mrjamiam

It's certainly a spy-vs-spy situtation, if you remember the Mad magazine cartoon. If you don't, it's alternating advances in offense and defense. I like analogies, and since security has multiple applications, here are a couple: When hiking in bear country, make sure you can outrun at least one of the folks you're with - you can't outrun the bear, but if you outrun someone else, the bear might not pass them up and come for you. And I've had a couple of experiences with the local cops addressing a community group about Neighborhood Watch, and both times it came down to this, very roughly paraphrased: Criminals gonna crime. What you wanna do is make your neighborhood so obviously nosy that the criminals say "forget this place, I'mma go on down the road". The general idea is to be a harder target than some or many, and you'll be less likely to be the victim. But there will always be victims.

Not to be argumentative, but why can't it be both? A two-character password that only uses lower-case alphabetic characters (standard English keyboard, sampling with replacement) has 262 or 676 possibilities. If you allow upper-case also (that is, shift+letter), then you have 522 or 2704 possbilities. If you also allow numbers 0-9, then you have 622 or 3844 possibilities. Now allowing the shift+number characters too, you have 722 or 5184 possibilities. If you stretch the password to three characters, and following the same scheme, you have 263 or 17576, 523 or 140608, 623 or 238328, and 723 or 373248 possibilities. Using a passphrase, like "takesonetoknowone", increases the exponent: something to the 17th in this example. In fact, in this example, I used only lower-case letters, so it would be one of 2617 or 1,133,827,315,385,150,725,554,176 possibilities (unless I mis-entered something on my calculator). Obviously this is a much bigger number than you get from a two- or three-character password, but the same principle applies: Allowing more characters increases the number of guesses it takes to cover all possibilities. When I hear "they used to say that but now they are saying this" I wonder what they will be saying next. If it's a matter of just increasing the number of possibilities, adding other characters is a way to do that, if we live in a world where the password protected site allows thousands and millions and kajillions of consecutive guesses until the right one is finally entered. Sites can do everyone a favor and implement a lockout or at least a cooling-off period when a number of incorrect entries are tried. Starting with a passphrase and then applying some creative misspelling (to counter the use of dictionaries in the guessing game) and alternative characters makes the number of possibilities skyrocket. I think it used to be that the worry was that if you wrote the password down, someone would access it and be able to log in. You'd have to judge your exposure to that, but in my case it's just my wife and me here at home, and in fact I'm at the age where I have an estate plan and part of that is to have passwords available to my wife or whoever survives me or us, so they have to be written down. I can make them as wacky as I want, and reference them when I need them. This is especially useful if the site that requires a hard-to-crack password also requires me to change it yearly, quarterly, or whatever. Passphrases might be easier to remember, but is what I remember the current one, or that cool one I used a couple of years ago? Of course I don't leave the passwords right at the keyboard. And if there is a key-logger malware on my computer, it doesn't make any difference how cute I get with the passwords, so I use anti-malware software. Ultimately your security is your responsibility, and good security is inconvenient.

You'd have to play metal on it.

Carhartt had a TV ad out a while back - "Every day is someone's first day on the job."

The show goes on, it seems. Unless this is a hallucination of our AI overlords.

RIP Frank. Same three guys, same three chords had a good run.

I'm no authority, and I was a tyke back in the days of these amps, but I sort of generally sort preamp distortion as "fizzy" and power amp distortion as "creamy". Maybe the idea was to deliver a less- (or un-) distorted preamp signal to the overdriven power section?

Come on now - it's had its octave adjusted!

Can't wait to see the artwork Dave proposes for the 'Dumbass' one.

Same. Yup.

Big news! Wishing you all the best!

Dibs! If it turns out not to be a keeper for you, of course. I've never had a Diablo.

Landlady: "I don't think you're trying to sell no guitar."

Many many thanks, Ted!

Tom is a great seller and HFC member! If I didn't already have a handful of Specials, I would be buying this one. Get yours!

Not to be contradictory (but I guess I am) but... with "relic-ing" being such a fad for a while now, there may be those who do want it, especially if it's the real thing. Anyway, you can't hear the checking, unless maybe you're Eric Johnson.

I need them.

Well put. It doesn't think, but it can do the searches you allude to incredibly fast and summarize results. The problem, of course, is the old Garbage In, Garbage Out risk of all computer processing. If all the search results it compiles were posted by idiots, the output will be idiocy. AI has great potential, but taking the next step of considering and maybe discounting the source will be harder than just scouring the web.

Or put a smoke generator in there instead?

So is it is, or is it ain't, an AI dream to put tread on the sidewalls?

Dang. RIP, sir.

If it was across town, I'd go get it. Across the ocean, I'm not so quick on the trigger. The thought of having nearly 2% of the entire Graphic production is enticing, though.

Come to Poppa! In my head that sounds like Bob Seger, but that is the only way I sound like Bob Seger. I had a very Canadian buying experience. First I communicated with Gary, then Alex. I guess Neil must have been off this week.

He even describes its acoustic voice!

I haven't broken out my translation aids to get past the cookies screen, but that is a very good-looking Graphic Special at what seems a reasonable price (given that I haven't yet read the description details). I do note the finish flaws on the top and bottom face edges.