on your card. That doesn't make it okay for others to exploit you when you make an obvious mistake. Let's not pretend these companies aren't aware how much money they're making off people's kids spending more money than they're allowed to.
I'm no expert, but a quick Wikipedia search was enough for me to not immediately brush it off as pseudoscience.
It's not claimed to be exact of course, but it does appear to me that consensus is that it can be done with reasonable accuracy.
Beauty of handwriting is that it doesn't even need to be consistent for an expert to determine with pretty high accuracy whether or not it's coming from the same person. A physical signature is actually a pretty decent way to verify that a specific person really did sign something.
So much this. They've basically figured out that if they burn enough money, they get the equivalent of billions of meth-charged monkeys on typewriters.
Anything with a security hole (so... basically everything) will eventually be broken into if you throw a data center worth of computational power at trying every conceivable hack. That's basically what they were doing here. The only mildly impressive part about it is the amount of resources they're willing to throw at this.
Hit em' with that exp(-x) sin(x)
You make a good point, however you need to remember that the power system, both power storage and motors, need to go somewhere.
I could easily argue that the power storage is just as critical a part as the central processing unit, but takes up a lot more space. So why not put the CPU in a hardened "head", and the battery pack in the torso?
When the compression is large enough to be relevant to whatever you're calculating or discussing. Part of my job is literally to develop models that, for instance, predict the compressibility of water. For pretty much all practical purposes I can attest that the isothermal compressibility of water is completely negligible.
The countries in power didn’t change much in size, but the countries they controlled did.
Sorry, but this is just a strange thing to say. The size of any place on a map can only be measured relative to other places on the map. "The countries in power didn't change much in size" just doesn't make any sense.
At the time when the Mercator projection was invented, we already had plenty of maps that gave a more accurate picture of the size of different land masses. The countries in power were actively colonising a lot of the world, so you better bet they would want to amplify their achievements.
The Mercator projection wasn't "just handy". It was literally the first widely used map projection that lat people sail across open seas and get where they wanted. That's a life/death matter. It's literally an integral part of the power of navigating the world seas.
The fact that it compresses the equator is directly a result of where the magnetic poles of the earth are aligned relative to the geography of the continents.
These companies literally design their product with the intention of making people overspend. As long as micro transactions have existed, the problem of kids over spending their parents money because they were allowed a single purchase has been a problem.
The companies in question are making bank off this. They know it's an issue, and they actively exploit it to make more money. It's extremely unethical.