Re: Optimistic
In general when you see statements like "bipartisan legislation in the US, with industry backing" you can assume that the consumers are getting screwed - No, I'm not complaining, it's just the way things are.
5376 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
The operating systems all say that they are going to "reformat the disk" and so the average user is going to think that they have done the right thing. It's way past time for the operating systems to offer an "erase disk" option that actually does what it says it does instead of just clearing the file table.
I agree and sympathize too but we have to realize that this is the internet, electrons rattling around in wires and electro-magnetic fields ... it's generally more reliable than carrier pigeons but, like pigeons, you can't complain when it doesn't work occasionally.
This is America, everything is legal in America until you get caught.
What's puzzling about this is that Uber is still around ... they simply fire the drivers and blame them but look back at how many times that Uber has been caught doing horrendous things - is their corporate HR policy based on The Art of The Deal?
"balance of harms" is this worlds excuse for pitiful bad behavior ... it's like saying that slavery is good for the economy, rape helps boost the low paid worker population, it's OK to pour coffee over a beggar if you give them a quid, etc etc .. the fact is, there is good behavior and bad behavior, and just because you are good sometimes, don't in any way excuse that fact that you are bad other times.
First W10, then Brexit, and now Bombastic Bob is getting more up votes than down votes ... our world is spinning out of control ... Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
"With no foreign workers allowed" ... but we'll still be letting Irish workers in ... OK, with the planned ERG Hard Brexit probably not, so we'll have to rely on the DUP, the Welsh, and the Scots to fill in the worker requirements. It's BRexit not UKexit isn't it. If I had written an essay 40 years ago in my school English Class that told the Conservative/DUP/ERG Brexit tale as fiction, then I would have expected to get a -F grade - Plot? ... none, Brains? ... none, etc etc. UK politics passed the pitiful stage a while back.
I was going to check the "Joke" icon for this post but given the current politics I'm heading for a beer, I'll feel much better.
The problem is that you have to realize that there's a failed sensor - but the software believes that the sensor angle is right and so - given two sensors - if one says that you are about to stall then the software will believe it first and go into anti-stall mode. You can say that the pilots should just take over but it's not that simple - a sensor's lying - which one? What do we trust? Flight control systems are so automated these days that commercial pilots don't spend a lot of time flying by the seat of their pants anymore and when the system goes into kamikaze mode you're fighting the software and the bad sensor - you don't have a lot of time to turn the software off, figure out which sensor is good and which one should be ignored when the plane is taking off and only a couple of thousand feet up.
Don't forget that AF447 went down because of a sensor error too - when the sensors give bad readings the software seem to always assume that the sensors are correct and the pilots are not - and so the software puts the plane into the ground - it's no big deal for the software. Human pilots, on the other hand, generally struggle to not put the plane into the ground. Sure, we occasionally have pilot errors too but pilot errors that cause a crash are extremely rare.
Back in the 90's I was at a January conference in Washington, DC when my company boss told me that their installation engineer was sick and I needed to fly to Melbourne Australia to install a system that had just been delivered. Installation and training would take about a week - I said that I'd only bought a coat and a change of clothes to the conference, he said, "No problem just get what you need."
So I switched my tickets, flew down to the Australian summer and bought a new summer wardrobe - it was hot, so I picked up a couple of Akubra hats too - they have lasted so well. When I returned I submitted my expenses with a note that the instructions had come from the company director. No problems for me.
The real problem is that the larger the corporation gets, the easier it is to avoid paying taxes. It's endemic - remember that in the US corporations are people too - for many people in the US, taxes end up being voluntary unless you are poor, or middle-class - then you need to pay. Warren's proposal will piss off the people running both parties.
Just look at what's happened since the hack, big bonuses and retirement for the executives, they fired a few of the low paid techs and now it's business as usual - their share price is rising again.
No need to worry, it wasn't their data that was lost was it? These companies make money by selling information about third-party entities so security was always relatively insignificant - what they really worked hard at was making people pay to access the credit profiles.
While I may bitch about starting Firefox and Chrome and seeing nothing for a minute while they update, you are correct - automated patching is the only real defense. I wonder what other groups are getting hacked or monitored by this approach - we've got a lot of faff running around this month, could there be other fingers in the pie too?
Me? I've stopped reading the News, it's too depressing most of the time.
I see emails from various old friends names @yahoo.com all the time but when you look at the email headers they are all originating in Asia - but all that means is that some spammer found an open relay. Significantly most spam arrives during working hours which suggests to me that the majority is coming via hacked computers in the corporate world.
It's a good example of how you can use a sensor - sensors are everywhere. Suppose you don't like Google listening to your cellphone microphone ... and you disable it. Feel safe now? .... But the phone still has an accelerometer so it can still listen to you if you take the same approach as they are documenting here.
Uber is a corporation, in the US corporations are very rarely charged with causing deaths because corporations aren't people, "Corporations don't kill people, people kill people." There were no people involved, it was software/hardware that caused the homicide, the Uber driver just failed to stop it and that's an accident, not a crime in the corporate world.
If Uber get away with this then there's no reason for them to worry, they can disable the breaking systems completely and just speed through town like a corporate bowling ball delivering their passengers to their destination in minutes.
That's the "anti" view anyway - but the real issue here is that our society has stopped caring about the fate and well-being of everyone except the wealthy. Do you think we'd even be having these discussions if the Uber had T-boned a Bugatti and killed the driver?
The metadata collection has been going on for many years, all Snowden did was to get the media to wake up and look at it (shock, horror, zzzzzz). This reporting is accurate, it's just a move in a chess game to distract everyone from reality. Intelligence services have never killed off anything off the record ... Mandy Rice Davies applies.
Sure, this sort of risk is worth scientifically evaluating but the chances of it happening are extremely low unless the oort cloud gets disturbed - occasionally a decent size chunk of rock will amble along but the chances of even getting one large enough to make a small crater are vanishingly small. Personally I think the risks to the planet come far more from human stupidity (climate change, politicians and social media idiots) than the occasional alien throwing stones at us.
In this game you hide some things and leave others out in the sunlight - when the malware is discovered in the sunlight people often stop looking under the stones nearby.
For example, here's my guaranteed method of always hitting someone with a snowball. You make two snowballs and you throw one at them in a high curve, the target person will watch it as it comes down towards them to make sure it doesn't hit them - so you throw the second snowball straight at them and you'll hit them every time. It's never failed me.
It was just "the cloud" ... face it, the main function of cloud computing is to generate income to the "cloud providers" reliability is just a competitive feature that aids sales. If you move to the cloud then you're moving all support and reliability to the cloud ... and we all know what clouds do, don't we?
We've had years of them introducing new products and then dropping them - sure, you may think that you own a nice Surface laptop today but it will be gone in a few years, replaced by the next "new" thing. Windows 10 is hanging in there but it's still not reliable (except at slurping your data) and it's widely hated - most users would upgrade to Windows 7 if they had a chance, Visual Studio get an "upgrade" every 18 months but all it does is shuffle the deck, add a few cards and leave a few in the trash can.
When I bought tickets to see the Rolling Stones back in the 70's at Earls Court, you had to send them a cheque in the mail and then a week or so befoe the show you either got the cheque mailed back to you or tickets - I got six tickets and we all went down to see them with The Meters - a fantastic show!
The point is that delay between issuing the tickets and knowing that you had a seat made a big dent in the scalpers - you can'r resell a ticket that you don't have, and if everyone knows that the tickets have not been issued (or guaranteed to be provided) then any "tickets" on sale are fakes and you can track down the "resellers" and prosecute them.
Nothing is illegal unless you get caught - and then you just say sorry and walk away. Facebook will suffer no penalties for breaking the law - hardly anyone does these days, you just move on to the next project/victim. Unless of course you are poor - then you pay the price - poor people should know better, rich people/corporations just have to apologise for making innocent mistakes.
I don't always agree with Buffett's statements but when I look back at his actions over the years he's never been that wrong. If you don't understand an environment that you'd be just gambling to invest or work in it. Most modern "investment" companies act like legalized gambling companies, "Give us your money and we'll make you rich (unless of course - check the small print - we don't)."
For years people complained that UNIX system were much better than Windows for system administration because so much housekeeping can be automated with a small shell script - Microsoft listened to us and along came Power Shell ... and the hackers are demonstrating what a powerful shell script can do to the system.
"Live and Learn" used to be a phrase everybody used, but who learns from history these days?
Once upon a time, many many years ago, we used to make the kit ourselves - but then corporations figured out that they could make more money by moving production elsewhere - the UK used to have a solid electronics industry but it's just evaporated over the last 50 years. We've lost the ability to make the kit and there's no serious interest in building the infrastructure (and education system) to support UK production any longer - all the chums running the country see that it's more profitable to close down UK based companies and move the design, development, and production overseas.
This has been going on for a long time.