Similar procedure in Sweden - "Kronofogden" would be right on their ass and rightly so.
Posts by fajensen
1362 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
Unpaid tech contractor: 'I have to support my family. I have no money for medicines'
Wednesday 3rd May 2017 11:24 GMT
Re: I lack sympathy, somewhat.
And especially if you have no savings, you cannot afford to take the gamble. Even if it's "your only option" and "forced" onto you
It's that or Starve / get kicked out of the country and then starve! Often the crap cake comes with some Icing on Top: You must contract via the company preferred staffing supplier - run of course by some family of the board or crony insiders, which will be skimming off both ways.
Windows 10 S: Good, bad, and how this could get ugly for PC makers
Wednesday 3rd May 2017 11:03 GMT
Re: MS is daft.
I know which option my son's school would go for & it's NOT to buy laptops.
Schools here (DK) would go for the shiny-shiny at every turn.
MS has means and ways - the first one is that they could introduce a rental / leasing model for their computers to make them more "affordable", then on the back of that they can securitize the income stream from the rental into s bond structure to pull the income forward when they sell the bonds. They probably have everything in place from Office365.
MS could lobby politicians on the "critical importance of business-oriented digital skill in today's marketplace", making it so that schools would be forced to buy digital devices with Office on them whatever the budget,
Finally, MS could probably mange to get their hardware prices down a good bit on volume contracts. If they want the "hearts and minds" of the future, they could take a strategy of negotiating centrally rather than with individual schools on special pricing which look cheap. They come in high, so 40% off is a good deal for the county's central procurement office, not!?
Now, why I believe Microsoft will fail is because they do not have the persistence to follow a strategy for 10-15 years. They just *have* to tinker and "revolutionise", after 5-6 years they will be *gagging* to do something that somehow invalidates all the previous work.
Irish Stripe techie denied entry to US – for having wrong stamp in passport
China 'hacked' South Korea to wreck Star Wars missile shield
Monday 24th April 2017 11:12 GMT
Re: Come again?
Why would you ever allow something like THAAD be connected to the Internet?
Because, if you don't, the License Manager cannot properly verify that you have purchased the rights for several value-added functions not available in the base-system configuration, such as: Targeting, Initiate Warhead, Fuel Management, PowerPoint Status Reports, Mission Approval, and Inventory Management.
There is also a service fee for every missile servicing a target.
Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly
Tuesday 4th April 2017 10:43 GMT
Re: $ 391,000,000,000
... and other infamous marauders going around raping and pillaging because ....
We *do* have lots of marauders going around raping and pillaging right now because those STRONG MILLITARY FORCES showed their strength by destroying their countries and whatever chattel these people once had.
Those potential - aka imagined - enemies SHOULD indeed nuke your ass at the very first opportunity, since it is the only way stopping those STRONG MILLITARY FORCES from preying on the weak.
Tuesday 4th April 2017 10:35 GMT
Re: I had to read this bit twice to get my head round it.
Aren't aircraft designers supposed to know about things like drag coefficients?
Nope, the people who make it to the technical interview these days has cleared two hurdles on the selection track already (actually, a third if one counts the whole page job-add in a glossy and expensive printed media glorifying the generic greatness of the organization): The recruitment con-sluttants with their hoodoo-based personality testing and then the locale HR-people. Since the first two "filters" know nothing of the subject matter, they will do box ticking on the CV and niceness testing on the candidate.
The end results are a set of genuinely nice candidates (and sometimes one or two psychopaths) with limited domain knowledge, not really what we asked for - but now we have spend thousands on The Recruitment Process and we are Late so we have to pick One, not "non of the above", and just hope that it works out - and they will be using Big-Money design tools like Comsol and anything Dassault, so maybe it will be OK in the end!?
Which it will be in a way... because In the end we recruit The Specialist Consultant to fix the mess, The Consultant is consulting because he/she absolutely knows their stuff but due to many factors like them also being bastards, they will never make Recruitment.
Civilisation is collapsing, I say.
Paris, 'cause she could work in HR.
What a time to be alive: drone pooper-scoopers are a thing now
Wednesday 29th March 2017 14:49 GMT
Lasers, want Lasers!!
I want the turd to be blasted into sparkly plasma by a ludicrously overpowered directed energy system* that some crazy hippie-like character with dreadlocks bought really cheap from a junked 1980's SDI project.
*) 'cause we never use trigger words like "weapon" any more in the sales material, and the turd should really be "serviced" rather than "blasted.
Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun
Wednesday 29th March 2017 11:24 GMT
Re: It's good but not great
only problem
Well, that, and the Guns.
The way the guns work so flawlessly even when in the flaky hands of drunks and morons or drunk morons will need an unbreakable Command, Control and Communication system with almost to Planck-scale precision and resolution.
But, this cannot exist given the amount of unchecked skulduggery and shenanigans that drives the story.
Dishwasher has directory traversal bug
Tuesday 28th March 2017 13:45 GMT
Please make no mistake, in a lot of cases IoT is not about consumer benefit, it's about them:
If "they" build a spectrometer into the unit, they can analyse the food you are eating and propose healthy options (while secretly procuring a life insurance on you before grassing you up to the insurers).
If you use your machine for washing laboratory glassware, they can see what you are working on and front-run your patents - or narc on you.
Google slaps Symantec for sloppy certs, slow show of SNAFUs
Friday 24th March 2017 11:04 GMT 
Symantic - the elephant graveyard of software!
Once useful software that time and windows versions has generally moved away from will be acquired by Symantec, then bloated enough to warp space-time and peddled to corporations for Cash via an annual subscription.
- as well as being forced upon grannies and school-children when something Symantec comes pre-installed in the form of almost impossible to get rid off, naggy, crap-ware, sucking the very life out of their new computer.
Do the numbers, Einstein: AI is more than maths as some know it
Monday 20th March 2017 09:09 GMT
Re: A.I. is hard...
A.I. is hard.
Sure, but, as you now realise: The A.I. doesn't have to work to suck in money from advertisers. In that sense it isn't a hard problem to use "A.I." to support a business model.
One could, if one was a very sceptical person, imagine that, due to an unfortunate skew in the measurements of when you buy something off Amazon and when those adds show up in your browser, it would appear to be the case that those adds were all shown before your purchase - thus validating the sophistication of the add-pusher "A.I." to the people who splurge money on the ads?
Bit like "they" do with the "precision attacks" too.
Germany to Facebook, Twitter: We are *this* close to fining you €50m unless you delete fake news within 24 hours
UK Home Office warns tech staff not to tweet negative Donald Trump posts
Tuesday 14th March 2017 13:00 GMT
Re: @AC ... Yes, good idea
Had they scanned her social media account during the immigration process,
What about After? According to Snowden and Wikileaks "they" suck up Everything - but - are too retarded or overwhelmed to do anything useful with any of it, except AFTER he fact, where failure is rewarded with more resources.
Maybe "they" even let terrorist roam and terrorise freely - because, failure brings in more powers and bennies for much less Effort than actual Work!?
Germany, France lobby hard for terror-busting encryption backdoors – Europe seems to agree
Tuesday 28th February 2017 16:11 GMT
That man has done real, quite possibly terminal, damage to democracy as practiced in the Western world for the past 75 years.
I highly doubt that .Both the damage and that "we?" have been practicing democracy in the same way for 75 years. Because, if we had, the entire middle east would be totally bombed into rubble by now and all of the worlds goods, resources and services would belong to 5 people. The neoliberal rot only started around 1975 so imagine what they could do with almost 40 years more of that crap?
Maybe "democracy" should take the election of Donald Trump as a warning and begin getting its shit together and start delivering something more than bennies for the rich and connected and austerity with migrants on top for everyone else?
Cyber-spying, leaking to meddle in foreign politics is the New Normal
Friday 24th February 2017 10:58 GMT
Re: Wonder
I have. What strikes me the most is just how totally dull, boring and petty these people appears to be. About 80% of the mail volume is office gossip and office politics with zero importance and limited entertainment value. Curated version:
https://zeroanthropology.net/2016/11/08/101-things-we-learned-from-wikileaks-podesta-emails/
One of the true gems in the pile is that the Hillary campaign worked to promote Donald Trump as part of their oh-so-clever uber-wonkish strategy:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120
Which just proves once again that left on their own consluttants will happily overthink and overdosing everything - the bill by the hour after all.
Friday 24th February 2017 10:36 GMT
Re: Will politicians learn from it?
Surely the DNC and RNC will want to avoid the potential for that happening, right?
Maybe not. The DNC for sure only cares about how much they get to collect from donors and other shenanigans, if they can lose the presidency, and still collect, it may be a better position to be in because then they can concentrate 100% on the graft and not be distracted with running the country and all.
We see a similar pattern with the European social democrats and socialists - they always just manage to not have influence, leaving them free of any responsibility for doing any of the good things they claim to be wanting to do for us and free to double down on the virtue signalling too. By not taking part, they too are supporting neo-liberalism.
Which is why we have Brexit, Le Pen, Wilders, AFD - voters simply want *anything* other than neo-liberalism, no matter the consequences and collateral damage, and those are the options.
Just look at SPD. Get a huuge boost just on sentiments like "Someone, anyone, but not the AFD, please, GOD, put a fork in Merkel and rid us of that old bat", then, what do they do: Martin Schulz proposes that migrants should be allowed to vote. The "opposition" are perma-losers, by choice and by design.
Friday 24th February 2017 10:18 GMT
Re: @Peter2
She has a considerable pedigree of being someone who pushes US hegemony abroad.
I.O.W: a serial screw-up and war monger. So, if one didn't agree with more countries being destroyed for nothing at all, then that makes one a Putin supporter by supporting the only available alternative, flawed as it certainly is, which was Donald Trump?
Friday 24th February 2017 10:09 GMT
Re: Hmm... Deja Vu...
Well, that may be so, but we would have more of a moral base to argue from if we hadn't destroyed any attempt of democracy and self-governance in the middle east, then, when that didn't work, doubled down and destroyed entire countries, killing hundreds of thousands, sending millions on the run, while seeding their earth with depleted uranium for their kids to grow malformed from.
Putin, and everyone like him, can always argue: "Hey, you lot did it first. I am just following your example on how to run an empire and fight terrorism". He would be right. I think he shouldn't be right.
Precedence and Example matter a great deal, when one is supposed to be the leader of the free world, indeed the leader of Anything. Good, Bad and Evil behaviour are all displays of Leadership and *all* will be followed. Everyone who is not a baby knows this in practice: If management is corrupt, everyone all the way down will soon have their fingers in the till too. Just how humanity works.
Vladimir Putin is such a small fry on the atrocity scale when compared to "Western liberal democracy".
We should worry about what we control: Our own behaviour, contrary to Vladimir Putin's, that we actually could totally do something constructive about, except we don't care to do that at all.
Because we rather prefer to rave and rant about the faults and failings of everyone else than owning up to our corruption and begin cleaning up just some of our own messes right here at home.
Cloudbleed: Big web brands 'leaked crypto keys, personal secrets' thanks to Cloudflare bug
Friday 24th February 2017 09:43 GMT
Re: anyone else ...
Nope or maybe, I have a zombie google account. My Skype account has been hacked twice, someone sending messages to all contacts on my behalf. Of course not hacked according to mickeysoft, I guess that there is another zombie coming right up.
What happens when ones abandoned accounts get hacked and start spreading jihaddi agitprop and bomb recipes?
Apple to Europe: It's our job to design Ireland's tax system, not yours
Thursday 23rd February 2017 08:36 GMT
It proper annoys me that the Irish Government don't want the money.
... Maybe they keep their secret stash of pedo-porn in The Cloud?
Politician (p) meets Silicon Valley Political Community Organiser and Singularity Evangelist (a):
a) "..You know how it is in business, guv? On have to prioritize and allocate capital most effectively, If we have to pay all of that in taxes then we cannot also afford security and Russian Hackers will surely be hacking your accounts and influencing the next election ..."
p) .... "b.b.b.ut - I dont have an iCloud or any Cloud account, how does this concern me",
a) "Sorry guv, our records show you have had one since 1985 ... and I hear there is some right naughty stuff in there guv, i'd say close to illegal, prison time illegal like, disgusting stuff too, of course this is nun of me business ..."
... hands over envelope of screenshots ....
p) "Sniffle! How did I get into this mess, I my wife hears ... How does this go away?"
a) "See, guv, that *IS* my business, making all of them nasty things that can just happen in life go away all quietly like ... taxes are nasty things, aren't they, guv?"
p) "Anything, Anything ...."
a) "Of course, guv, but a little less will do for now ... just a favour really"
US visitors must hand over Twitter, Facebook handles by law – newbie Rep starts ball rolling
Friday 17th February 2017 10:54 GMT
Re: Glad the translation will be supplied by me
It means a lot of things apart from "some atrocity is imminent". It can also be used in much the same way "we" use "fuck" - As a generic expletive meaning both good or bad things.
For example, when a westernized muslim drops her iPhone on the cement, she might say "Allahu akbar" with a "down"/"ironic" tone on the "akbar" bit.
Friday 17th February 2017 10:42 GMT
Re: Huh?
Why go to the USA at all? That place is getting nuttier and more random for every year that passes.
Passing the border of the DDR during the peak of the cold war was a much more relaxed undertaking than meeting the USA security circus in 2015. With the DDR goons, one didn't have this feeling of "These people are *on* something. Reach for your handkerchief too quickly, drop an iPad with a loud noise, and thousands of rounds will instantly go off in ones general location clipping all the bystanders."
The Mail vs Wikipedia: They're more alike than they'd ever admit
Tuesday 14th February 2017 13:02 GMT
Oh yeah. I remember very well the "Antique History" classes in high school with the semi-attractive but crazy female history teacher getting all steamy over the orgie parts of the classic texts.
No piece of pottery was left unturned in them days if it was suspected that something perverse might be hidden underneath.
Tuesday 14th February 2017 12:58 GMT
Yeah?
Pet peeve activated: "Trying" is a very popular failure mode for all of these Good People with only the best intentions and rich friends with private islands to show for it!
I mean "The Left" has been "trying" so very, very, very, hard for at least 2 decades to "do something" about things like environmental destruction, rising inequality, corporate ascension to power and Islamization. So far, worse on all parameters, but, by God they are Trying.
Departing Autodesk CEO says he became dumber and less funny the moment he quit
Revealed: 'Suicide bomber Barbie' and other TSA quack science that cost $1.5 billion
Thursday 9th February 2017 12:47 GMT
What did people imagine would happen? The TSA was set up rapidly and to do this rapidly, they asked everyone else amongst the TLA's to send them staff: "Give us your best and brightest!" was the call
- of course what they actually got in response was the deadwood, problem people, misfits, idiots, the people we cannot fire for XXX reason and whatever else could be spared.
If one is, for example, the FBI one does not necessarily want Competition to succeed and attract more staff and more funding because of it, now, does one?
Big blues: IBM's remote-worker crackdown is company-wide, including its engineers
Thursday 9th February 2017 09:40 GMT
Re: Taking the piss....
It's that kind of behaviour that prompts employers to reign in staff that take the piss.
Eh? No, that is Exactly what NEVER, EVER, happens: Instead of dealing with the problem individuals, those few people who does take the piss are used as the excuse to put the screws onto Everyone, including all the reasonable people who do NOT take the piss. Everyone who ever worked has had at least several experiences with this.
Maybe this a leftover from the time when employees were "hands"?
This cowardly behaviour from "leadership" is behind "the immigration problem" too, BTW.
Elon Musk joins anti-Trump legal brief
Tuesday 7th February 2017 14:18 GMT
Re: Chilling
at what point do we just dispense with government and allow the biggest company to pull the strings
Right after the EU ratifies CETA, and maybe also TTIP and TISA which will surely be back online when someone explains to Donald Trump "what's in those treaties for him".
Government will still be there, though. Fat, Bloated, Lazy, and now bored out of it's skull, so surely a lot of Moral-Based Legislation can liven up proceedings and make life interesting again?
Ohio bloke accused of torching own home after his pacemaker rats him out to cops
Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?
Friday 27th January 2017 16:02 GMT
Re: Just a suggestion...
What do you expect?
Internet Media relies 110% on funding from spam-vertisers. To get good prices for add placement spots, the media must have high page views. To consistently get high page views, media use Machine Learning and other tools to measure and test the response - in terms of click-ratings and page views - to various kinds of articles, layout, subjects, the use of words, and so on, always optimising the parameters for the writer-bots and fleshy-writer-bots for whatever moves the needle on the add revenue.
Thus, every successful for-profit internet media will be converted into The Daily Mail.
This just by using dumb AI and A/B split testing, no singularity is needed for grey-goo'ing the Internet.
Friday 27th January 2017 15:30 GMT
Re: Yet ANOTHER Trump story?
But consider this:
No, you better consider this (Without Google): What did Donald Trump *do* while our "Great League Internet Warrior for Truth, Justice and LGBT Loos" were debunking Trumps Terrible Twitter Lies?
Exactly! Nobody remembers!!
PS:
It's totally fine if indeed US IT-providers are fucked in relation to the EU; We need jobs, remember.
Of course the EU will just lube up and bend over for Uncle Sam yet again, but, at some point, perhaps, the embarrassment of repeated public ass-poundings will force the EU to grow a pair and a will of its own. Eventually. One hopes.
The TLA's sniffing of our underwear and sharing any good bits with everyone was always there (in PRISM t.ex.), now that The Donald is sniffing, and his friends ogling, it somehow becomes much worse than when Obama was doing the dirty deeds!? That is illogical, in my opinion.
Friday 27th January 2017 15:13 GMT
Re: Yet ANOTHER Trump story?
Okay. Give us all an example of Trump doing something logical.
To me it Donald Trump is very logical. There is a tentacled beast aching with a terrifying eldritch power cloaked behind The Donald that no one yet sees because "everyone" amongst the media and "experts" are busy with rending of cloth, throwing ashes upon their heads and wailing over the latest 256 char of Donald Trump outrage on Twitter.
Cats and Laser Pointer is the logic of Trump. The Donald is very, very good at his game.
Trump not shifting America's economic and/or social and/or scientific progress into high speed reverse.
A trend continuation is not a shift. Almost *every single parameter* one could use to describe the quality of life under the US neo-liberal regime has been in reverse ever since the 1980's. I said *every*, because the banks, squllionaires, and the mil-sec complex have grown fatter.
Trump not fucking over the rest of the world as collateral damage to his own delusions.
Hahaha - what material *difference* does it make to all those shredded wedding parties and dead Iraqi children if that old vampire bat Madeline Albrecht, or Hillary or even Nobel Prize Candidate Obama makes them collateral damage to pad their CV as a Warmonger, to better fit in with their peers?
The world was fucked over solidly by Americans, whenever it pleased some corporate money-bag to have a regime changed somewhere, pretty much ever since the Monroe Doctrine.
Trump actually making sense.
Trump makes *every* sense. He is just communicating more effectively, much clearer, in a ways where it cannot be denied easily, that, compared to those Exceptional Americans with Rights and Stuff, everyone else on this planet are un-people, mere collateral damage that hasn't happened yet.
*That* is really good to know, before we - say - join the US in yet another stupid war over nothing in particular in some forsaken soon-to-become shithole that exactly nobody cares about.
This is Good too: https://zeroanthropology.net/2017/01/18/the-dying-days-of-liberalism/
PS:
You can exhale now.
UK ISPs may be handed cock-blocking powers
Wednesday 25th January 2017 13:26 GMT
Re: Contact your ISP
GuvMint will just tell ISP's: "You can run your business any way you like, Sir, you just have to take all of your traffic feeds off this here core network that we will provide for you."
GuvMInt will certainly win that contest, because GuvMint has infinite resources (well, all of "yours") and also kinetic options, should it come to that. Only way to not lose is to change government into one which is on our side on this.
Wednesday 25th January 2017 13:20 GMT
Why don't they focus on the important stuff such as dealing with the issues of Trump, Europe China and Russia
Because most actual conservative values are sadly ones that require work to produce results. It is so much easier and more convenient to adopt liberal thinking and go all in on emotion- and feelings- issues.
Keeps the eyes off the sorry results created by universally agreed-upon neo-liberalism too; LGBT toilets and Diversity Issues - it's like laser pointers and cats. Saves the catnip too.
Make America, wait, what again? US Army may need foreign weapons to keep up
Wednesday 25th January 2017 11:18 GMT
Re: Military-industrial 101
So understand that when you complain about the military-industrial complex... your country helped make America what it is today.
Ding, Ding, Ding - *EXCACTLY* we finally have a Winner! I'd even suggest that you lot take the next round of war at home, optimise those logistics trains, expenses and stuff. You know - For Busineess!
Gimme some skin: Boffins perfect 3D bioprinter that emits slabs of human flesh
Dropbox: Oops, yeah, we didn't actually delete all your files – this bug kept them in the cloud
Wednesday 25th January 2017 11:03 GMT
Re: Dropbox has a very handy feature for NSA/GCHQ.
This is very likely a change to Dropbox that has been subpoenaed on them, along with a gagging order, by the incoming Trump Presidency.
Well, I'd say that this kind of Identity Politics is a strong signal that the USA should *definitely* make the investment on replacing all those lead pipes and in general get the water supplies up to 1'st world levels.
Otherwise, that great country will never return to sanity! Dumb-assery and Snowflakeness will take over!!
Truth is: Obama left the surveillance machine to Donald Trump, all gassed up, tuned to perfection and with the keys still in the ignition.
Just because Obama was assumed to be "our president" doesn't mean that Obama's surveillance state was not a totally retarded, dangerous and wrong idea all along - it is so sad that it takes "the wrong president" getting elected before "anyone" is capable of even uttering the thought.
Wednesday 25th January 2017 10:53 GMT
Re: Um What???
Typically, we permanently remove files and folders from our servers within 60 days of a user deleting them.
Soo much weasel-craft in just one sentence. Tony Blair must work there.
"Typically" -> "if it's some good shit, we definitely keep it around for Later"
"Our servers" -> "the servers we contractually own, that outsourced storage we rent in Utah ... whatever. They don't tell and we don't ask."
"User" -> "who is that, exactly. Browser, Client software, Person"
"Deleting" -> "Now, that is a subtle term with many definitions. So we have this here 70000 pages TOS to explain it".
Annoyingly precocious teen who ruined Trek is now an asteroid
Monday 23rd January 2017 14:42 GMT
Re: I like Will wheaton but wesley...
I believe that Wesley's role in the organisation is to sign off on things that he doesn't understand so that every cock-up and failure bears his name. Eventually, he will be court-martialled and ejected into space, nekkid, for his crimes.
Pickard and his cronies will have a drink and cigar while they briefly lament his untimely passing in front of the panorama windows. Then they will request a successor. Maybe a diversity candidate this time?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
