The membership has another impact on the balance sheet. It not only adds revenue, it also cuts loss from shoplifting

Same. I have found it impossible to explain to the uninitiated so I delight in finding others who’ve found it!

Does it have to be one photo? If you reproduced a spinning drive but with the camera positioned to see half of the spinning disc, I wonder if it could capture the "stream" of pixels in one arc of the spinning disc

You would still need some significant magnification. And there might also be a measurement latency issue if the disc is in motion (the camera CCD might not be fast enough to capture the image before it rotates away).

The optics of a CD-ROM drive are optimized for something pretty different than the optics of a camera. But if you made enough tweaks and adaptations, sure, the data is ultimately there and can be captured by a different kind of sensor than the one it was designed for. It would be a cool project.

I'm mostly just pointing out that adapting your camera to successfully capture billions of sub-micrometer features isn't that trivial.

He didn’t work there. He was a Neo-Nazi and member of Neo-Nazi organisations, divulging secrets.

By keeping him out of jail, Mi5 stood to gain more intelligence

Canadian citizens are exempt but this is the program that allows non-visa travel to nationals of certain countries https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/

What a delightful little question!

Thanks. I ran into it in a real life situation, and was surprised that the answer is so nuanced. It had me questioning my sanity for a while. :)

In a previous job I worked for a site doing natural language parsing on recipes.

We noticed one of our partner websites had an unusual number of unique ingredients. It turned out every ingredient was a link to another recipe to make that ingredient, along the lines of your idea.

However for some reason (presumably SEO) they took this to the extreme and everything was a recipe. Including apples.

The recipe for “apple” is

1. Take 1 Apple

2. Eat and enjoy

But since Apple is a prerequisite for this recipe, infinite looping is a risk in the kitchen now

This couldn’t have been better timed for me.

I sit with a pile of raspberry Pis I throw into different rooms about the house and want to stick assorted tasks on them. My open question was how can I just image them, plug them in and centrally configure what runs on them with no more sd card or Mac detection shenanigans when I change their job.

I’ll be giving this a try!

If lldp proves inconvenient, pi's also have a unique cpu-id, which can be found in /proc/cpuinfo

I think something similar exists on most processors

How does cpu-id map to physical location? If I move it from a closet on the first floor, to a rack in the basement, how does knowing the cpu-id help?

You would use CPU id by having the vanilla image display its ID (or perhaps some more humanly readable derived name) until assigned something to display. It won't know that it's moved, that's an advantage of the port method.

I mentioned it because the OP was going to use Mac addresses in a similar way, and only didn't because the Mac addresses of her machines were unstable.

I think it’s not a nation state actor thing. In 2018 British airways checkout got popped by a JavaScript being library being changed to eavesdrop credit cards. The same thing could easily happen with password forms

Granted they didn’t break the session in flight, but there is a low bar to achieve the same thing