Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
why would one expect anything else from management of an oligopolistic empire ? Just that new boss not as subtle as old boss in selling out citizens to the corporates. Aside from the new rulez not being racist, merely discriminatory. Now lets see how how Oz PM handles his "your fired" moment.
Remember TPP ? Merkin goals were to legislate their control of trade via IP and multinational friendly clauses. Given these politicians are simple sons of the executive suite, (apologies to Blazing Saddles) they probably intend to effectively "nationalise" everyones hardware, from home routers up to big Telcos via previously mentioned malware preloaded into firmware, as well as "unbreakable" encryption with backdoors. Marketing and mouthpieces will explain the need for security updates and why the networks have suddenly got slower. If you don't co-operate, you must be current villain de-jure. The Chinese probably have sold them the code already. Obligatory Win10 references superfluous.
This might be the reason for the smokescreen on border control. Outrage can be exhausted. In case you think this has not had a dry run, it explains the Oz version of Attorney general demanding all telcos submit their network changes and plans to the lawyers ( and Oz TLAs) before making changes. Dont you love software defined networking now ?
<off-topic> What happens when the spyware in the drives and network cards of the TLA archives mirrors the contents to the TLA archives ? Automatic backup or I/O choke at Langely ? </off-topic>
having suffered merkin multinational governance (cough), the current head of the USSA is behaving exactly like any other CEO from that decaying empire. Image is all. Check reality at door or airport. Listen only to inner circle of yes droids.
One wonders if this is like living under god emperors, eg Pharaohs or Norks ? Will this initiate a plot by TLAs who feel slighted that they are not at all tables of power. A rerun of Praetorian Guards versus emperors in Rome internal power struggles perhaps as history repeats.
A conspiracy enthusiast might also wonder if the manufactured outrage is a diversion from something seriously nasty happening behind smoke. Our little bunch in Oz pulled this off over Xmas/New Year.
reminds me of the 1920 car industry. Tens of firms closed or merged by acquisition into 4 big firms which would eventually merge further. With the rise of virtualisation in all HW components and the various software layers, connected by usually workable networks corporate IT will concentrate into a very few firms who provide a cost effective adequate service. This raises minor questions about Itanic future, (lack of), future of Power architecture and the ARM vs Intel face offs. China with its MIPS derived focus may also provide a "Chrysler" for the GM and Ford of hardware. As for SPARC, another long tail into irrelevance, not allowing for black swan events.
Next year, HPE sold to a Taiwanese firm ?
<conspiracy hat> If advertising companies can ask for this data, perhaps whatever passes for the AusGov single Digital ID PHB cabal will be seeing how much they can get away with using compulsion if the punters hand over so much information voluntarily </conspiracy hat> Only flaw in this hypothesis is the assumption that the political classes are cunning enough to try it as it does not involve brown bags under table.
Branflakes is most likely to use the use mere managerial prerogative or captains picks as they are now called to mandate something like this for the new improved Australia Card. :-J Perhaps the Norks have a secret consultancy program for advising the remnants of western governments on how to become a police state.
the vanishing in Oz of ZTE handsets from what could generously be called Telstra "Shops". Hardest place to buy anything if one has specific requirements. Only bought them because ZTE seemed to be last of manufacturers that have external aerial sockets and hardened aka tradies handsets. External aerials are a necessity in a country with a plentiful oversupply of connectivity in 5 cities and sparse coverage everywhere else. Did see a cheapie Android somewhere very briefly with aerial socket but it seems to have vanished also. And no, phone holders that claim to connect to external aerials are not sold in Oz and the few reports I heard were very scathing.
Another example of the blind following of Merkins that collectively deludes the political classes.
and there lies part of the root cause of the current economic malaise. Economic theory is based on rationing of scarce resources. For the first time in history this is no longer the case in the West. Basic needs can be satisfied. Even the poor live longer than most great grandparents of any status. An example of market /needs saturation are mobile phone makers. Phones last too well while being incredibly cheap for what they can do but the phone industry relies on continuing sales when a 3 year old model is just as good for most users. Housing is another matter, but I suggest this is due to deliberate government policy.
I don't see any evidence that jobs are being created to fill the gap left by automation. One can only keep a few baristas employed in a given area.
except this already happens. A lot of us in the retired/outsourced/junkheap categories already do freebie things in our communities. Rewarded of course by necessary bureaucracy, forms and process. Also copping lectures about upskilling at our own expenses (anyone can pay $25K for a crap college course, right?) One wonders how much the undocumented charity services save governments in West? Judging by how quickly the food bank in my small town had its user count climb I suspect the economic efficiency pundits don't have a clue as to how close many of Oz are to completely becoming disconnected to what passes for society. Then the last part of the article does hold true.
Yet Western gummints, especially in Oz have an ideological fixation with punishing the poor, not the 35% of 100 biggest companies that pay no tax. If you want a recipe for instability, this is it. No doubt the rise of the security estate (yes, I think the spooks are another country inside their countries because they have different laws) is connected to the elites beginning to fear the peasants are restless. Trump being elected by use of persuasion techniques, not policy is a sign of this. Previous Oz PM is another, thankfully failed, example, though his toxic legacy lurks on.
Now to watch the spook estate in Merkin Land investigate its presumptive El Presidento over Russian hacking, instead of asking the obvious question of why any computer of significance be accessible from anywhere ? /* yes I know, cost cutting by the stupid, but bear with argument please */
buy our dodgy foodstuffs or else. VRH need not fear. Trump Co or more accurately, the United States of Oligarchy, will set up an even better TPA which the luvvies in multiple governments will sign up to in hope of post politics cushy jobs in corporate corridors. Said TPA will have more secret courts that means minor matters like death and Minamata Disease will be illegal to complain about, let alone stop. Like the recently reported secret corporate trials in Asia about dubious drugs being sold after their lawyers sued governments arguing profits come before government policies.. Oz had a corporate challenge to Federal advertising rules over an addictive substance. Case was lost fortunately, but the TPA and its successors would strip that power from governments.
OTOH, it has been observed the FDA is so bureaucratic it is actively stopping new treatments being tested, so drugs are being sent to Europe which is, amazingly, less difficult to get new treatments assessed and approved. The EPA has made environmental disasters worse if assertions about European oil spill equipment being rejected at Deepwater Horizon event are true because offered emergency equipment only cleaned up 99.5% of oil, not 99.9% as required. So 100% of oil was left in ocean. But I digress. Given the figures about unrepeatable results now being endemic in most sciences, to use the word loosely, suggests Trump and Co are too late. Evidence based decision making is long gone so any appointments made are only a minor sideshow in the tidal wave of cultural incompetence in all spheres of government.
is this unusual for most leadership in remnants of western democracies ? Most seem to be party hacks, ex-academics, (although a few have been very competent, (take a bow ,Professor Fells), union droids and business cronies. BTW, could this be an indicator that the outbreak of internal violence in MerkinLand predicted by a statistician mentioned here and on New Scientist be not far away. just sayin'
Tom, true enough. I cant get <sarcasm> </sarcasm> tags working. Sorry. As for the rest of your comment, IMHO you have just described many of the publicly funded busybodies plaguing most remnants of western democracies already. Like most here, I regard civilised discourse as essential to any policy making, especially when strong claims and opinions are made. IMNSHO, ad-hominem attacks are an indicator of a rigid world view restricting rational thought, even if it is fun to use in satire. Problem is most users of satire these days use strawman arguments rendering their satire as verbal noise. BTW, I am not suggesting you have done this.
So far, Trump is behaving exactly as any other recently elected monarch president. Loading all offices with friends and allies, just as the nominal opponents do. Just this time the prevailing world view of general media did not expect their lot to lose.
@MrDamage. I believe that is the French law. I agree with it. In Oz there is the ridiculous situation of people who have their drivers licences marked as organ donors have their wished not complied with because of some hysterical relative. So people who have made their wishes clear still have their wishes ignored when it would save lives. Just making the donor declaration final and not over-ridable would ease organ donor situation. Some Oz pollies are rabbitting on about doing something about it sometime, but yeah, right.
My devices now have to live in a Faraday cage, except for old ones. Blackhats will love this. Wasn't bluetooth just for a personal network, not a small LAN ? That's what WiFi is for. However, ITIRC an article 3 or more years back on ElReg arguing that as the Bluetooth working groups have got their act together much better than the WiFi groups it is likely bluetooth will eventually overtake WiFi as local network technology of choice.
However, IOT lack of security will probably flood the networks with so much "traffic" ISPs will be DOSed out of service so maybe it is a self healing mesh network. Mines the one with Cat 4 cable in pocket
what's that ? A fair bit of public service has been outsourced, privatised and contracted out. The snouts in public trough are of those who are writing the rules about access to public trough. For some reason, the idea that sacking state employees and using private donors companies is cheaper and popular despite most citizens not wanting state owned enterprises sold off is still endemic despite its persistent failures to provide any benefits to the country in general. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance may fade after outsourcing the ATO to something like Westpac or Mastercard is carried out. The Romans used tax farming too,. Required legions to keep the peasants quiet. Oh wait, SAIC can do that too with Haliburton and spooks/snoopers.
Tom, perhaps the coin from about 3AD showing a figure representing Rome with its foot on a globe to brag about Roman domination of the world suggests you have been in echo chamber too long also ? Washington Irvings 19th century libel against the critics of Columbus is due to be put back where it belongs, lining drawers in garden shed. I would use the word tolerance but it now means the same thing as Maos little Red Book now on "correct thinking"
Well, their leadership think they do. Also those organisations are becoming extinct. Never met a compromised proferssional religious who was clued about any of it. Even heard a senior Baptist academic spout disproven waffle from a century ago as if it was recent. For once I agree with Dawkins. If Darwin was right, Christianity is wrong.
And vice versa I add.
speciation was never disputed except for some group back in 19th century. The natural philosophers had been discussing variation and adaptation for 2 centuries before Charles. No doubt one of the Greek speculation enthusiasts had some concept that could be stretched to fit requirement 2 millennia ago. No, I cant be bothered to trawl through library and for some reason, dont trust Google or wackypedia on it either.
Article shows usual faulty argument that shuffling existing information is the same as generating new information. A strong argument could be made that creationists were supporting fast speciation events _long_ before the materialist fanatics decided it was occurring. Goldschmidt with his "hopeful monster" and Stephen Gould with "saltation events" were honourable exceptions. That someone with Goulds standing and firm belief in the one true faith of materialism could consider speciation events happened quickly suggests it is mainstream evolutionary believers that are slow to adapt.
Given the intricate variation generating processes built into DNA (transposons) while also maintaining error checking mechanisms suggests believers in mere random chance generating new information have a belief system that defies logic. But then, this is a "post truth" culture. The shoutiest group is deemed to have won. C'mon ElReg, you normally do better than this piece of histrionics.
In the spirit of rampant contrariness, given even M$ have begun to use command lines and config files more in their server OS I suggest that the CLI may even make a come back. Very secure, quiet, mostly private, powerful if user RTFM and very low on resources. Given the amount of junk code running on idiot smart phones, phabulous phailing phablets and other end user devices I forecast <drum roll> a return to end user devices that make phone calls and resemble smaller versions of IBMs smart terminals.
so no-one considers effort expended to create hardware for VR hallucinations real work ? Someone has to make the machines that make the machines, not to mention steel, concrete and fix borked traffic control hardware. Then minor issues like food. You know, the stuff that isn't merkin corn syrup. So far, I only heard a future of intrusive surveillance, deskilled menial casual work, and a ruling non-elite in echo chambers. In these nightmare scenarios, the only up is to be a dope dealer big shot supplying the latest Bolivian marching powder to the 1%s brats.
wasn't reused components so much as Pave Blue (and F117) are so un-aerodynamic the electronics are essential to keeping the craft the right way up. That the flight control and design worked well speaks volumes about _real_ engineers pushing the boundaries of current practice but not leaping into unknown.. It also suggests that the source of the endless mirth and mockery of the flying flimflam AKA F35, has too much clever code instead of much developed code.. Now if I could just remember the pithy appellation used about the F35 another commentard used I would be a little less depressed.
not until the fleshie pilots can over-ride the silicon pilots. If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going. At least it looks like an aircraft that will sell and make money for the buyers. The final sign has been sighted,* the next financial splash is on way so running costs are going to become very important to the 3 airlines left after smoke clears.
* whenever Merkin stock market hits record highs while real economy is still falling, Nemesis is on way.
about normal for the local ABC. The more inconsequential the more they rabbit on about it.. Usual contempt of the chattering classes for any technical skills.
I was informed of worthy recipients on ElReg. as none of the local sources of lies information mention unfashionable achievements, especially of women. A lot of babble about feminism though.
However, well deserved kudos to Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.
Especially with an AG like BranFlakes. The Fed cops already kept on short info leash by ASIO who brag about it. Fed cops keep State cops on same drip feed diet. What is needed is an anti-corruption/harassment body that can scare the spooks and ministers that only reports to a joint sitting of both houses of parliament to keep all of the peeping toms in line while allowing necessary security and policing work to go ahead with minimal overhead.
reminds of me of the ancient project tangerine that tried for a common binary layer above the multiple CPU instruction sets once available so applications needed to be compiled once and would run on many different versions of unix. Died in the Unix Wars of late 1980s I think. How many layers of virtualisation are being run these days ? Hyperviser, OS, container with this inside ?
or a Seafire with a RATO unit ? Lets put the warbird movement on a sound financial footing. Given the number of hard headed beancounters and PHBs around western militaries, they could be used as kinetic energy penetrator weapons. Do enough damage to their own side. My coats the one with "War in a String Bag" in pocket...
What passes for light technology show in Oz ran an IoT booster in what looked like the shell of an ancient but very good program badly updated. Beyond 2020. Had to shut off TV again as nothing else on and whole program seemed to be pushing handing over control of ones assets to a remote server. How the adequate are fallen.
not to mention their utterly crap DNS lookups timing out. If one has a big /etc/hosts file on bridge/router network speed is merely slow. Amazingly after getting almost usable lately, a mere 75 KM north of nations crapital (sic) it has now reverted both on 3G and fixed line to its usual 28Kb modem speed. Floptus and Vodafail no better. Even SMS are arriving a day late, a feat only VodaFail achived in past.
LDS, concur. Last multi-day dive trip had pairs who could not take an image of anything, especially clown fish, without their faces grinning behind the anemone. Clown fish usually had hidden by then. Only speed of fish stopped images of being mostly face, not tropical fish. The self obsession that meant the beauty around them could not be appreciated for itself was nauseating.
Kudos to Eric and John. Almost as good as Ed Kilburns "Get off the phone" which make similar observations and is very funny.
partly true AC. You did not mention the long term bureaucracies. As the Poms had it a century or so ago, Sea Lords come, Sea Lords go, the Civil Service goes on forever. Huge amount of inertia there. I suspect very little will change in long term, simply because in the absence of real ideas, the ancient statement that "without vision, the people perish" seems to be true. The USA will merely join its twin, the USSR in list of failed empires eventually.
However, to become an adult one still has to deal with the bullies who seem to have become HR or managers of the PHB kind. And worse, proud of their ignorance. My solution was to become somewhat literal minded. PHBs tend to feel control slipping when their words are taken at face value IMHO. Your mileage will vary.
However, I disagree its just geeks who fight over trivia. The whole race does it, whether over some variation to barely understood words uttered millennia ago to the pronouncements from on high by newer priesthoods. Transhumanists, misotheists, economic rationalists and other feral utopians come to mind. In short, there are no adults.
@afernie. yeah, that worked brilliantly in 1914. Germany's biggest customer was some little island off Europe. United Kingdom or something like that. Much as I am sceptical of Jared Diamond, he has a point that societies do insane things, acting against their own self interest.
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