Posts by h4rm0ny 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
I just watched it after reading your comment and no, her hair definitely bounces as well. As does the pan on her backpack and her backpack itself. I don't think the breasts bouncing is out of context with anything else. Article is wrong. Anyone disagreeing, have a re-watch.
>>It's well known that young men who view female breasts grow up to be climate change deniers and socialists.
Actually, I think the sort of people complaining that breasts are sexist are actually pretty in favour of socialism. It's no longer some puritan religious Right leading the charge, but left wing SJW types, ime.
I always found Maplin stores to be very good from a customer point of view and the staff surprisingly knowledgeable about their stock and what you need.
The problem is that the only things I ever need from Maplin are small items that I suddenly realise I need (USB stick, SD Card reader, cables, a mouse...) and isn't worth making a special trip into town for. So I open a new tab, find the item on Amazon and know that it will be with me in the morning.
There shouldn't be a double standard for celebrities. If you argue that these people should be treated lightly because of whatever reason you want to blame the celebrities for, then you're normalizing and arguing for light treatment for all victims.
If it's humiliating and destructive for you or me (and yes - nudes and sex tapes seen by everyone I work with would be very damaging for example) then celebrities should be treated the same.
They would have been less if it wasn't celebrities.
Maybe. But if they hadn't been celebrities the files wouldn't have been mass shared the whole world over and a media focus. I don't know if that makes a difference to how they should be sentenced.
No, I'd prefer that no-one built and used the damn things. But if someone is going to make one, smuggle it onto a plane or suchlike where security would bar a "normal" gun and then use it to take someone's life then I would prefer it be the perpetrator that suffers rather than the innocent victim.
These still have metal parts in them, still show up in X-rays, still use gunpowder (and thus detectable by the same chemical techniques). You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. The few people making these things are hobbyists, not criminals.
Not necessarily. I'm not into guns, but I remember several people in my youth who built zip guns in grade school shop class, using basic and readily available tools and materials.
I read the post as meaning "real" guns. Not dangerous but highly inaccurate one-shot devices. But they are guns, I suppose. So it depends what is meant. In any case, it takes a lot of bulky and expensive equipment to make a modern firearm, that is for sure.
>>
What will happen to the NRA's generous corporate contributions from Big Gun when people quit buying from them?
The NRA has over 6 million dues paying members. This may shock you but guns are actually quite popular in the USA. The biggest share of its funding is from ordinary members. There's around another 10% from advertising (which is probably your "big gun") and then a chunk of private contributions above and beyond dues. As lobbyists, they rank far, far, far behind big players like Google and Health Insurance industry.
Did you bother to look before you declared the NRA remain silent. NRA have commented on 3D guns previously. Most recent statement on it seems to be from just last month:
“Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRA’s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.”
Seems an accurate statement to me. I'm unclear on what exactly you expect their position to be.
>>"So all the TLAs need to do is give compromised systems a hard time, and you'll assume they haven't been compromised?"
I'll certainly consider it more likely. They'd be damned fools to allow a non-compromised network to operate unimpeded whilst actively banning or restricting the one they can scan through at will. Most people don't choose their app on the basis of what the state dislikes, but on what is convenient. So why would they try and push the masses to the one they don't the to use?
You're considerably less clever than you think you are.
Well..
(1) We can't know that symmetry between defence and offence will be preserved. Our current encryption technology in fact relies entirely on the fact that it's harder to run a piece of mathematics backwards than it is forwards.
(2) It's still a problem because it means they'll be able to retroactively decrypt today's messages. Sure, it's great that if in 2025 they still can't crack your messages. But that secure stuff you send tomorrow they'll be feeding to their search engines one day. Maybe not as bad, but it could be depending on how important what you sent was.
If the TLAs aren't giving something a hard time, I generally assume they've compromised it. Skype, WhatsApp, et al. The only exception is (I think but do not know) Telegram which I think they give a pass because it creates more headaches for Russia than it does for the West. Hardly anyone over here seems to use it except for the Italians.
Of course, I could be wrong. I try to trust as little as possible. For example, why on Earth would Twitter be helping with this?
I agree with nearly everything you say except that blaming Trump for anti-US sentiment. The destruction of Libya was the policy decision of Obama and Hilary (who really pushed very hard for it). The US backing of anti-Syrian elements in the ME (i.e. ISIS) along with CIA destabilization efforts in Syria was initiated by Obama. Bush attacked Iraq.
Trump's contribution to anti-American feeling in the non-English speaking world is basically recognizing Israel's claim of Jerusalem as their capital. Which yes, caused a lot of anger, but mainly with parties who were already very angry with the USA anyway.
Because the way it's written makes it sound like many of them are actual Iranians and just considered removed because their political views are considered wrong.
Will Facebook be dealing with UK, USA and German public manipulation efforts on their network? Because all three are actively engaged in exactly this. I remember during the attacks on Libya there was a large co-ordinated effort to create and maintain online accounts to push the accepted view and attack contrary posters. I'd love to know how many people they actually had working on that one.
"While inauthentic content operations are, at least in the popular mind, associated with right-wing content..."
They are? Why? Because of a pittance of Facebook ads bought by Russia that were vaguely (we're told - they wont show them) pro-Trump? To my mind it would be the many millions that the Democrats spent on "online campaigning" that comes to mind along with the use of Cambridge Analytica data. But hey, I'm not a journo from San Francisco where anything bad must be Right Wing so what do I know?
I don't think it's bad that there are lots of options in itself. But what it results is balkanization of all the developers and users so that no single UI ever gets the level of polish and progress that it would. Windows has a single UI that is linear and iterative. I like it these days. KDE, GNOME, et al not so much. I actually use Xfce almost all the time on GNU/Linux because it's light, simple and has reached that level of polish by simple virtue of being both these things.
You make an unsupported leap when you say it demonstrates women are not given the same opportunities as men. This is your hypothesis, it's not something the data demonstrates. And what is more, we have a lot of reasons we know that contribute that don't depend on lack of opportunity. You're not only guessing the reason, you're also guessing where there are known reasons.
As to why not give women a turn to 'dominate', we're not rival football teams. We're individuals. NOTHING in this area should be determined on the basis of sex.
Shame on El Reg for this clickbait, shallow article, as well.
There's a reason for that, Wilseus. The Register switched much of its writing and focus over to Silicon Valley. It's not really British any longer. They kicked out Lewis Page for vague and unspecified reasons (but basically editorial policy) and they've been pushing a particular political angle ever since.
It's the main reason I and others have stopped coming here so often.
There's an important difference between the Chinese spying on you and the US / UK spying on you. If you break a law, engage in a protest, say something unapproved or affiliate with people your government doesn't like - the Chinese wont give the slightest fuck about it. Whereas ours will be paying you a visit shortly.
This is about protectionism. Huawei was approaching finalization of a deal with a large US carrier (rumoured to be AT&T). This has been in the works for a long time. In the UK market it is not quite as important to have a network agreement but in the USA phones are overwhelmingly sold locked as part of a package deal. If you're not a partner of one of the big players, you're small fry.
The deal has fallen through because the Trump administration intervened. The Trump administration is much more protectionist.
Huawei have been assessed by both UK and US experts for spyware and no evidence has ever been found (in contrast to when the USA installed firmware spyware on a large number of harddrives sent to China some years back, as it happens). Huawei have provided hardware to BT in the past and received the GCHQ go-ahead.
Sites like Stratfor attribute this to Trump's 'America First' trade policies and determination to bring jobs back to American soil. The Register seems to either have no awareness of the wider context or simply doesn't wish to question the US govt. line. Either way, this is very weak journalism.
And I'll say the same thing to you as on the previous occasion. You have missed the point. I could write a cmdlet called `stat` for Windows very easily that would do exactly the same. For ANY given example of a script I can create a program that will do that.
I showed a comparison between pipelining in Bash and in Powershell and showed how object pipelining is simpler than text mangling. Using a program like stat does not illustrate text mangling. It illustrates a prepared macro that does the same. Which is trivially doable on Windows, as well. I'm comparing text mangling vs. objects not whether a sequence of pipelines can be replaced by a program. That is true of either OS.
>>A shell with binary object pipelines, merely shows what we already knew. That Microsoft do not grok the power and simplicity of text based protocols and that "everything is a file" approach.
My inclination is to treat the above as humour. However, you continue on so I'm going to reply just in case it isn't. Text mangling is NOT "simplicity". Anything but. You have to change later steps in the pipeline when previous steps change. E.g. the output of `ls` and `ls -l` yield the same list of files but different textual output. So if the output is piped to other commands they must be cognizant of any changes. It's anything but simple, it's brittle and fiddly. If you pipe an array of file OBJECTS to the next tool, there's no text mangling required.
And because an illustration is useful, here's getting the list of file owners in BASH vs. Powershell:
Bash
ls -l | awk '{print $3}'
Powershell
DIR | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner
Acl means "Access Control Layers" which is something anyone working with Windows at this level will know. Bash requires working with textual output. Powershell is all objects: Directory listing to get the ACLs to select the owner attribute. Very logical, very robust. The awk example will break if you try to feed it a file list from somewhere else (or even without the -l flag).
Lets get more complex. Suppose I want not the current directory but a recursive tree. In Powershell it becomes this:
DIR -Recurse | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner
Very simple change. I just add the recurse flag and the rest remains the same. Lets add one more tweak and have it select unique owner list:
DIR -Recurse | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner | Select -Unique
All I did was pipe it to a unique filter. Simple.
Now you might think that the Bash equivalent would be this:
find ./ -exec ls -l {} \; | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq
But you'd be wrong. Why? Because of the issue I talked about. `ls -l` is returning textual output, not an array of objects. And it throws in a summary line at the foot of each directory it traverses. My awk component which is downstream is now doesn't take care of everything. I need to add something to filter out certain parts of the text that have content. So something like this:
find ./ -exec ls -l {} \; | awk '{print $3}' | grep . | sort | uniq
The point is with text (which you think is simpler), you actually have more interdependencies between the components you're piping between than in Powershell where it's all clean objects.
You have two components in the above (awk and grep) which are there purely to compensate for the fact that Bash is using text rather than objects. It's not simpler, it's anything but. And the more complex the script, the more brittle a reliance on text makes it.
>>Why do people compare Powershell to bash?
Seems to be mostly GNU/Linux users who need to assert that their OS is better than another. Command Line has historically been a notable differentiator between GNU/Linux and Windows. And so its arcane spells and incantations became a badge of superiority over dialogue boxes and configuration wizards - because if you need to be smarter to use it, that shows it's the tool for smart people. *ahem*
When Microsoft looked at Bash and said: "You know, if we can make this a bit less idiosyncratic and do it in a modern way, it would be pretty useful to us, too" it was like Steve Balmer had personally mugged Brian Fox at gunpoint to these people. (Even though as you point out, Powershell and Bash have basic, conceptual differences). It became vital to prove that Powershell, despite being newer and benefiting from building on everything that came before it, was inferior to Bash. Because otherwise GNU/Linux gurus couldn't point at a pile of (unsigned, downloaded from the web) scripts and say: "See! Better!"
>>It's a very capable scripting language, but an appalling shell
Well it's not really a shell. I fire up ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) which comes as standard on Windows rather than the basic Powershell interface and it works great as a shell for me. (Only time I use the other interface is if I'm CLI'ing in Python or something and I need stdin style interaction).
>>You're better off comparing it to node or python.
By language design, yes. But it's so handy for sysadmins managing Windows systems that it occupies the same user space as Bash.
>>"No. Windows is still mostly a C API, which is not object oriented. It also has some C++ and COM APIs, which are object oriented, but which are not .NET objects. Powershell requires its wrappers over all of them."
No. Windows HAS a C API (and others). But pretty much every setting and configurable option in the OS is exposed as an object for use by Powershell.
>>And frankly, I'd prefer to call a COM API than a .NET one. It doesn't require a specific VM, a JIT, and a framework just to call a function - and you can call it from many more languages and scripts.
It's the 21st Century. It's okay to use languages that don't require an explicit compilation step. We're discussing Powershell vs. Bash. None of the above is relevant in a comparison of the two.
Powershell is far superior to Bash and I call BULLSHIT on your suggestion that Bash is superior. The only problem with Powershell is a GNU/Linux environment is that GNU/Linux is not an Object Orientated environment whereas from top to bottom Windows is. Therefore Powershell can use it's far more advanced capabilities whereas on GNU/Linux it's stuck using the same kludgy approaches as Bash.
You claim to have used both. Well I have to. Here's a short list of some of the things I can do in Powershell that I can't do in Bash. Oh - and syntactically it's more consistent and intelligent, too.
1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings.
2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.
3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.
4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.
5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.
6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.
7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.
8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.
9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.
10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.
11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?
12) Strongly typed stripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.
13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.
14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.
15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.
No, I get what they're saying. They're not arguing that it's not possible to spread knowledge of how to beat the extra layer of security easily. They're saying that if you stand out from the crowd in terms of security, you'll be in that group that people don't bother going to the extra effort for. Like how there is a tonne of malware for Windows but less (at least the user-focused kind) for GNU/Linux. It's not because GNU/Linux can't be compromised it's because why go to the extra effort to get a few more systems when you're best directing your efforts to the large majority. If you have "Security Level 11" and everyone else has "Security Level 10", you've effectively created your own little microcosm of the same effect.
The worthwhileness of spreading around and implementing that extra knowledge only applies if the security measures are spread around and implemented. Otherwise it's extra work for small gain.
Warren Buffet is very smart, very experienced and knows a lot more about investment and the economy than anybody who is likely posting here. It's outrageous arrogance for El Reg to be pronouncing on Buffet's lack of understanding. Especially given they seem to be misrepresenting Buffet saying "I don't fully understand this" to "will all end in tears".
People saying Bitcoin et al are no different to the US dollar because neither are backed by physical wealth miss that the US dollar IS backed by two very important things: as the national currency you can pay US taxes in it. And the US tends to bomb any country that calls into question its value (Libya I'm looking at you).
>>"I'm not prepared to share it with some bigoted misogynistic bro arsehole."
The problem being that you're talking about firing someone for not agreeing with you preferentially selecting by sex. Or for voting for a different political party than you (see his court filing listing many of the emails that were flying around insisting he be sacked before someone leaked the memo to make it happen).
You can't just point at someone, call them a "bro" and fire them. Well, not in Europe anyway.
>>No, you're wrong there. I didn't mention the details of the leak because I simply wasn't aware of it.
In that case, I withdraw my statement saying you're deliberately ignoring facts. But I hope you see it as reasonable that I thought that - this is a key fact openly available. As you were pronouncing rather confidently on why Damore was fired, I figured you must have known the details. I respect you being open to changing your mind.
>>I used the word "nerdy" without meaning it to be pejorative, by the way. I meant an office culture where it's considered desirable to spend all hours coding, to the exclusion of other activities.
Well that's kind of Damore's point in which case you're at least somewhat in agreement with him. He argues (with support) that women are in general less inclined to work jobs where they're just coding away all the time. But Google creates policies on the assumption that its coders should naturally reflect general population. If you create policies based on a wrong assumption...
>>On the other end, we have Identity Politics, probably the most horrible, divisive concept of recent decades
And I agree with that. And I expect Damore would as well. Respectfully, I think if you re-read the memo and some of his court filing (which goes into the environment in Google in some detail) with an honest, open mind, I think you might find it has more merit than you originally thought. The Identity Politics that you despise appears to be endemic within Google to the point that it is systematic in actual policy. Which is what Damore is objecting to.
I'm not sure if you genuinely don't understand or if you are, as I suspect, simply determined that I must be wrong. To extend the benefit of the doubt one last time:
It very much does have to do with sexism. I provided good quality primary data showing that computer classes have higher female participation in sexist countries than they do in less sexist ones. I even helpfully directed you to examples of both countries as the data set is large. The reason for this is because in these more sexist countries, women have less career choice. You're less able to become a doctor or a lawyer or a manager, etc. When choice is restored, e.g. Sweden, you find participation drops because more often than not a female student will pursue a career other than a purely technical one.
The first are well-demonstrated facts. The conclusion is directly derived. If you again try to shift ground or dispute this, then I don't believe you're arguing honestly.
Fun and amazing fact: although British pilots were instructed to shoot down the V1s., their gyroscope ceased working if inverted. That is to say that if you could get the missile to fly upside down it would immediately crash. British pilots would sometimes fly alongside the missile and get their wing under its fin and flip it over.
Interesting book that mentions this: Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson. (No, I'm not touting the book and no connection. Amazon's just the easiest link).
Governments generally have a pretty good idea of who their weapons are reaching. Which is a very different thing from publicly admitting it or it being done legally. And when weapons end up in "the wrong hands", it's as often simply a matter of time and shifting allegiances than error. Arms dealers are VERY aware of who governments will be okay with them supplying and who will get them into a very nasty situation.
A low-tech device that does the job is better than a high-tech device that does the job for one simple reason: For the price of a single US$500,000 device, you can get thousands of cheap ones.
If you can build a model plane out of balsa wood and a cheap motor with enough range, that's what you do. Besides, the sophisticated part of these was the guidance systems which aren't shown in these pictures.
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