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Typed on my crappy tablet: took fracking forever.

Welp, as the title says, Disney can fuck my telemetry up the ass for all I care (I'll care in a few days), my son (which means me, lol) just had a Game of Thrones quality day (or a Tom Baker-Doctor Who day?)

First of all, stay at a resort: when we booked (aug. 15-18), it was hurricane/thunder storm season so we got a free meal plan which my wife upgraded to a dinner plan with sit down meals: smart woman. (Plan ahead and book ahead, of the restaurants fill up quickly). We have had mostly cloudy days, so less sun to burn, but high temps with high humidity (93, feels like 109).

When you register, tell them about any food allergies and it will follow you around!
Our first dinner was at the Rainforest cafe at 9pm (first time we could get for the first day): steak dinner that would have cost us $34 each was free. A 'chef' came out to explain what we could order to avoid gluten and dairy, and it was an excellent meal.
Second dinner was a buffet at Boma restaurant: buffet that would have been $43 each: waiter took us to table and then sat down with us, took allergy info, talked with us (thought he was going to eat with us, lol) then brought out a chef to walk us through the buffet to tell us what we could eat and not.
Xcellent service and food.
Third dinner was Best. Dinner. Ever. at Chef Mickey's: personalized service again, but had a MOB of characters at the tables and doing dances. Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto all came to our table for pictures, hugs and high fives (although I should have punched Goofy for missing my wife, lol).
Our son loves it all, and the buffet took second place (they have gluten free waffles that were amazing, though).

We got free snacks with our plan and a free cup with, I guess a chip, for free drinks (except, there's no club soda, so the calories aren't great: I drank the Powerade). Cup sits on platform/scanner and won't dispense drink unless it senses a valid cup. I tried to fill my son's water bottle with Powerade, but it cuts you off after a fill and a bit of the cup and makes you wait 3 minutes before you can dispense another cup. Free, but semi-limited. Dang!
The snacks: we were really too full to use them, and only started using them just to use them (cinnamon glazed almonds...yesssssss!)

Stay at a resort if you can:
We stayed at all star music: you can go to the park (if you don't bring a bag, you don't have to go through the bag check, but do have to do the metal detector thing).
We put drinks, etc, in a backpack and put the backpack on the wheelchair!
Go to the park in the morning and hit what you want with little wait and use pre-booked fast pass too.
When the heat and rain is coming, go back to the resort for a rest/swim, then back to park in afternoon.
If you stay outside the park (like we did years ago), if you get tired, you trek back to your car, drive back tired, then probably too tired to go back at night.....
Much better this vacation.

You can skip the meet and greet character things if you go to chef Mickey's.

Rides for kids and kids at heart:
Go to The trouble with bugs' thing: bad smells wafted down at you, my wife got a poke in the back, but I wasn't sitting with my back against the chair back so I missed it. You also get this funny/creepy 'bugs running under your butt' thing which is really kind of just cool.
Our son liked the Buzz light-year spin ride thing, but he likes Buzz so he's biased, lol.
Small world ride is aging and looking it, but it's a long ride to relax on.

Carousel of progress has been my wife and my favourite since we went as not quite newlyweds.
Fun ride, until you get to the modern/future time: then I get lost a bit. I like the simple format of the guy sitting in his chair with the dog on the floor, and he narrates with things happening behind screens on either side. The modern/future one is the whole family at once, and seems chaotic and not as interesting for me. But would watch over again...... because!

Skip the animal kingdom: not that interesting for us, but we did not see Pandora, so....

Haunted house is a skip: it seems darker (to keep paint from fading?) and ghosts dimmer. Or I'm getting old. Anyways, not worth the wait, we decided.

So, if we ever go again, note to self: (especially if grand kids ever come along)
Stay at resort and upgrade meal to dinners.
Book chef Mickey restaurant, absolutely! Book restaurants ahead of time (2weeks or more ahead, if possible).
Skip animal kingdom.
Go to Trouble with bugs.
Ride monorail, but only the air conditioned ones.

I am not affiliated with Disney at all, this is just some things I wish I had known years ago.

Next, off to Mammoth Caves: we went there years ago: it is so deep underground, they turn the lights off, light a match, then blow it out and drop it. You can hear the match hit the ground like your ear is right beside it.

Better than my stay at home vacation last summer!

Walt Disney World, I've found with this vacation, tracks you everywhere and now has my finger prints: they use chipped cards and 'watch-band' type things. AND, you also use a finger to pass through the park gates.

The system for passing through the park gates is glitchy, and you either have to use a fingerprint or get your picture taken because of the glitch not making your chipped device work.
When the devices don't work, the person letting you through raises their hand, and a supervisor type comes over to solve the issue. The issue happens constantly. He supervisor comes over and tried to solve the issue with a pad device running Windows, which you can see because when they tap the device, there is a brief flash of the windows logo.

The issue happens CONSTANTLY.

My son won't wear the watch thing, so I wear his and mine, and use (because I was surprised by the request for a fingerprint) my index finger on my left hand for him, and my middle finger of my right hand for me.
Now I have to remember which finger for which hand, AND they have my fingerprints.

Will the prints be wiped when I leave? I'm going to have to ask, but I'm doubting it.
At least they don't have my son's prints, but they did take his picture for the 'disabled fast pass' thing.

Sigh: go to enjoy yourself, and end up wondering who has your details.

Note to self: don't go for the Disney hookers.

BUT, my son is enjoying himself, so......worth it.

An external SSD has become Samsung's first drive to hit the market with 64-layer V-NAND. It includes a 10 Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connection and capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB:

Moving on to the pricing aspect, it must be remembered that the Portable SSD T5 is a pilot vehicle for Samsung's 64-layer V-NAND as its production ramps up. Samsung naturally expects this to be a low-volume, high-margin part. Therefore, despite the higher density, consumers should not expect much difference in the cost per GB compared to other external SSDs in the market. The 2TB variant will have a MSRP of $800 and the 500GB will retail at $200. At 40 cents/GB, it is priced close to other such products currently in the market.

Also at Samsung, PCWorld, The Verge, PCMag, and YouTube.

Not a submission because: Intel First to Market With 64-Layer 3D NAND SSDs

You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf

Last of Secret JFK Files Slated for Release This Fall

Fresh Air interview with Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, airing now. Will edit link in later.

Walmart is apologizing after a display seemed to market guns as back-to-school items

Walmart apologizes for sign marketing guns as back-to-school items

Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Kids to 'Own the School Year Like a Hero'?

The official Kek cult attire is now a trenchcoat.

FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”