You are right, QR codes are very easy to decode if you have them raw, even the C64 should do it in a few seconds, maybe a minute for one of those 22 giant ones. The hard part is image processing when decoding a camera picture - and that can be done on the C64 too if it has enough time and some external memory (or disks for virtual memory). People have even emulated a 32-bit RISC processor on the poor thing, and made it boot Linux.

If cookie clicker was real:

Because

1. When the internet was rolling out, a decentralized, open, best-effort solution of TCP/IP thankfully won over telephone companies’ centralized system proposal
2. IPv6 is still not universal for some damn reason
3. Onion addresses solve these problems but good luck getting everyone aboard with Tor
4. You always trade anonymity for reachability, and with the amount of threats, NAT and firewalls have been put up to make it harder for unsolicited requests to reach you by default

Yeah, it’s fun but the temperature needs to be correct. With rising temperature, the paper goes black, light gray, brown and then glowing orange.

The IMU probably drifts by some small percentge but an intermittent GPS signal every few kilometers should ensure that it never gets too far off course.

I am not aware of any receipt printers using lasers - thermal printers have an array of resistors that get hot when necessary. I know how a laser printer works and it is hard to explain in 12 or so words. Inkjets are way easier, you can just say “squirt squirt oops”. Anyway…

1. A photosensitive drum gets a negative electrostatic charge.
2. A laser shining through a rotating prism scans lines across the drum’s surface. This removes charge from parts of the drum that should not be covered in toner.
3. A high-voltage corona wire inside the toner reservoir charges an amount of toner positively.
4. The charged drum rotates past the corona wire, getting covered in toner where its negative charge remains.
5. Paper is pushed against the drum and the powdery toner is transferred to it.
6. The paper continues into a fuser, a little oven where a heating element briefly makes the toner so hot that it melts, its powder particles making a permanent bond among themselves and with the paper. (The heater is usually stationary and heats the paper from below. The fuser drum that pushes paper against the heater can get sticky and pick up some of the toner, making images repeat down the page. This is the most common failure mode that cannot be resolved through regular maintenance such as replacing the toner cartridge and printing cleaning pages. However, almost all laser printers have a cheap fuser module or its drum available so it is usually worth replacing.)

Laser printers more accurately “bake paper so that number powder sticks to it”

I wonder if there is a notification ad blocker with community-submittted sets of regex patterns that root users can use.

Prior to 1870, Italy was several kingdoms, republics and duchies, with a federation of papal states in the middle, and Vatican, then just another cathedral hill in Rome, was not special – the pope mostly lived elsewhere. During the unification of Italy, the pope retreated to Vatican and troops left the palace alone. For almost 60 years, the papal state, now only controlling the Vatican area, was informally tolerated by Italy until Mussolini signed a 1929 treaty, recognizing the territory was independent.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the pope could do if he no longer came to good terms with the fascists but if I were him, I would retreat to an Allied cathedral on a “diplomatic mission” and ring the alarm, not caring if the tiny Vatican was occupied to Italy. Its bad wartime performance was becoming apparent and there would be a chance of reclaiming Vatican after it lost the war.