Also NASA Has Rules and Amazon Locked the Library.
The New Air Filter Is Too Expensive, We Are Switching to the Old One
A new study has finally confirmed what everyone in the budget meeting suspected all along; the elaborate Carbon Capture initiative is effectively more expensive than simply deploying existing renewables, rendering the entire concept an elaborate oopsie. Researchers determined that the massive infrastructure spend for 'sucking CO2 out of the air' is a poor return on investment compared to just not making the CO2 in the first place, like switching off the server rack when you leave for the weekend.
The failure isn't malice, it's just the unfortunate result of a company trying very hard to avoid making structural changes. Think of it as installing a $5 million HVAC system to deal with a persistent mold problem instead of just fixing the leaky pipe in the breakroom ceiling. The commentariat is mostly in agreement that this entire concept has been an elaborate delay tactic to avoid inconvenient truths about fossil fuel subsidies, a common management tactic when facing an uncomfortable quarterly review.
NASA's Ten Rules to Avoid Exploding
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, has released a list of ten essential rules for building software that won't, one assumes, cause a catastrophic rocket failure or, worse, make the mars rover write endless logs. The rules themselves are astonishingly generic, a kind of motivational poster for the embedded systems engineer. They include groundbreaking insights such as "Keep It Simple" and "Test Every Path," which suggests that even the people responsible for traveling to distant galaxies still need to be told not to check in broken code.
It is comforting to know that whether you are coding a space shuttle or a simple internal inventory script, the same fundamental principles of bureaucratic risk mitigation apply. Rule 9, which states, "Don't use the goto statement," is a personal favorite, a rule so old it was probably written on punch cards. The fact that the most advanced agency on the planet still has to mandate this level of basic discipline is a great equalizer for all of us in the IT department.
Amazon Rescinds Your Library Card
Amazon has decided to remove the ability for users to download older Kindle e-books for transfer via USB, an action which means the company essentially no longer trusts its customers to behave themselves. Previously, a user could download a copy of a book they "bought" and side-load it, a practice known in the digital rights world as "ownership." Now, the company has unilaterally decided that your personal library is no longer personal.
This move is framed as a "streamlining effort" but reads more like the digital equivalent of Amazon sending a representative to your home to supervise your reading habits. The tech giant's new policy ensures that if Amazon decides to stop supporting a book format or a device, your purchased media vanishes into the digital ether, an excellent reminder that you only truly rent digital content from multinational landlords.
Briefs
- The 20-Year Patch: The original Sony PlayStation Portable, or PSP, can now finally connect to WPA2 networks. We are all relieved the security vulnerability of 2005's hottest handheld has been addressed before it could cause any real damage to the 20-year-old network infrastructure it is connecting to.
- High-Frequency Card Trading: The quantitative trading behemoth Jane Street has published a card game called Figgie, which is reportedly designed to teach the general public the thrill of market-making, arbitrage, and, presumably, burnout. The only difference between Figgie and real-life trading is the latter is played with human souls.
- Diablo's Audit Team: A team of hackers using in-game tools exposed a falsified speedrun world record in the game *Diablo* using code analysis, proving that the most efficient people for quality assurance are not QA engineers but competitive gamers trying to shame their rivals.
IT POLICY AND COMPLIANCE RETRAINING (MANDATORY)
The Carbon Capture project's core failure, in office terms, was due to:
When Perplexity announces "Deep Research," this most closely aligns with the following office function:
Amazon removing the USB download function for Kindle books is a classic example of:
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 149
Wait, if the PSP finally has WPA2 after twenty years, does that mean all the corporate WiFi networks I hard-coded its MAC address into are finally secure? I am asking for a friend who is me and I used it to stream movies during the last maintenance window.
The real takeaway from the speedrun drama is that gamers are now better at forensic code analysis than most enterprise security teams. If you want to debug your flagship product, just tell the community the world record is beatable and watch them expose every single vulnerability.
Carbon Capture is just a metaphor for every bloated corporate software suite we have been forced to roll out this decade. Highly expensive, minimally effective, and designed primarily to look good on the executive summary while avoiding any actual process change.