Posts by Swarthy

Re: Women v men

If you shoot a watergun, all of the droplets have equality of opportunity (similar pressure, nozzle velocity, etc) some droplets will spray outwards, but the vast majority of them hit in a tight locality - looking an awful lot like equality of outcome.

I used the word statistically because statistics deal with large numbers and discounts outliers - the spare drops in the above example.

While I agree that equality of opportunity is what is needed, the end result of opportunity equality will look an awful lot like equality of outcome. Further, I have found that people who deride equality of outcome and favor opportunity, tend to ignore things that are key definers of opportunity. They seem to believe that a kid in private school with tutors has the same opportunity (school) as a kid from an inner city public school; disregarding food insecurity, parental connections, and academic assistance.

Re: LOL

Sadly, the pre tag let you down. Just as well, or I'd be tempted to post "Killroy" a lot, and who knows what other ascii art would flood these forums.

Re: The AA and police

The original Warrant Canary?

Or stealing a car is acceptable if the door isn't locked "enough" - I mean, it's child's play to slip in a BP cuff to wedge the door open enough to fit a slender pole through and flip the lock.

We don't know the security LabMD had in place, but we do know (from the whistle blower) that Tiversa had exfiltration experts who acquired data from many companies to extort. We can assume from LabMD's response of "there is no leak, we don't need your services" to Tiversa that they had enough security to at least allow them to see if files had gone on walk-about.

Re: Popular saying?

California is to car standards as Texas is to text books.

That's because Google didn't buy Waze for its features or implementation, but rather for the crowd-sourced traffic/events notification. I have seen many things on GMaps "reported by Waze". I use Waze because it's UI is Way better than GMaps; but I intend to checkout Magic Earth and osmAnd, as recommended above.

Better than Google Maps doesn't exactly imply "good", just... less bad.

Re: Mountains of coal ash

Compared the mountains of ash produced by coal power, nuclear waste is nothing.

You can, the cost of filing taxes is a deductible expense - if you itemize your deductions.

Re: Air gaps are all about physical security

Blinkenlights exfiltration has been done - a lot. The twist on this is NIC blinkenlights, which haven't been bothered with, because the NIC is usually at the back of the machine, and hard to surreptitiously monitor; also, you have actual network traffic that will pollute the data stream, or the machine is unplugged (actual air-gap, not just an air-gapped network), so no lights to blink.

Re: From 'The 10 Commandments for C Programmers'

Or "antidisestablishmentarianism"

Or, something in German, using compound words, umlauts, and eszetts.

Re: Combo for the win

They are finally addressing my main issue with nuclear power: That we are using nuclear fire to boil water.

This, at least, is a more apropos medium for the process.

Mozilla is worried about privacy - full stop.

Reproductive health apps are a good counter to the "nothing to hide" brigade, because a few months ago, there was no fear-based reason to hide your reproductive health, now there is.

The guns reference was because the "pro-life" crowd who see nothing wrong with forced gestation would have an absolute fit over losing access to guns; and you have to draw those lines very clearly.

Re: Occam's never ever applies to people

Or, both. Maybe they were trying to take over the alarms to set them off on-demand for fun and profit (malice), and just ended up borking them (stupidity).

Re: Where does all this memory go?

layers and layers of shims and emulation, would be my guess.

I know a bee keeper who tried to remove the wax worms from their hive, using a plastic bag to carry them off, they then discovered that wax worms will eat the plastic bag.

Here's a non-anecdotal version of this.

It seems the downside is that they produce ethylene glycol, but that is a short-term nasty.

Re: Pretty much on the nose

Do you mean exceptions like "but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."?

Re: Poor basis for comparison.

Both!

Reading that statement felt like playing tic-tac-toe with linguistics, so, "Yes"?

Although, re-reading the statement, I can see why the word salad was used - He was admitting fault. Rough translation: "We got into something we don't know jack about. This normally doesn't stop us, we can have consultants bail us out; but in medical, it seems even our consultants can't bullshit our way out of 'practicing medicine without a license' charges."

Re: "While 248 patents is a lot…"

<pedant>Well, 248 patents is a "lot"; it's a judgement call on if it's a large lot, or a small lot....</pedant>

As for the second paragraph, that sounds an awful lot like the comments that were made when it was speculated that Apple would be making a phone. "There's no doubt that Apple wants to improve the iPod, but that's a very long way from building its own phone. They'd never stand a chance, Nokia and Motorola have decades more experience, and are pushing towards touch-screen functionality."

Re: Am I reading this right?

Right, the Chicago Entertainment Tax is a different beast than the other localities that were linked in the article. The Chicago one makes sense, and is hard to argue against (in a legal/logical sense, if not a pro/anti-tax sense); I was more wondering about the California suit and others that were linked in the article.

See also Facial Recognition failing on faces that are not pale/male.

And then force the people who demanded it (MPs, CongressCritters, heads of inteligence agencies, etc) to use it exclusively "to ensure fitness for purpose".

Re: Speech recognition...

And it still falls over on the "any accent" - as many a Scot has commented in the halls.

Re: Amazon's sorting algorithm

Mode?