Posts by Tom 13

No, you'd need 574 coaches of virgins* based on the numbers provided in this article.

Now, I expect even the Suffolk police would quickly spot a convoy of 583 coaches, so the risk here is minimal.

*As others have pointed out, this assumes you could find that many. Although I understand terrorists accept virgins down to age 8 or so, so they might have a loophole there.

@John Brown (no body)

For the context of comments above, it seems that in the UK coach refers to a small train car as opposed to a decent bus. Here in the US, assuming you can find a a passenger car, it would likewise be insufficient for more than two cars and that's assuming the absurdity of one weapon per terrorist.

Re: The BBC just quoted the Detective

Isn't it even worrying that a BBC reporter mindlessly repeated what the government plod said?

They do have the option to NOT quote him.

Re: well we just use millichucks then

Still not enough guns in the world.

And remember, Chuck uses TOWs instead of derringers.

Re: Precisely

And that's assuming you don't double up on rifle/pistol which is a really silly assumption. I'll grant the machine guns are the tough part of the calculation as they vary in size. I'm assuming they're using the military LMG as opposed to a decent HMG or what passes for a machine gun in Hollywood flick these days.

Re: his work phone issued by the county.

I hadn't heard that. You're quite right, that makes this an even more interesting case.

I work for a government agency and part of securing the phone is installing software that does allow the user to reset the PIN in case they forget it. Most of the time we in IT can't use that route because the reset is tied to the email of the person owning the phone, but in a case like this we could be authorized to change that password so we could perform the PIN reset. It's not entirely foolproof since the agency does allow people to use personal Apple ID accounts, but even then you should be able to find the appropriate account, get the court order to reset that password, then proceed with the PIN reset.

@werdsmith

If it had a fingerprint reader would it necessarily work? Or to frame the question even more clearly: Do YOU trust fingerprint readers on mobes to work?

I sure don't and I don't really keep anything on my phone that NEEDS protecting. Instead I use a PIN I can easily remember.

Re: why aren't they just running a 'find and replace'

Well, let's take the example provided.

If you run a find for 'spel' and replace each instance with 'spell' when you are done you will have 'spell' and 'spelll' as your new variable names.

Yeah I know. The best way to do that find is to look for 'spell ' and replace it with 'spell '. Alternately you can do a second search and replace all instances of 'spelll' with 'spell'. BUT, do you really want to trust the sort of people who can't spell correctly in the first place to do this sort of thing?

No, I'm not a programmer. But once upon a time I was the English major writing the instruction book for an object oriented language to be used in a proprietary control system. So you'd have commands like 'OpenAppliance' or 'IfOpen'. Hand checking the text was the only thing that really worked and spelling was my second worst subject in school (worst was always math, slight dyslexia). The two months I spent working on that was the worst year of my life.

Re: on floppy disk and want it installed on the managed desktops

Be thankful it was at least on a floppy disk. Could be worse; it could be magnetic tape or even punch cards.

Re: Security is an enabler

Maybe it should be, but it isn't. Because most of the time the safest course of action for the security guy is to say no. I also see way too many box checkers in the business: "This checklist says we need to implement this policy" even though the subsystem the policy was written to address has been altered radically and that control is no longer relevant to the way the new subsystem functions.

Re: Challenger doesn't need O-rings that don't turn brittle

As I recall, the issue wasn't so much that the rings got stiff (not brittle) in cold temperatures. It was that middle management chose to ignore the recommendation of their tech people because they (he? IIRC it actually came down to just one dipshit close to the bottom of the information feed) didn't want the President to miss his photo op.

@Alister

While the overall analysis is good, I suspect the issue here is more the location of the fine than it's magnitude. Since the fine comes off company profits, it's rounding error. If it came off the CEO's salary, I don't think doing proper security would be such a problem.

Re: Air F**king Gap

Seems to me a smart IT manager would make the case that strong IT security is PART of ensuring patient confidentiality. You sure as hell aren't keeping your patient records confidential is somebody you don't know in Scamiganistovia pwns your network.

Air gaps didn't help the Iranians protect their nuclear facilities from Stuxnet.

Sadly that pox is now out of the box and the malware miscreants will use it.

Re: Best of Breed

Since I haven't used the API's I won't dispute your characterization of them.

But even as 'Merkin, I have to say this decision looks corrupt from top to bottom. Initially I was going to object that "appreciable" was a reasonable standard. But after seeing that Streetmap (which I've never heard of before today) had evidence of exactly the sorts of losses I would qualify as "appreciable" but the judge excluded them because they weren't direct, that objection pretty much falls away.

I hope there's some way for this case to be reviewed, and a solid Biatch Slap delivered to the culpable judge.

Re: They weren't deciding a policy, just implementing an existing one.

The decision to exclude a whole category of damages is a bit more than "just implementing the existing one." I'd say it does in fact change policy since it changed the prevailing interpretation at the time the policy was implemented.

Re: competitors are allowed to undercut one another

Only when they don't hold a monopoly position in the market, which Google clearly does for search.

@Charlie Clark Re: The FED my be reversing that 0.25% rise

I agree except I in this case it isn't just about hitting targets for the quarter. The FED is propping up the entire economy.

I wasn't a big fan of TARP when it was proposed. But it at least addressed the root problem: all that bad MSB debt. But a funny thing happened on the way to implementing it. Instead of actually buying the MSB debt, it got diverted elsewhere and the MSB debt was left in the system. So the castor oil flavored ipecac we were all forced to take didn't even address the issue it was supposed to address.

Yep, not a good place at all.

Re: The FED my be reversing that 0.25% rise

If you raise/borrow money and assume that rates will stay this low forever then you need your head examined. If you do your business plan and cater for them to be say 3% then anything less is a bonus and 'embiggens' the bottom line.

This OUGHT to be true. I'm not sure that it is. The FED has ironically fallen into a money trap. With economies depending on 0% (or lower) interest rates, when they try to bump them they kill economic growth. This is NOT a good place to be. When the next inevitable bust happens (and I wouldn't in any sense claim we've had a boom in the interim) they don't have any tools left in the tool box. And with governments around the world embarrassing drunken sailors with their profligate spending, they don't have any tools either.

@allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Actually that would be $Hrillary. Fiorina would be more India or Pakistan.

Re: Was a Bot farm required to pull this caper off?

But think of all the money they save by not printing forms!

/end sarc

Where are the two bullets and bottle of vodka when you need them?

Re: Incorrect extrapolation

I'll only call you patronising if you automatically think someone needs more help and encouragement simply because they're a woman

Well then your first targets need to be the SJW types, including the authors of this so called study, because they are the most prominent promoters of precisely that bit of sexism.

That's actually pretty hard. It's not nice being separate from most of your friends in several of your classes or being the odd one out.

That's NOT the fault of the men. Your numbers aren't wrong. I was in Astro, we had one woman out of 12. In the physics classes the numbers essentially doubled. But in both instance the men were more than happy to see women in the classes and fell over themselves to help them when asked. And I was in college before you, so according to the SJW types, we Neanderthals were supposedly more numerous and less restrained.

Re: I expect votedowns

Firstly, whilst institutional sexism does exist, my encounters have always been based around a few bad eggs.

That's a complete non sequitur. Either it is institutional (exists everywhere and in all institutions) or it is a few bad eggs. By definition it can't be both.

It's this sort of sloppy thinking that gets SJW types into trouble and why the anger in the backlash is growing.

Re: the five best techies

I've only met two I'd put in the class of best, both were male. The first was a programmer on level with Torvalds except without the penchant for profanity. (Yes this programmer like Torvalds actually wrote his own operating system.) He was one of those rare people who actually could do two complex tasks at once. He would often continue typing reports when you went to him to discuss a particular issue. The second was the tech who trained me for desktop support. He had a knack for knowing how something had to be configured even if he'd never seen the OS before. The only thing that slowed him down a bit was his first exposure to BSD.

The two worst technicians I've ever dealt with were both female. The first was a paper cert MSCE working at a local private school district. The school made a deal with a local ISP to get a single dial up login account for all the students to use. Their OS was Windows 95. To hide the password so the kids wouldn't be able to use the school account on their home systems they were creating the dial up adapter from the admin account then having the kids log in. She didn't understand why the kid's account didn't have the dial up adapter credentials there.

The second was a network admin at the company that absorbed the one I was working for when the above incident took place. Most of the time she had no opinions of her own and merely echoed whatever the consensus of the other techs was. This was when she was at her best. If she actually formed a strongly held opinion, even if you had documentation it was impossible to prove she needed to change it. At one point the company was in two locations and decided to consolidate into one location. One location was running Novell, NT 4.0, and Win95/98 desktops. The other was running strictly NT 4.0 and Win95/98. They decided that with the move they would also upgrade to 2000 Server and eliminate the Novell segment. We got all the systems migrated to the new domain. As you would expect all these changes led to an abnormally high call volume for the Service Desk. One problem in particular was perplexing. People would lose their connections to the server in the middle of the day. With access to the server lost, they'd get "Disk Full" errors when trying to save any document they had been editing. We hit upon the solution of saving it locally and rebooting the PC. With the connection newly established, they could copy the file from their local drive to the network. It wasn't everybody, but at least 20% of our users were having the problem. We built new systems for a couple of users but the problem persisted. Finally that second tech I mentioned above found the article addressing the problem on Tech Net. Because of the vagaries of the merger process, he wound up being low man on the totem pole for the network tech team. Despite having article in hand which precisely described our problem, Miss Head Bitch in Charge would NOT make the necessary change because "it involved manually editing the registry and you NEVER want to do that." We went for another full work day before the combined network team was finally able to prevail upon her to let them make the change. With the change made the problem went away. (Underlying issue was that the MS IP stack at the time was so bad, they set a time out on the Windows 2000 server. Not a problem for w Windows 2000 workstation because it would send a reconnect signal when it saw the drive was disconnected. Windows 95 didn't have that functionality, so the timeout had to be increased. The users who weren't having the problems had sufficiently frequent activity that they didn't experience the timeout.)

Now, I will grant that on a raw basis the second woman wasn't a great deal worse than one of our other male techs. There were two things which made him tolerable. First, you could use tech articles to convince him what he was doing was wrong. When you did so, he would thank you for it. Second, he wasn't promoted above his competency level because of his sex. It is this second problem that keeps getting the sex warriors into trouble. Because they keep looking only at numbers and not quality, incompetent people keep getting promoted. And those incompetent people outdarken all the other lights that are advanced. In fact, I'll bet some of those lights avoid promotions precisely because of the incompetents.

Re: @Pascal

they're in no position to draw conclusions like these.

Particularly given their own study calls into question their conclusions: the differences disappear when the contributors are well known to the inner circle.

If it's purely a gender thing, it would exist across all lines.