Posts by Notas Badoff 1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
"Another interviewed board member shrugged off the risk of fines .... opting instead to pay the watchdog's fines that could reach $1.7m, ..."
More such honesty, please!
Remember all the commentardery saying that fines should be replaced with or progress to jailing for C-level and board executives? We really need this progression to personal liability, as the only effective path to personal responsibility.
At least this editor has the minimal functionality you'd expect from *any* that would try to get your attention in this busy world.
When there was a recent _splash_ in the tech world about 'brackets', an open! source! editor! from Adobe, I went and checked it out. Then I ended up asking in their mailing list how I could enable/find the bracket bouncing feature. Without any sort of embarrassment, the brackets people said they don't do brackets 'yet'. Along with apparently a barge-full of other features they don't do 'yet'.
Don't even try to get people interested in software that isn't somehow *better* than average. You're wasting people's time and no one appreciates that when they have no spare time and were hoping from the PR that you would _save_ them time with your whizbango snazzola beaming-proud-papa software.
Calling it 'beta' won't save your reputation. And calling it 'free' when it's costing me time I don't have ... I have something for you to indent about 13 tab stops!
"... around 2,000 staff went on a one-day hunger strike two weeks ago to demand greater job security."
Can someone explain this to me? Is this a strike without snacks? Or work without breakfast? It just sounds so much like "You're so mean to us we're not going to use the letter 'K'!" How does that wor'?"
But they didn't mention it before everyone knew about it. When they might have had some credibility, y'no?
Flash! Alert! Lisbon will be destroyed in a 9.0 earthquake!
Well okay, I'm a few hundred years late there. How about:
Major news! Russia invades Ukraine, says they are liberators!
Am I 69 years late or 69 hours too soon?
Trying to understand another weirdness with McA-Mantic virus scanner, I started searching their 'knowledgebase' with keywords specific to my problem. Getting nothing back I began getting more and more general with the searches. Still getting nothing I finally clued in and searched for 'virus'. Nothing. No articles found. 'malware'. Nothing.
Sent them an email saying their search function was dead-on-entry. After two round-trips with the AI answering the emails, and checking again *four* days later, still no articles found searching for 'virus'.
Hmm... A year later, should I check again?
So guy isn't a kernel-type coder, and doesn't interact directly with them - by choice he says. (there's mucho background there fursher)
But coder's widget is fundamental to Linux and affects the kernel people fundamentally.
How do you get dis guy to fix his stuff?
Public shaming, if nothing else works ... ?
Footnote mentions what the usual cause of pneumonia is. Would also be nice to mention there's a vaccine against 23 different strains of that bacterium. SO had pneumonia 3 times in 10-some years. Got the shot, and not an incidence since (more than 10 years).
Come to think of it, maybe Apple could ask their contracting companies to offer vaccinations as a free benefit of employment? Paternalism and all that. (and self-interest, yes?)
Hmm, okay, there's an association with Arabic, but who knows what batoota was supposed to mean. Hmm, Batoota films would like batoota.com. Ibn Battuta was "a famous traveler" so I could see a travel-related site for the ME.
But... How did Yahoo end up with it? That might be an interesting story!
Not so much writing notes, as practicing writing Chinese characters. This with Google translate on GS4. It is quite reinforcing when you've gotten the strokes of a character close enough that it shows up in the possibilities window. Where else would I get that practice?
Who'd'a thunk it - a tool that can cause native users to forget how to write (b/c constantly using phonetic input method) can also be used to foster learning how to write for students.
That is the consideration that requires the Swiss to first try on their own satellite only. Touching any other country's satellite would ignite politics on high thrust. No one has made any determination/treaty yet on the general legality of any of this.
So the Chinese add 50% more orbiting bits by blowing up their own defunct satellite as an example of deorbiting technology. (What other purpose could they have been demonstrating?) The Russians are not going to be happy at anyone presenting them a bill for services rendered for pre-CIS trash, such as the myriads of sodium globules from exploded reactors. And the US is going to plead money problems and say they'll tackle it sometime after Social Security.
"Should women in the public eye be cowed by the trolls, then?"
Consult the relevant law.
Because every government entity that could coopt the press forbid the spotted G from touching anything until the greatest amount of PR about 'investigations' and 'scrutiny' and 'protection' and 'concern' could be extracted from a non-governmental goof.
A year it took. Was the emphasis ever on the data, or on the PR that could be gained?
I'd ask this of the continuously fulminating commentards: which really looks worse in this debacle, the public G or the private G?
"If counterattacks against hackers were legal, there are many techniques that companies could employ that would cause severe damage to the capability of those conducting IP theft."
If the efforts of private actors go as well ((badly)) as those of government actors, this would degenerate into a free-fire zone where no one can tell who or what actually got attacked by the "return fire".
Would you really trust a BAE or GE to know a joe job misdirection from a real attacking source? Do you really want to give a government entity (say China) proof that they were attacked by a (bamboozled) <insert Western pigfarm here>, thereby giving them the further justification to continue their own righting of centuries of injustice.
Show me the instances where enough evidence of attack origination was isolated to take to an international court and win a ruling. Until you've got evidence the level of "here are the pictures of the missiles in Cuba" you aren't going to win, and you'll attack the wrong enemies. (Sorry about the slipup Telenor, no hard feelings, right?)
where you are screaming "stop looking at me, start aiming at me."
"... simply by searching Terracom's site on Google for a particular file type."
Which means that any charges must include Google, which means any defense must include Google. (When *all* the lawyers are grinning you should worry)
Or, you know, if a public utility like Google search can see your data freely, and has for months, then it ain't protected at all, my exhibitionistic sleep-walking friend!
So we aren't going to talk about what might be talked about, because we (Intel) really like freedom of speech, so let's not talk about anything unpleasant?
D••n, this makes tech seem so much simpler than real life....
"... Branson plans to be aboard ... along with his two children, "if my wife allows.""
No sane person would put all his little ducklings and himself on the same experimental aircraft on its first full-scale flight. Even if it doesn't end up wiping out his posterity, the mere fact of doing this will be an indelible comment that he thinks he's a Hollywood movie rather than being in the real world. The biographies would always end with "... and a fool."
You no read article? "... to over 9,600 state, regional, city and town tax authorities ..."
That means someone has to keep track of what the particular sales tax is on particular classes of items on particular days depending on which state, city, local district someone is ordering from. They have "tax holidays" for back-to-school for 2 separate weeks of the year round these parts. That's for the state tax, or is it the state and city but not the local, or is it...
So someone has to offer the 'service' (thus at a price) of letting you fire off a query based on delivery address, for them to then respond with how much and how to split it up. Everytime someone hits your front door waving money, you have to run out the back door and ask someone how much to charge them. Retrofit this!
"... Verizon Wireless told The Register that it "thoroughly" tested every update before delivering it to customers. "We ... provide mandatory updates to devices as quickly as possible, ...," a spokesman said."
So, when did you last issue updates through your network. What month? Which year??
Ask that of all the operators. No bullshit answers, just what was the last time?
"... shows ebook sales accounting for 22.55 per cent of all revenue ..."
"Still, the fact that nearly one of four books sold last year was an ebook is ..."
The linked article talks about %age of revenue. You then extrapolate to proportion of copies sold. Wrong. Or at least, precise only to the degree that publishers are screwing their customers. With the too-often seen current situation, where a $20 book is a $17.95 ebook, then they unfortunately approach equivalence.
But oh we wish that publishers would get a clue. If my friend Foo says "The life of Bar" is a great read, I might splash $5 on such a recommendation. But $15 or $20 or more is a no-go. I'll buy so many more copies at fractional prices than the greedy full prices. The volume will go higher if you lower the barrier. Give me a bargain and you'll make a mint.
I'm afraid this hits my limit on public disclosure and it is plain irresponsible to do this. Always assume there are people out there much cleverer than you are. This jerk's work of 3 years might just be reproducible in 3 weeks by someone else. Once realizing that small fact he'll be rather sleepless too. Nothing like having your name publicly associated with "how could that disaster happen?" Ahh, fame at last.
"The hacked aircraft could even be controlled using a smartphone's accelerometer to vary its course and speed by moving the handset about."
Assuming the handset would need to be in proximity to said aircraft, as in inside, this would be the classic mad scientist's belated education in unintended consequences, as having moved the handset and induced a reaction, the reaction would induce a further reaction in the now flailing handset, culminating in the now doomed passengers telling said sad sack "we could have told you that would happen - don't you ever watch movies?"
The mistake was having it merely monotonic... so boring. Change it to be specified like SVG's dasharray: on for 2, off for 3, on for 1, off for 1, on for 4, etc. Add in a time signature and "audible: yes", and we making music! Now that they support canvas and SVG, I can see MS doing a rotating mirror ball and inviting Chairman Bill to the party!
BTW: Was it intentional not to scrub the <blink> tag </blink> from the repeated article text at top of comments area? No... Yes... No... Yes...
Legal and been done over and over. Burroughs bought Sperry with Sperry's reserves. Well, and then a lot more short-term loans to make it work, after Sperry dropped a poison pill. Hey, the bankers don't ever really learn, do they? Oh, and this was engineered by a former US Treasury secretary, Blumenthal. Oh, and then the pension fund got halved in a deal gone bad with a customer that bankrupted after the pension fund bought quite a lot of shares in it, to encourage it to buy equipment from Unisys.
Intelligence is hard to see in these deals. Morality is clear out of sight.
Pull up PDF and check the authors... ohhh yeahh, it's him - Wickramasinghe. He's been using every opportunity to 'identify' interstellar life since the '60s. SARS was extraterrestrial, y'know. And other viruses. And other bacteria. And ....
Searched for 'NASA' in the PDF. They made some scanning electron microscope pictures. I don't see them being quoted as sourcing the 'explanations' about flagella and friends. I can take any photograph you've taken and announce to the world that you have gotten the definitive evidence of the boojumwicz (in the lower left corner, behind the trash can, it's *there*, see?) Even if _you_ deny it there'll be 1000s of believers. (Ooo, it has pretty fur! Scales! Fur! Scales!)
Nitrogen-depleted flagella? Biologicals throughout the rock? From Sri Lanka and Cardiff? The "Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology"? No, and my purple toed seven eyed friend here is making the wavy movements of the head crest that means they are greatly amused.
Let me help.
Where do the big boomer beasts live and work and earn their keep? Up in space.
Now it's quite expensive enough giving birth to the beasts and filling their maws with enough woosh to get them flying the first time. How do you keep them flying?
You really don't want to keep bringing them down to the neighborhood forecourt to fill up any time you want to send them somewhere new, do you? They are very noisy beasts and it'd be right swell to keep them out of the same atmosphere as your ear.
So where do you set up a filling station very convenient for top ups? Up in space.
Only, where does the woosh goop come from? Wouldn't it be absolutely fine to mine the go stuff from something already up in space? Something that doesn't have much of a gravity well?
Hmmm, can you think of something...? While you're thinking, here's some rocket fuel to wet your whistle...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
