Posts by Pascal Monett 16756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
During all the time nobody noticed, she was living large and paying zero taxes on a billion dollar revenue stream.
Then, when she got caught in the spotlight, presto, her access to taxable revenue disappears, so she won't be paying taxes either.
Poor husband, he's now going to be the sole earner for the household. Does he pay taxes in his position ?
Oh, and can we get a kaching! icon ?
Sorry Pichai, but I don't see how trudging to the office of a company that does not create or manipulate physical objects is improving my quality of life.
Now, I will admit that my only daughter is over 25 and working in Paris, so I don't have a gaggle of bawling, roudy offspring to distract me at my home office.
I also admit that I live in a house, not in an appartment surrounded by tenants who all think that the noise they make is quite acceptable.
Finally, I have a wife I love and who completely understands the words "I'm busy now".
Obviously, if one or more of these criteria is not met, I can understand that taking the daily commute to park oneself in an office might be more productive, but that is not my case.
I prefer the view of my front lawn, the bandwidth of my fiber connection and the absence of endless phone calls.
Agreed.
NSO stating that their software could not be used like that is pure cow manure.
At best, NSO could have said that all of their clients were aware that their software should not be used like that. That might have been acceptable, except that they specifically created software that hijacks mobile phones.
You don't do that when you're honest.
I went to check them out.
The most interesting thing I find is that there isn't a dollar quote anywhere to be seen.
You get a boatload of MSU ranges and corresponding AWLC percentage reductions (could somebody translate that into English ?), but after skimming over the blah blah I couldn't for the life of me tell you how much one would cost.
Of course, I'm sure a call to my nearest friendly IBM salesperson would guarantee a quote and a nice monthly charge in the blink of an eye.
The problem is not with voluntary data submission. If I choose to activate 2FA then I provide my phone number, that's my choice.
The problem is with all the tracking that done without consent. The fact that ad agencies are basically finding out who you are as soon as you connect, and they're following you all the way whether you like it or not.
I use Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Origin, or Brave. I like to think that I'm rather invisible to ad companies, until I actually make a purchase somewhere. I like to think that, but I'm not sure.
I would like to be sure.
That is a high claim.
The only thing that is secure by default is a safe hidden in a salt mine behind a camouflaged brick wall that nobody knows is there and everyone involved in making it happen has been brought to a pit in another country and shot.
And those that did the shooting were brought to a pit in another country and shot.
Then the person having orchestrated all this took a poison pill and died.
THAT is secure by default.
The rest is just guardrails surfing on hope.
Is this going to improve the various Telecom provider's incentive to update their customers' equipment ?
Because you're not using Android on your phone, you're using your provider's version of Android on your phone.
So, if this means that your provider is going to improve on getting Android updates out to its customers, I'm all for it.
Not really.
You're making the mistake of thinking that Democracy is a thing in Russia.
Democracy is a puppet, and Putin is the puppetmaster. Successful political figures running against Putin have a tendancy of disappearing, so voting for them is not really an option.
Putin leaves the cretins that have no chance to justify his rigging of the electoral landscape. You don't need to rig the votes if you've taken care of all serious claims to your power.
And don't forget that Putin has changed the Russian Constitution to basically ensure he can stay in power as long as he wants (aka until he dies).
So, the only real vote against Putin is a bullet to his brain. The rest is just theatre.
Well, in all honesty, a drone is going to have a spot of trouble finding (let alone taking down) a botnet with only its cameras.
We recently read about a 176-billion-parameter pseudo-AI, now we have a 540-billion-parameter pseudo-AI. I'm guessing it's supposed to be better. It's also likely to need all of SAP's engineers to set those parameters.
So, who's going to invent the trillion-parameter AI ? And which country is going to devote all of its population to configuring it ?
Shouldn't be long now . . .
I once had a very good surprise from my bank. Having ordered some work in my bathroom, when it came time to pay the bill I made a bank transfer of a few thousand euros. It was on a Saturday.
Not really a habit.
The following Monday, I got a call from my bank. The person confirmed my identity, then asked me about the transfer. I explained the situation and, at the question "so you do authorize the transfer ?" I answered yes, I very much did because the artisan deserved being paid for his work.
THAT is fraud prevention.
I like my bank.
Well, let's make one thing clear : if the porn industry does not adopt the concept, it is dead in the water.
Porn is what has made the Internet as useful as it is.
Porn is the reason why you can purchase stuff on web sites.
Porn pushed all it could to get that to happen because it was in its interest to have people buying anonymously.
So, if porn finds this metaverse thing interesting, it will happen, otherwise, it won't because nobody else has the incentive to make it work.
Accountability ?
For the CEO of a multinational multi-billion dollar behemoth ?
Has Apotheker been sanctioned for his shameful dealings in acquiring Autonomy ?
Do these "critics" understand how the world works these days ?
This kind of thing can still be necessary.
I like using recursive functions, whenever possible. It seems quite elegant to me, but I have learned that said elegance comes at a price.
For example, if you need to search and replace a given character in a string of characters (for export to csv reasons, for example), if you have to write your own s&r function for whatever reason, you'd better be sure that the original string isn't too long and that there aren't too many occurences.
Otherwise, your code will crash with a memory overflow error due to the amount of instances of the recursive function.
In that case, there's no choice but to deal with a loop function and handle everything in one instance.
It's a bummer, but it works.
Every time I gave a training course in LotusScript or VBA, the last day I had a session on commenting your code.
I tried to drill in my students' head the fact that you do not write a comment that repeats what the code is saying. Anyone who can read code does not need a comment like "Test for zero".
I tried to show them that code commenting is "If there is no label, then <something> ".
Of course, I have no idea how successful I've been, but I've tried.
Given that there is always a government somewhere that is funding the terrorists, in the broad view you are right.
However, there's a fair chance that it is not your govenment that is funding terrorists, so you are also wrong.
Unless you're in Russia, in which case you do not say such things because, if you do, you're the terrorist.
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