Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Speaking as a straight man raised in the ultra-liberal UK in the 60s and 70s, just let me say that I watched La Cages aux Folles" (film and stage) *and* Priscilla Queen of the Desert" and therefore understand everything there is to understand about Gay Life.
Please don't move next door to me and fill your garden with lewd statuary.
I wonder what would have happened if people had stood up and said "hang on a minute" back then.
You can't run a company that pushes itself to the public as a LGBT-friendly place while funding laws that deny that philosophy at the basic level. At least, you can't and expect people to just stand by and say "sounds reasonable".
Now if we can just use the same issue to get that unnecessary attack vector JavaScript out of the web the job will be done and well done at that.
Interesting. I analyzed my investments for the duration of the Bush Years (all of them) and came to the conclusion that the money I had invested would have been safer had I put it in a shoebox under my bed and then set fire to my house. During Bush One I went to see a banker and used the phrase "hemorrhaging money", and he winced and said that he was hearing that phrase with every phone call and consultation he took.
Thank God for Clinton. A complete sleaze and part of the problems we have under the microscope today but his attitude on the intarwebs spurred so much quick cash generation I was able to absorb most of the damage to come with Bush 2.1 and Bush 2.2. Without it I'd be wearing cardboard and holding a soup can out to passers-by.
No, the root cause was that the bad debt which was encouraged at many levels in the extremely multi-tiered system for buying a house in the USA was bundled into packages and these bundles became an investment end in and of themselves.
Here is some food for thought: In a system where mortgage brokers take a commission every time a mortgage is taken out, where does the incentive lie: in selling a house once in a given period of time, or in selling it many, many times in the same period?
Now consider the case of balloon payments. What factor do you think was foremost in said brokers' minds when pushing people to sign paper for which they couldn't possibly muster the dosh in the long term?
I'm rather closer to this nasty business than some here, and those pointing to group X (most popular are politicians, next the home buyers) are underestimating the incentivization issues that permeated and still permeates the home market.
The debt is the point these days, not the eventual settlement of it. That is why there is another crash waiting in the wings when holders of impossibly large student loans start defaulting. Their debt is also being bundled and traded around.
The situation with credit card debt (another bundled investment vehicle) got so bad that there was a popularization of the actual predatory nature of the business in the mid 90s and people, finally, got educated. Banks were told in no uncertain terms to stop sending pre-approved credit applications to debtors because they were not only making the problem worse by the hour, but were opening massive ID theft opportunities for the less lawful. After the crash they finally did stop, for a while, but I think it was because someone did a cost benefit analysis rather than an outbreak of sudden-onset ethics.
Faced with a record wave of personal bankruptcies brought on by impossible credit card debt, King George the Second reacted with firm and swift leadership and ... changed the law to make it much harder for a person to declare bankruptcy (but corporations were still able to avoid their liabilities with ease).
With leadership like this it is no wonder that the ship of state staggers from one iceberg to the next while everyone runs about asking what happened to all the lifeboats.
And here we see more rose tint in the Googleglass.
Where is the incentive for *ANYONE* to "alert the public" if they have money in the markets? Insider trading only works AT ALL when the information is kept close to the chests of a few "insiders". That's why it is called "insider" trading. You *don't* alert anyone in the case you cite because if you so much as sell to fast the HSTs and humans with better connections will stampede and you'll be broke in sparrow's fart time.
Quick analogy for you: do sellers on eBay benefit from the now-common practice of high-speed end-of-sale "sniping", or were they better off when people just bid throughout the sale?
Why is this an analogy? Because the stock in your pension fund is only worth what it will *sell* for. When you need the money, this sort of fuckwittery will ensure you don't have any.
Was this Lego Face Study paid for out of the academics' pockets, or did they get public funding for this moronic waste of time?
Seriously, some stern letters should be going out right now from higher educational institutions demanding the return of Degree Certificates for making "educated" people look stupid again.
"A good developer could write a driver for a CNC lathe in a short period of time. Some devs have written a driver in a day. You make it sound like an impossibility."
Ah yes, the old "please follow my unwritten thought through this sudden sharp turn" ploy. You certainly tricked us with your clever use of not staying on the explicit subject. Well done.
Though I have to wonder why you are citing a feat entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion in order to prove whatever it is you feel was proved.
Other than if you don't tell people you've changed the subject they won't know you've done that. Which seems sort of self-defeating to the thrust of your (partly invisible) argument in my opinion, but there you go.
You got me.
Not the point. The example given is an excellent explanation of what *real* people want from computers. The "computers-as-an-end-in-themselves" crowd need to get a grip on this.
The salient point for the use case presented is: who will write the Linux drivers for those CNC lathes that are no longer in production anywhere in the world and are too expensive to simply toss out because someone thinks the real world follows the IT model of obsolescence? And on what equipment will these wond'rous Linux solutions be tested? I doubt the place has a spare CNC lathe just lying around for the purpose, because machine tools are like locomotives: standing still they are losing money.
Living and working in the IT world distorts perspective. We turn over kit at an alarming rate just for the sake of doing so and lining the vendors' pockets. (Don't make me wheel out tales of the endless meetings over servers humming along nicely but creating panic in the enterprise because they are at "End Of Service Life"). In the real world machinery needs to earn its keep and to do so until it falls apart.
"Said machinist then takes the USB key home "
This is a non-problem, a matter of lax procedure and easily dealt with.
Attach a real credential to the USB stick with a ring - some sort of ID card, and lock the rings to an eyebolt set in the wall. Give each person onsite a similar card with their ID on it. Give the key to Two Trustworthy People, to whom you pay a stipend to be the keymasters. Someone wants a stick, they must ask for one and surrender their ID.
Now you post a notice on the staff noticeboard: All Staff IDs must be claimed by day's end. Removal of USB sticks from factory is a firing offense. You have to mean this, of course.
If you have the ability, make the ID part of the clocking in procedure and you are watertight.
An overly simplistic analysis of the problem, I feel. True, but not always the reason for a grounding out, at least, not in the USA.
"The driver is the one in control of the vehicle. There is no such thing as an accident."
This is pure cobblers. How do you drive defensively when someone else crosses the divider at speed and rams you head on? How do you drive defensively to prevent the lower front wishbone mounting point of the critically design-flawed TR6 chassis from breaking away from the rest of the structure due to metal fatigue and leaving you with three wheels on your wagon? (that last one is personal experience, the first ruined the lives and careers of a family I knew who were driving within the speed limit on the New York State Thruway when hit). How do you drive defensively when a truck travelling too fast loses it's cargo bindings and the load goes seriously airborne? (Happens several times a year on the LIE).
You sound like my dad - before he rear-ended someone and totaled my mum's car (which he tried to make my fault even though I wasn't in the car at the time 8oD) ending his thirty year clean driving record and his smug, snide digs over minor fender benders everyone else had had in the family. Now he has rather broader views on the subject.
I think you're imaginary MR E would have more success with a TV ad campaign in which a soccer mom loads her infant children and the family dog into the DC Flyer (or whatever the thing will be called) and safely delivers everyone to school while the next-door neighbor loads the a similar crowd into a Tesla, drives over a small rock in the road as they exit their driveway and disappears in a ball of flames and corona discharge (which kills an innocent cat walking by).
But the idea is yours and a guddun. Well done for cracking a history book or two during your life, Mr/Ms AC.
Squander Two, you are full of Ethanol. European cars work just fine on US gasoline (unless they are so old they need unleaded which can be hard to find, but even then).
Do you think Top Gear brings a ship full of good old English Petrol when they come over to do yet another daft European supercar drive in some redneck place?
And what do you think that nice Geordie bloke from AC/DC runs his Bentley on?
Sweet Azathoth's Nebulous Nodes.
(for Trygve Henriksen )
Well, I'm an opinionated blowhard and so quite often shown to be full of spit, but I look upon those times as learning experiences, so if you can show this to be a genuine effect that can be performed reliably to order more than 50% of the time I'll recant my views here and loudly.
But a question occurs: instead of just putting a fat, middle aged English ex-pat in his place, why not apply to the JREF and try and win a million dollars *as well* as putting me in my place? If I could dowse to order I know which I'd be doing, because, you know, when *can't* you use a million dollars?
You design the test in conjunction with JREF volunteers, you tell them what you can do and if you can do it in a blind test better than 50% of the time you are quids in. You don't even need to explain how it happens.
Dowsers were always Randi's favourite people to deal with. He said that he never met a single one that was just conning him. They all genuinely believed they could find whatever it was they could dowse, and were all genuinely confused when the preliminary tests showed no better-than-pure-chance success.
Heh heh. One wonders that there are any atoms of penicillin in the "medication" at all.
Gotta love the "alternate medicine" crowd. I had a boss who suffered years of agony with a bad hip joint that he was having "treated" with something called "crystal therapy". These days that would probably mean he was tweaking around the pain, but he explained it involved getting close to the "healthy vibrations" of quartz crystals. I asked him if vibrating quartz was so healthy to be next to, how come he'd gotten sick in the first place when he always wore a digital watch with a quartz-controlled oscillator in it strapped to his wrist?
A Chinese colleague was extolling the virtues of reflexology to me last week. This loony theory has it that there is a place on the sole of the right foot for every location in the body, and by manipulating the foot one can "cure anything". I asked him where on the right foot corresponded to the right foot (I have recently become subject to gout attacks so this wasn't idle questioning) and he got mad.
And because no Credulous Saucer Loon story is complete without a dowser:
A family member "explained" dowsing to me recently by citing electric fields in the water. I was about to ask about why underground water wouldn't just conduct these electric fields to ground when the dowser went on to say "Obvious really, hydroelectric plants get electricity from water don't they?"
This was a classic "so many things wrong" moment that I was unable to do more than stand mute in awe of the reasoning.
Let's understand something here. Getting into the server means figuring out a credential hack. Once that is done, the "innocent" thing to do is to contact the server owner and send them the credentials as proof of the hack.
I find your front door open I dial 911 and tell the cops so they can contact you.
Going for a wander around to see what's what suggests a rather more sinister agenda even if all he got was some e-mails.
I take photos of your front room after wandering through them all and copping a good look at your sleeping daughter. Only the fact that you didn't see me in her room stops you from taking an axe-handle to my head.
And AT+T's people aren't "public servants" as one commentator suggests, they are corporate employees. They don't work for you, they work for a large multinational corporation that has a well -known sensitivity about its computers and is able to afford the legal heft to do something about it if they find an intruder has been at the family china.
I have to question the intelligence of someone who breaks into a machine belonging to such an entity, then goes for "lols" to prove he did it.
When did the "if it doesn't belong to you don't touch it" rule stop applying? And why, after so many people getting their fingers slammed in the till drawer, can't these "security hole alerters" realize that they are *never* as clever as they think they are?
I'm waiting for the inevitable "Asperger's Defense" to be filed and for the inevitable downvotes from those who thought that pulling out the upholstery and carpets from a new car and hosing it out with water was not at all suspicious for a murder suspect.
But isn't this how the modern stock market works? The initial evaluation is speculative based (as far as I can make out) on hope because there isn't any other metric, the price falls when people doing the fast trading can't see the point, then gradually finds its "true" value over the next few weeks until a new product announcement causes a flurry of activity in which only computer mediated (and triggered) trades win and ordinary meat traders lose, until the stock is worthless?
Who knew that putting computers in charge of the trading process would be a model-breaking mistake?
The Shape Of Posts To Come:
I say old chap, it occurs to me that you my dear sir are an extremely unintelligent member of the human race as a whole, and furthermore I might venture to suggest your choice of wardrobe is deficient in many key areas judged by one's peers to be of more than passing importance in the current fashion.
Not only that, I cannot overstate the physical hideousness of your visage, and the odour arising from your vicinity is enough to drop a horse at ten paces. I took the liberty of polling a few mutual acquaintances and I'm afraid we all concur in the repugnance in which we hold your good self.
In short, sir, you embody all the qualities associated with what I believe is termed "teh luzer" and I, and I venture to suggest a good many of the other people who have had the misfortune to meet you in person, would be greatly obliged if you would vacate the country as soon as is humanly possible and move somewhere where Standards are accommodatingly lower than those that pertain here and now.
I remain sir,
Yr, obt. svt.
Stevie.
And yet Homeland Security needs me to take off my glasses for my Biometric-Enhanced Green Card because their state of the art image recognition systems cannot deal with change of glasses frames.
I hate to think what sorts of fit it will throw when I attend my nephew's wedding in Canada now I've cut my face-hedgery into a full set a-la Nigel Green/Colour Sergeant Bourne.
Spot on, but I would also like to see an end to those doubly annoying "re-agreement to the license" windows.
Nothing makes me madder than to have Adobe yell at me to update this or that plugin, then confront me with a window full of Lawyer Gibberish and force me to check the box to activate the button that I must click to get on with what *they* were begging me to do only five minute before.
I can believe it.
I can believe almost anything after watching Oracle "specialists" fail to get Oracle RAC running cleanly on a Sun/Solaris stack in a reasonable time, or to be able to say "yes, we know exactly why <very popular document manager application> hosted by our Weblogic Application Server running in Solaris 10 on a dedicated 4450 is acting as though it is running in treacle on wet tar, and here is how to fix it".
I was approached by an Oracle afterservice drone a couple of years back who asked "How do you like Weblogic on that 4450?" and I had the great pleasure of telling him we liked it so much we were now running the application in webSHPERE on an LPAR in a crowded P7 - and had seen an order of magnitude pick up in response time as a result".
The fun when doing that is to keep a straight face.
"cracking open a three-decade-old CRT display with death-dealing capacitors was somehow unsafe"
I'm hoping this scaredy-cat "tech" is in actual fact a kno-nuthin intern and *not* a self-described "engineer", otherwise I shall have to ask "Gordon Bennet, don't they teach basic electronics in Physics any more (and thus provide the would-be CRT stripper-downer of the mathematical toolkit needed to calculate safety levels and also provide the methodologies for making power supply capacitors safe)?"
Besides, even though I've seen a demo of the mighty death-powers of capacitors (as a warning, while qualifying for a shortwave license), they were soup-can sized things from the power supply of a well-obsolete-ten-years-before-the-PCjr-saw-the-light-of-day *mainframe* computer, and they were creatively connected to up the oomph (serving only to fire the desire in everyone present to duplicate the Capacitor Bank of Death and confronting us some days later with the inescapable fact of the impossibility of obtaining the old mainframe-sized electrolytics needed for the task).
I doubt the actual configuration used in the mainframe would have resulted in more than third degree burns, sundry loss of hair, a refreshing spot of ventricular afib and few fingernails blown off anyway, and if you're not in the market for that sort of action, why are you taking an interest in engineering in the first place?
"Science is hard, engineering hurts."
So much for the flat-screen and system-on-a-chip generation. Pfft! 8oP
"an original Mac in mint condition with original packaging and manuals can sell on eBay for thousands of dollars, we found a working PCjr complete with monitor and cables for a much more reasonable price: $250 (£151)."
Hmm. How much would a mint condition PCjc with original packing material and manuals set you back then, Mr compare Apples to lemons?
"A magnetic compass would not read true because every piece of ferrous metal would be putting out a magnetic field, that due to is close proximity to you vs the earth's poles, would throw off the compass."
Yes, but for how long? The GPS issue has to do with the long term effects of the destruction of the satellites in the path of the flare.
But once the flare has been swept past by the combined effects of the Sun's rotation and the orbital motion of the Earth, the magnetic field induced in these ferrous metal sources you cite would drop dramatically and the Earth's magnetic field would be able to re-assert itself over the local environment.
But furthermore, navigation by compass is really only an issue in places like deserts (where iron bearing mountains make a well-known mockery of mag compass readings) , plains (where the iron content is usually low) and the open sea (where the iron in question will be the hull of your own vessel), where you must navigate by dead reckoning in the absence of a real-time absolute fix on position (such as GPS).
Everywhere else you navigate by piloting - looking at things you know to be on the way to where you want to go and working from one to another until "there". In a car, these things are usually street signs, petrol stations and the like.
I'm not seeing the hurt here, compass wise.
That would be Microsoft, wouldn't it?
I mean, we *are* talking about a breach of the terms of service, terms of employment, professional ethics and just plain common sense here, aren't we?
Or do we think it's a good thing for the IT and IT consulting professions to encourage people who steal from their employer?
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