Re: Voting machines are a bad idea
Dangling Chad is also a terrible name.
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Yet only a decade before we delighted to Tarquin Fintimlin Whimbimlinbim Bus-Stop F'tang F'tang Ole Biscuit Barrel, and a decade before that Screaming Lord Such.
Millennials are a boring bunch, t'would seem.
Signed:
Peter Brian Norman Scot Neigh! Frog-Gobbler Whoops Cuckoo-Cuckoo Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head Chuggata-Chuggata Bang! Smith.
@Dr Syntax: in every case in my own experience it has been one (1) call on a toll-free number and a painless process, followed by a confirmation a couple of months later in writing.
It's almost like some of you are guessing how credit cards work based on some nebulous model arrived at by viewing twitter feeds.
Or, like I said, the relevant UK law has become so naff in the time since Nat West asked me to call (toll-free, transatlantic) over a fraud THEY had detected taking place in America on my UK Access card that risking your own hard-earned cash is preferable than seeking to invoke it.
I've had about a dozen instances of fraud on my cards over the years. No cost to me. No fees. No penalties. No late-payment fees. Nada.
Which is why I can't for the life of me understand the desire to use debit over credit forming in an intelligent brain.
@William 3: and yet with numerous frauds attempted against cards issued to me, starting in 1984 with a UK Access Card "taken" to Atlantic City through to the latest $1500 swindle attempted on my NY Visa Card, it has cost me personally exactly nothing.
What, you thought I was just making it up, like those catastrophe stories people claim as true every Friday?
Stay away from my server room.
And amazingly, 40% of commentards think it's a better idea to have your own money on the line than the bank's.
Not sure I'd want that sort of logic engine designing my backups, switch arrays, disaster mitigation measures or even brewing a pot of coffee.
Or is it that UK credit card protection law is so unbelievably naff that having your current accout raped to bedrock is better in every way than invoking it?
What is needed is an international effort to get legislation passed guaranteeing ruinous monetary penalties should the Back Door Key fall into the hands of unauthorized people.
Yes your bank account was raped by Chechnyans using a key pulled from a government laptop left on a train, but now you are a multi-millionaire.
Gotta dream.
"They didn't kick out the students involved - they kicked out those who had crossed whatever line they determined defined inappropriate aka stoopid behaviour."
And in doing so they opened themselves to the old "Select ten peasants and make an example of them" abuse of power charges.
Look, I'm not saying what these idiots did was acceptable. But isn't one purpose of a University to widen the student's perceptions and open them to new ideas? Including how to be adult and know when to keep schtum?
Does anyone really think anything good will come of this action? Or is it possible that now we have a group of young people convinced that they were victimized for their out-of-mainstream opinions and denied their future over it?
Look around - look what happens when such people gather together and make their voices heard at the right (or wrong) time. They may not be the only ones rubbing their hands in glee but they were part of the claque that enacted Operation Fuck-Em Where They Beathe.
There were cleverer options open to the supposedly intelligent people holding court.
Social Media has become The Clap of the Digital Age: no matter who initiates the interaction, everyone comes away scratching their crotch and vowing "never again".
Employers abuse their position when they scrape (there is no more appropriate verb) social media to dig up the dirt on a prospective hire.
Young would-be employees retain an idiotic naivety when it comes to using social media platforms, behaving on-line in an exaggeratedly juvenile manner, then have the nerve to act surprised when they're found out.
Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium in which juvenile behavior can be forgiven - up to a point - and employers understand that without a safety valve the boiler can blow with catastrophic results.
Bring on the EMP.
While I fully applaud the effort to clean up this sewer, two points I see:
a) Kicking out the students involved was not an intelligent way to go about this. I can envisage several more onerous ways of re-indoctrinating Da Yoofs while still milking them for their fees,
2) The offended young lady who joined these fora: Did she actually post anything or was she there just to be offended?
Teaching students that Free Speech does not exist on the internet is a great thing. I support all efforts to throw a bucket of cold reality over anyone who thinks otherwise.
But semi-professional outrage is becoming tedious, and can end in such unpleasant side-effects as the election of the Clown Car Caucus to real power.
As for Kathy Griffin: Same applies. Make her sit in the unpopular corner for a bit by all means. Voting with yer feet is always an option (at least for now). But save me the fake outrage over a fake chopped-off head that looked nothing like OPOTUS. Nobody seriously thinks she has an army of people waiting to assault Mara Lago to remove anyone's head.
Well, I say that but given the utter tripe I've heard people declaring as true in the last year I suppose there might be a few dolts who do think that.
Religeous wars are mechanically no different from any other type - political ideology or land-grab being the two broad classifications I can immediately call to mind - in that the reason they collapse is when the money needed to prosecute them dries up.
You can talk about The Will To Win or Public Opinion, but they both boil down to sources of funding in the end.
If you think carefully there are any number of relatively recent examples of the phenomena in action.
Complicated???
What the fuck is complicated about defining the legal domain of an altitude calculation to be a POSITIVE INTEGER?
Or in using a violation of that to start the process of taking measures to, you know, not plough into the Martian regolith at maximum wellie?
We've known how to tell negative numbers from positive ones in code for a few years now, way before the commissioning of The Martian High-Cost, High-Speed Impacter.
My original outraged comment stands.
In ten years? Of course! In ten years Mr Trump's enlightened policies will result in a gatrillizon dollar surplus for all the things we really need instead of vaccinations that give kids Autism and rules that slow down pharmaceutical innovation with pesky needless "tests".
No,no,no,no,NO! You aren't getting it!
It's the fembots that will get objectified. Real women will now be able to rest in an objectification-free world of whatever they do when not "submitting" to male advances.
In the new world of the no-guilt ready-for-action 24x7 "around the world in 80 ways" fembot, only perverts will prefer sex for fun with women.
And who said the fun will only be for hetero men anyway? Once the basics are worked out it should be eminently possible to fit out a Boytoy Bot who is hung like a horse and can go all night without farting, belching, sweating or falling asleep, brings flowers and likes long romantic talks afterward.
There is no downside to The Rise Of The Sexbot. Once they are a reality, western sex lives can normalize properly instead of being roiled in centuries of religious counter-programming and internet-induced false norms.
Actually there is a downside. I imagine the sex-worker industry will be caught up in a paradigm-shift maelstrom just like everyone else has been in the last thirty years. However, spin-off industries will arise in that field just as they have in every other, post-maelstrom.
Mine's the Cherry 2000 with the shiny, man-made textile clothing. Don't tell the missus (yet).
The problem is that the NHS thought Locums would want to be brought in under the ruling because of previous experience some years ago with British Rail Locums in which popularity increased in direct correlation with numbers opting in.
Their thinking was that once the whole thing got enough of a head of steam it would become a Locum motive.
And shame on the author for carefully aboiding saying that the biggest incentive to stay with XP was that the UI was pleasant and relatively easy to work with.
I used to work for a guy who downplayed Joy of Interaction in the mainframe apps we turned out. No menus because we had manuals (which no one read). Result: no one ever became proficient with our apps and everyone hated them.
Fortunately, MS have executed Plan Shred Own Foot with their bug-ugly flat-ass three color GUI so movng away from 10 should be a no-brainer.
Back in the late 70s the Americans were experimenting with upward seat ejection for helicopters.
In the high-speed slo-mo footage I saw the helicopter in question had a four-blade rotor. Explosive bolts sheared first one opposed pair of blades from he rotor hub, then the other, then the roof was discarded before the seat rockets fired.
As I recall, "significant challenges" were faced to make all this happen reliably and in the right order and the idea was eventually shelved as Harriers were making big inroads to the military strike helicopter market.
I think, were I piloting a failing helicopter fitted with such an escape mechanism, my first thought would be to attempt any other option before chancing the complex ejector seat mechanism built on a low-bid contract.
Dr Eccles Four million three hundred thousand and five, Four million three hundred thousand and six,
Lab Technician Bluebottle Eccles, would you like a cup of tea?
Dr Eccles Oh yeah! Nuthin' like a good cup of tea.
Lab Technician Bluebottle No, nothing like a good cup of tea.
Dr Eccles Slurrp! Nuthin' like a good cup of tea.
Lab Technician Bluebottle No, nothing like a good cup of tea.
Dr Eccles Nuthin' like a good cup of tea. Four million three hundred thousand and ... ooh!
One, two, three, ...
Curiously enough the same sort of thing happened to Margot Leadbetter and she and husband Jerry were forced to spend Christmas with Tom and Barbara Good as a result.
Not sure what wisdom can be drawn from this, other than there is a point where getting someone else to do your shopping for you can result in fiasco and home-made Christmas crackers sans little strip of explosive.
The barbecues in question would undoubtedly have been rained out, so no great loss.
Just another reason to telecomute or use private transport.
Coming soon: downswing in tres expensive business class ticket sales brings airline penury and layoffs. Trump to move aggressively to rid the nation of this onerous legislation, bring back airline jobs and Make Americas Airlines Great Again.
Or something.
systemd
-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status
Discs are better than streaming on Long Island NY because the cheapass cable company can't spare enough bandwidth to run the delivery at best-of-breed levels, resulting in stars that have clearly defined bands of light in concentric shells about them as Serenity zooms past them, explosions are ruined by pixelation as the palette overloads the pixels' ability to display it and James Bonds does the same every time he goes out at night in a black suit and the software can't figure out what's what and so runs a Gloomy Goth Pink Floyd FX lightshow over the important bits.
They also have the absolute naffest digital recorder in the world. Set it to record Jason Bourne and you get The Bourne Identity. Tell it to record what's left of Dr Who so you can switch to the news and you are odds-on to get a spiffy recording of the news you just watched when you page back to see whether the Daleks won this time.
As for remote-blote, I coped partially with this by buying the same brand disc player as my TV. I rarely need to faff about with two remotes, though getting the soundbar to wake up might require that.
What's needed is a proper API so we can blow a raspberry (Pi) at the problem once and for all.
"In addition to a set of steadfast liberal principals, Mark shares (perhaps more legitimately) many of the qualities of Donald Trump that resonated with everyday Americans – a wealthy, anti-establishment outsider unbeholden to special interests."
a) Because that is working out so well.
2) Unbeholden? You're pulling my war wound mate.
þ) As for special interests, why, aren't both Trump and El Zuckface the very definition of special interests in and of themselves?
Cthulhu's Aquatic Anus, do we really have to recapitulate the 1900-1930 period before we remember why we said "never again"?
Although I take most of these "I spotted such-and-such vulnerability and exploited it in this what-I-judge-to-be-humourous-fashion to alert the system owner" stories with a big pinch of salt, the commentor who pointed out the risk to those who are feeling clever is spot on.
Why this business seems to produce clever people with such poor impulse control beats me. I get the need to be seen to be as clever as they think they are, just not the lack of risk assessment skills.
FWIW these sorts of exploits go back into the greenscreen/mainframe days. I once discussed a simple and annoying hack possible with the old Sperry Univac editor messaging service with a colleague. Next day, yep, I was a victim. Entirely predictable, but the bright young man should have had the common sense to know that if I was telling him about this, I had a way out. Once out I (of course) turned the very same hack in such a way he sued for peace.
But in this case we were both drinking buddies and doing nothing to intrude where we didn't belong. Had we done the same to someone in the systems department to "illustrate the danger" we'd both have been fired and we knew it.
So when the slutty credit card gets stolen, in addition to the inconvenience of cancelling the card and replacing it I will now also be deluged in targeted ads for state of the art video cards, SCUBA equipment and dog grooming salon supplies (all real uses others have put various cards of mine to without my permission)?
Not sure whether to be annoyed at irrelevant targeted ads (as if there were any other kind) or overjoyed at the sheer cobblers this will make of Google's $Data_Mine{$Stevie}, already half-bolloxed by my wanton and surrealistic browsing habits.