Posts by Pascal Monett 16767 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
"The Attorney General has made it plain he believes there should be a legal mechanism to allow law enforcement to access the contents of phones"
Please go ahead and do that. Then watch as the USA becomes a third-world country while everyone else enjoys proper encryption.
If you don't want to listen to reason, if you refuse to acknowledge how the world actually works, then you deserve what you get when you try to force your fantasies on Real Life (TM).
"we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument"
Funny, I can't begin to count how many different domains I've witnessed that kind of attitude.
The prequels kinda dampened my enthusiasm for Star Wars, not to mention the damage Lucas did himself (Han shot first, you bastard). I have to admit though that Rogue One was, to me, once again a Star Wars film worthy of the original trilogy.
So, by my count, Star Wars is 4 films and a smattering of blah. I would like to see a film giving us a Darth Vader that is actually frightening, as he was (so briefly) shown in Rogue One. I think showing him tracking down and exterminating the Jedi that escaped Order 66 would have a lot of potential entertainment-wise, and could maybe be tied in to the original trilogy by explaining how Yoda exiled himself on Dagobah. Something like barely escaping Vader to throw himself against another Sith and then making the decision to lie low in the Sith's power shroud to remain alive and elude Vader's hunt.
Something like that.
But I'm not counting on it.
If ICANN is continually comparing itself to for-profit companies, it is high time that ICANN's statute be revised by a judge.
There should be a law somewhere that limits non-profits to raking in just what they need to survive and continue to function. These high-rollers who deal themselves Golden Boy salaries in Mother Teresa companies are starting to get on my nerves.
Okay, they halve the error margin and still produce a result "quickly". Nice to know. It would be even nicer if we had a ballpark number of the analytical error margin to get a better idea of how important this is.
As it is, this 50% improvement in guesstimate precision could be half of 80 or half of 10, we just don't know.
They paid for an economy seat, they got the economy seat and they got to their destination as planned. Yeah, it sucks that nobody could actually be upgraded, but this is a storm in a teacup.
I'm going to have to check if I have any position in this upgrade scheme. I've crossed the Atlantic about two dozen times in my life, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't be enough anyway.
I used to have Battlefield 2042. Every time EA updated the game, I ended up needing to reinstall it completely. Back then, my Internet connection was 10Mbps at best, so you can imagine the hassle.
Then, one fine update and a full reinstall later, I was greeted with a popup demanding my CD key. For the game that I purchased through their online portal. That had never before required a CD key. That didn't have a CD key.
I was incensed, and said as much in a mail to support. The answer ? Banned.
Well EA is now banned from my life. EA doesn't care ? Neither do I.
I don't know what Bible you have, but mine says Thou Shalt Not Kill is part of them.
So yes, there is a prohibition on murder. And on theft, and on lying.
I am a gamer. I play on a proper PC with a 28" widescreen, a keyboard+mouse and a Microsoft Strategic Commander. On a 1Gbps fiber line.
4G covers all the needs I have for my phone usage, but my gaming I do on a proper platform.
I do not see that 5G is going to benefit me in any way in the foreseeable future. I also do not plan on changing my Samsung Galaxy A3 unless it dies on me. A phone is a phone, as far as I'm concerned, and the only other use I have for it is occasionally checking Google Maps for my position vs my destination. 4G works fine for that.
Well duh. Apple has been locking down every new jailbreak technique with every new release of its iOS since forever.
And it won't stop, because when you buy Apple you go the Apple Way or the highway.
To be fair, Apple is far from the only company that doesn't want anyone to tinker with their code.
Not acceptable. This is a professional company dealing in international currencies and with direct links to banks, there is no excuse for not having a properly secured environment.
The CEO should be dumped without a parachute. The next one can go about firing the head of IT. Being hacked is one thing, but not doing one's due diligence on security when dealing in this kind of market means that heads should roll.
In a word, it is inefficient.
We are already burning way too much coal to power all our gizmos, gizmos which we are buying more of every year. Why have a regular toaster when you can have a "smart" one ? Why have a regular anything when you can have it use compute cycles all day long just so that you can, once a day or less, command it from you bloody smartphone ?
So yeah, use even more energy, and recharge your gizmos with the most inefficient technology that some brilliant idiot thought up.
We're going to burn our way back to Stone Age.
At first, upon reading that sentence, I thought "what the hell is that ?". When finished with the article (nice rant btw, great start to the New Year there), I searched for it, and found that it is yet another way to get valuable aid to poor countries. No way you can complain about it in this era of enforced political correctness.
However, there are already several high-profile aid organisms working in poor countries and funneling masses of money and effort to help out, so why is there a need of yet another organism which is much more obscure and whose reliability is not well established ? I am always wary of non-profits I've never heard about ; you have no idea what they're actually doing with the money nor how efficient they are in bringing the aid they say they bring. I'd want to see other photos of twinned toilets to control that they're not sending the same picture to every company that forks over the money.
I have a hard time understanding that as well, but I no nothing about either the conditions he was living in, who is he like and what made him make that decision.
Unless he was just lazy, I'm guessing it was a difficult decision to make. He knew what he was turning down after all.
Back when I worked as an accountant I got intimately acquainted with the numeric keypad. When you have to enter an average of 6 financial numbers a minute during the day, you get used to it pretty quick.
You tell me that Golden Boys had issues with the numpad ? Maybe they should cut their white powder usage a bit.
As well it should be. You're the Boss, you send peons to the server room. Because it doesn't matter how knowledgeable you think you are, you have no idea how things are set up, how to check what state they are in ad how to ensure that you are acting on the proper server when you fiddle around on keyboards.
Because if you did know all that, you wouldn't be the Boss, you'd be a peon.
So rely on the people you pay to do the job.
You're telling me that there are hours and hours of dialogue, and what I say makes almost no difference ? What's the point then ?
Thanks for the heads-up. This is one game I'll be avoiding.
That reminds me that I have Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition I and II on Steam. Might be time to go and relive those proper RPGs.
Nope. No guarantee. It's like backups. You can explain their importance to a user, you can regularly send a reminder, you can go around and make a point of asking them eye-to-eye, it's only the day that the hard disk crashes and all those precious files are gone that the wailing will start, the gnashing of teeth and the beseeching of all gods old and new, all to no avail.
At that point, and that point only, the user has a chance of learning the lesson. And even then, there's no guarantee that he will actually start doing regular backups.
But at least there's a chance.
Okay, I get that he didn't kill anyone, but he attempted blackmail on a grand scale. He threatened (baselessly as it turns out) tens of thousands of possible victims to extort money.
Again, he didn't kill anyone, but that level of threat, to me, means he should have gone to prison for six months, not just have an electronic curfew.
The sentence seems a bit light, in other words. I guess the judge found him to not be that much of a threat after all. Either that or he's setting the guy up for a major sentence next time around.
Um, since when has kerosene became green ? Okay, it's probably just the way the sentence was written, but "using kerosene and [a] green hydrogen peroxide oxidiser" would probably have been a better choice.
In other news, I note that, for the first time in Internet history, we're actually going to have to pay attention to what a Troll says. That's a first !
Of course not. Office is popular because Microsoft gave it away to schools to wean entire generations on its software. That is why businesses are using it today, because everyone is supposed to know how to use Word and Excel.
But if you just look at the differences between the two products, Office is years ahead of LibreOffice in graphics and that's why LibreOffice is not gaining any traction in the business environment.
Oh, and there's the fact that, for some reason, people think it's a great idea to put their sensitive data on someone else's server, and Microsoft is all over that in Office.
Well, it's still alive, so I guess that is a positive. But as a comparison to MS Office, sorry. It's no wonder MS Office has the upper hand in the business world, the options for charts are ten times what LibreOffice has. As far as charts in particular and graphics in general are concerned, LibreOffice is at the Office 95 level. In Excel, you can adjust almost everything in a chart. In LibreOffice, you can change chart type and hide or show the legend and that's just about it.
Given how management is so attached to their pretty graphics, Office is the winner hands down.
At home, on the other hand, I use LibreOffice because it does everything I need to do and works well. I just don't need to make charts.
What's the point of having two suppliers if they both use the same fibre ?
Because if you want to have two fibre lines from two different suppliers and you don't want them coming from the same direction, you're asking one supplier to lay a special cable just for you. A billionaire could undoubtedly get that level of service, I'm not sure a mere millionaire could, but I'm sure you can't.
I'm sure politicians are no more corrupt than they've always been, but it is quite interesting to see that getting caught nowadays gets you crucified in the Court of Public Opinion, and thanks to the Internet, it has consequences.
I don't know how we're going to adapt, but things are changing in the way politics has become public.
Um, if I'm not mistaken noise cancellation allows you to clearly hear people screaming.
If you want actual silence, what you need is more akin to industrial earmuffs - they cancel everything, to a point.
Edit : After checking the web site, I found that the app has a setting called Transparent Hearing. If that is activated, you can hear people talking to you. That means that, if it is not activated, you can't hear them. So your point stands, in the right conditions. Of course, if you're wearing these on a plane, I don't see why you would activate it.
You are right, but that in itself is not a reason to write off a product. MicroUSB works.
The reason I'm not interested in these headphones is because it is once again something that needs my phone to work, because of its price and because I just don't need that kind of functionality.
I'm not a road warrior, just a keyboard warrior, and I cannot bring a pair of headphones like that on client site. It would send a very wrong message.
Of course it will. Because it says that Gibmedia was using deceptive practices.
Now, if we had been presented with a spat between Gibmedia saying it had been booted unjustly, and Google stating deceptive practices, and the perspective of a lawsuit, then fine, we'll see what happens. But the judges have sorted it out, and they have decided that Google was unfair, thus justifying Gibmedia.
France is not the USA, you're going to have to find a different reason and just chanting "They were cheating" is not going to cut it.
Of course, this being Google, I predict that this affair is going to go on until Gibmedia shuts down for lack of funds.
Because you do ?
There's only one thing that keeps your photos safe : a physical copy on optical medium stored in a place without much sunlight and a temperate environment.
If you count on someone else to keep your pictures safe, you're setting yourself up for a big disappointment. Especially if you're not paying that someone.
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