Posts by Turtle 1888 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2010
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. What exactly is this mysterious "self-interest" that is impelling members of congress to investigate the OPM data breach?
They are in exactly the same boat as millions of other government employees.
The data has already been stolen. Do you understand that? So how members of congress would find themselves in a position different than any other government employee in regard to this is a riddle. You need to try to learn how the world works.
Be certain that the amount of publicly-available information on members of congress far exceeds anything that the OPM had in its files. And since the OPM data was self-submitted, it doesn't include anything that anyone would really want to hide. Any foreign power - or local political opponent, for that matter - would have the incentive and the ability to easily gather more data, and more sensitive data, and potentially far more damaging data, than what members of congress voluntarily submit to the OPM. They live with that every day.
So the situation of member of congress, consequential to the OPM breach, remains... completely unchanged.
It's all the other government employees that find themselves in a, shall we say, new situation, with their data being available to and pored over by heaven only knows whom, and for what purpose. Member of congress are probably very accustomed to living with threats like this; your average government employee, probably not.
Even leaving aside the data that is publicly available, via the courts, or credit bureaus, or similar, for both congressmen and other government employees, the amount of illegally-obtained data seems to be so vast that one has to wonder how much of effect the OPM breach actually had on them.
Members of congress have to expect to be the subjects of inquiry and investigation, both legal and covert, from all sorts of quarters and entities - foreign, local, political, journalistic, etc etc etc, and would probably be grateful if the stolen OPM data was the worst threat that they had to contend with. But it's not. And members of congress probably have less to worry about the OPM data breach than almost anyone else.
Learn to think about things.
"The owner of the drone, neighbor David Boggs, was unsurprisingly not happy about the situation and confronted Merideth, who then threatened him with a handgun."
The original story as published here on The Register was that Boggs along with three friends went to confront Meredith. If four people came to my house confront me, I'd also have had my firearms handy and prominently displayed (if I actually had such - which I don't.)
"It kept popular title Dragon Age: Inquisition uncracked for about a month."
That's pretty good, but the most recent versions of Steinberg's digital audio workstation apps Cubase and Nuendo to have been cracked was v4 of each program, in 2008 - seven years ago. Of course, those apps use a usb dongle so it's not quite the same. (On all my systems the dongles have always worked completely transparently, even with three of them plugged in simultaneously. But that's a very large sum of money embodied in those little thumb-drive pieces of plastic.)
I recall one of the Steinberg forum mods saying that if the protection lasted a month it was considered a success, as that seemed to be long enough for significant numbers of "early adopters" to get frustrated and actually pay for the apps instead of waiting for a cracked version.
On the other hand, if a game can't be cracked, then one's ability to play the game would seem to be congruent with the life of the company that published the game: if the publisher goes under, you could be left without a means of installing and playing it. And with what AAA titles cost, that's a meaningful loss for a lot of people.
"...hedge fund SpringOwl Asset Management, [...] sent a 99-page letter to the company's CEO Marissa Mayer arguing for her to be ousted"
If I understand this correctly, SpringOwl Ass. Man. sent a letter to... Marissa Mayer, urging her to fire... Marissa Mayer?
Good luck with that.
But if they did send such a letter, then SpringOwl Ass. Man. would seem to be exactly the kind of people that you'd have expected to invest in Yahoo in the first place.
"Doubtless readers will suggest suitably inspiring titles for 113, 115, 117, and 118, before it's too late."
These elements should be named "onethirteenium, onefifteenium, oneseventeenium, and oneeighteenium" respectively.
Got any other problems do you need solved?
I'd never heard it, nor had I heard of it. I tried to watch / listen to it but I couldn't do it; I couldn't make it through the first chorus. I found it "insanely" puerile and moronic. And if there was anything catchy in there, it didn't catch me. Furries are stupid, the video was stupid, the song is stupid.
Which brings us to, perhaps, the in-article observation that "somewhat strangely, it’s often foreign releases that have major breakthroughs".
I listen to a considerable amount of foreign music and the reason is fairly simple: When the lyrics are sung in a language that I don't understand, I do not need to know how fatuous and inane those lyrics are. If I assume that most Youtube viewers are English-speakers, then this factor could also be operative for at least some of them too. And considering how many Youtube users there are, a fraction of them could still translate to a very large number.
"Valve said 34,000 gamers' profiles were leaked this way. If you didn't log in that day, your information is safe because your profile didn't end up in the dodgy caches."
So, uh, if I correctly understand what they're saying, the best way to secure my Steam account is by not logging in to it. Makes sense, I guess.
Thanks for the candor.
"'Apologies for my harsh tone, but I'm really not thrilled about this trash being installed for Chrome users,' Ormandy told AVG's engineers in his security bug report."
It's all relative. I don't consider Ormandy's to be a "harsh tone". To me, personally, a harsh tone would be "We're a-gonna kill your family and half a dozen of your relatives" whereas an appropriate and measured tone would be "We gonna kill you".
"Can one presume, whilst welcoming the cash injection, they will not be launching the service in Saudi Arabia, any time soon? Money talks, equality goes out of the (driver's) window."
Would they be allowed by Saudi law to hire female drivers? Would the religion of prospective female drivers be, in the eyes of Saudi law, a factor in a female being allowed or being prohibited from working as a driver? Or would civil status, i.e. being a temporary foreign worker or a citizen be a factor?
It would be interesting to know.
"Lotteries are just taxes on people who are bad at maths."
I used to think that too but I recently reconsidered and am now of the opinion that such a view is often incorrect; I think that more often, lotteries are a tax on unfounded optimism, wishfulness, and magical thinking.
"Tipton was sentenced to ten years in prison after CCTV caught him buying a $16.5m winning ticket in the Iowa state lottery. He is free on bail while appealing his conviction. He has already been charged with criminal conduct and money laundering in three more states."
Let's see: convicted of a $16.5 million scam, a very strong suspect in others worth another $8 million, charged with criminal conduct and money laundering in three other states, and his possible actions in another 30-something lotteries need to be investigated under the strong suspicion that not all of his scams have been uncovered.
And! He's 52 years old - which means that he's looking at charges with sentences that could send him away for the rest of his life.
The chances of his having access to large sums of money from scams in as-yet-to-be investigated systems seems very great; that would make him a real flight risk.
Why's he out on bail?
"Where is Gordon Freeman when you need to break something?"
In beta, possibly. In the link given by Mr Flibble, https://steamdb.info/blog/recent-caching-issues-on-steam/ , we read the following entry in the comments:
"A month ago or so HL3's existence on steam in beta was leaked https://steamdb.info/sub/66300/ " (but there is a following comment disputing its authenticity.)
I used Bing to find the store pages for two games, and logging on to the them, I found myself logged on, simultaneously, to the Steam accounts of two different people. I accessed their "Account Details" pages and could have gone further than that but I did not actually do so. I would imagine any other search engine would have gotten me the same results.
It made me wonder if someone was logged on to my account but I wasn't able to access it. Although, as I write this, Steam is off-line entirely, I will have to check on that when they're up again, to see if anything has been changed. Steam only has my Paypal account; pretty sure that that doesn't get them any credit card info...
Whatever shitty webpages Steam creates and sets to "public" when a new account is created were set to "private" by me a long time ago. Although I once had to (temporarily) set a few to "public" to do some trading, those too were reset to "private".
Did that provide me with any protection, I wonder?...
I recently saw the pictures that were going to "break the internet" (they're easily available on your favorite search engine) and if I had to use one and only one word to describe her, uh, "attributes", that word would be "grotesque". She is a living caricature of the female body.
"But the question becomes: why is the equipment of poor quality and why has the maintenance contract been allowed to lapse and why are the directives and guidelines so ambiguous? ... And the answer to those questions may well be that the department doesn't view this as something important. "
I think that most police departments have much less financial discretion than you seem to believe. And of course, contracts for all supplies and services are awarded to the lowest bidder, in accordance with the wise old proverb "Buy cheap, get cheap".
"'I saw a 10-inch floppy drive unit in a storage closet.' It was probably left there because nobody could source 10" floppies to use with it."
Probably not. It's quite likely that they have 10-inch floppy disks to feed that 10-inch floppy drive. And considering that any data on those 10-inch floppy disks would be official police data, I'd expect that they'd want to be able to read that data in case of necessity. But not want to spend to any resources "pre-emptively" transferring that data to more modern formats.
There's another reason why police departments do not always use the latest technology, as for example in the question "Why does my local police department have Polaroid-type cameras and not digital cameras?" The correct answer to this question is that a Polaroid snapshot is much, much more difficult to alter than a digital image.
This could also, possibly, apply to the 10-inch floppy disks mentioned above where the provenance of evidence and records is important: how much value would 20 year old files have in court if the media on which they are located is only 10 years old and the tech who did the transfer was not available to testify to its authenticity? Not much, or none, if the objecting attorney is any good.
"'the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to up to 3 living individuals, and can not be given to organizations.' Bullshit!"
Oh, the Peace Prize. Who fukken cares? *I* certainly don't.
At any rate, the matter was broached specifically in regard to the Nobel Prize for Physics, about which my statement is true. So your observation, while correct for the "Peace Prize" (and only for the "Peace Prize", I believe), is kinda tangential to the subject under discussion. Also it suffers from the same defect as my original statement: it is not sufficiently specific: it is wrong in regards to the actual science prizes and (probably) about the Literature and Economics prizes.
So, all in all, basically a worthwhile correction but one which in its own turn required a li'l bit of correcting.
"This would be something worth more than one Nobel prize!"
Who would or should get a Nobel Prize for this, if it turns out to be a discovery instead of a false alarm? (And of course I need not remind you that the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to up to 3 living individuals, and can not be given to organizations.)
I don't see how anyone could claim to deserve a Nobel for what would be a completely unexpected and unpredicted discovery.
Probably not. Most likely a spurious reading. This is very, very tentative. Don't expect too much - which is to say, don't expect anything. You remember this, right?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
See http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8174:
"...the 2 GeV Run 1 excesses have gone away. There is a diphoton excess at 766 GeV, but an unimpressive one (2.6 sigma locally, 1.2 sigma with look elsewhere effect). [...] Bottom line: nothing beyond the SM so far."
"Is it possible to get any further off topic?"
It might be off-topic but not off-accompanying-photograph, as in (with apologies to Roky Erickson): "Three-headed dog, Three-headed dog, I've been working in the Kremlin with a Three-headed dog!"
"At some point in the not too distant future, companies that are happy to store our stuff for free or a one-off cost (such as when buying music, filns or TV serues) will decide they no longer want to pay to maintain or power the storage all of this stuff that doesn't make them money is sitting on."
I'm waiting for Steam (and GOG too) to decide that you can only download each game you own a very few times before you have to pay for the privilege of downloading it again.
Apparently Microsoft didn't have the brains to realize that there would be a meaningful number of people who would take advantage of the "unlimited" offer in ways that never occurred to them.
It would not have taken much foresight to have foreseen the inevitable outcome and so avoided this problem.
I hope that the people who got the worst of this are the people who used the service in such a way as to cause Microsoft to rescind the offer - i.e. people who backed up multiple terabytes of data - all of which will soon be gone.
"'> I'll probably be slaughtered for being a racist and a xenophobe' Or someone who believes what he sees in the media and accepts it uncritically.'"
As an aside, that the Muslim family next to you are nice people means nothing in the larger picture, it is an anecdote. The plural of "anecdote" is not "anecdata". Of course, if you believe in anecdotes as data, I can direct you to any number of "alternative medicine" sites, guaranteed to keep you and your family alive when faced with any form of cancer.
Your post is an exercise in hypocrisy. Your idea seems to be that if the media would show what you want them to, then the viewing public would accept those stores uncritically. Apparently, "uncritical acceptance of the media" is only acceptable when you approve of the moral of the story which is being uncritically accepted.
Just as an example, how do you know what any of those people at the Muslim demonstration actually believed? Were there any, do you think, that possibly went in order to give people like you the impression that are more Muslims against Daesh than there actually are? Do you think that that's even possible? And can we assume that many, or even the majority, of Muslims who didn't attend this rally do support Daesh? Or do assumptions only acceptable when they can serve as "anecdata" in your favor?
And what percentage of anti-Western Muslims amongst all Muslims in the UK would it take to make an unacceptable security nightmare, and waves of terrorist violence? Hint: the answer is far, far less than 100%. Even if the majority of Muslims are not inclined towards violence there are some who are. You don't seem to realize that even if the percentage is very small, a "small percentage" of a large number of people can still be another "large number of people". That's a real problem.
Some people "uncritically accept" what the media conveys. Some people accept whatever stories they find it necessary to contrive. Or whatever anecdata is close to hand.
Your attitude shows that you do not to have any great interest in, or respect for, facts; and some of those people at the demonstration might be more like you than you realize - were you to have some understanding of what you really think. But you might not have such an understanding; most moralists don't.
"It depresses me that in the 21st century we still talk about our brothers and sisters in the human race as 'them', 'aliens', 'animals' or 'illegals'. "
Even if the human race consisted solely of my "brothers or sisters" - and it doesn't, I promise you! - that still does not mean that I want, need, or should live in the same polity, society, country, or house with them.
"The arbitrary designations imposed on us by our political overlords have become such a pervasive trait that we hardly even think about them any more."
You are so wrong. It is FAR more often that politicians resort to racism and other particularisms because that is the easiest way to recruit their followers. Blaming this on politicians solely, or even mostly, shows a complete lack of understanding of the problem. And people grouping themselves on the basis of race, religion, geographic location, language, social strata, etc etc etc, are not "arbitrary" - some of these things have real meaning and actual importance, even if, to an outsider, some of them are borderline senseless - such as rivalries between fans of football clubs, motorcycle club, or even, you know, computer operating systems. Some of them maybe and certainly are harmless but others might not be.
"We *are* all the same. We just happen to live in different places."
You might think that if you spout enough of this shit it will somehow become true. It won't. Because you make another error: the error of thinking that deep down, under it all, everyone one the world is, and wants to be, a self-satisfied bourgeois moralist, like you are.
There can be, and are, differences between cultures that are, and will remain, unbridgeable. And you will never understand this; you are too close-minded to see and admit it.
"SJ was born here, raised here, spent 100% of life here. Whatever his biological and adoptive parents are, or were, matters not. He's an American."
Job's father was Syrian and the only way that it could have had any effect on him was genetically as he essentially never met his father; and so claiming that Jobs' Syrian heritage - solely genetic! - was a significant factor in his life and success, tends to genetic determinism and thence racialism.
Jobs was a loathsome, profoundly shallow and narcissistic human being. The world needs neither another Steve Jobs nor another Apple.
"An EFB, or “Electronic Flight Bag”, is a system that places all the documents pilots need in a table computer instead of a weighty bag full of printed material."
I'm not 100% sure that "table computer" is a typo. Is it? I can easily imagine there being such a thing as a "table computer".
The only place that I recall seeing something that would qualify, though, is in a James Bond movie, possibly Casino Royale (the new one) but maybe not, where some people are examining banknotes, the images of the banknotes being projected on a very large, table-sized touch-screen that was being used as a table i.e.the screen was laid flat, like a table-top. Of course, such a thing intended for use in an airliner cockpit would be rather smaller.
"Sounds like the victims were in Blighted (sic)... So shouldn't we be seeing that "fair and balanced" "extradition" "agreement" swing into action on this?'
Yeah, so you can try him and upon finding him guilty you can give him a fucking ASBO.
"To date, Spotify says it has paid $3bn in revenue to rights' holders."
This is not a particularly meaningful number. It might indicate Spotify's expense for the basic product they sell but as an indication how much real, individual, specific rights holders earn, it is more deceptive than informative.
In Re The $3bn Number:
1) How many streams has it paid for?;
2) How many artists have gotten a piece of it?;
3) How many months did it take to earn (or disburse, depending on your point of view) such a sum?; and so on.
Other meaningful numbers would be:
1) The earnings per artist, per track, and per listen, ranked by percentile;
2) The income per user per stream, track, and artist, ranked by percentile;
... and so forth.
Note that the above categories can be further subdivided by source of revenue i.e. by paying and by non-paying, free-tier users.
These would be meaningful numbers.
"...tests had shown that existing hardware will work for certain tasks much faster than anything else on the market. How broad a range of tasks is something that all the cryptanalysts at all the world's intelligence agencies will be spending a lot of time finding out."
Well, yeah. Of course.
“Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users.”
A corollary to the quoted statement would be "it will be the right business for us at another time*".
* ... and "another time" translates to "as soon as we can manage it"
"$200 million on development"
I'm not sure which is more egregious: The Firefox money-pit, or Wikipedia, which collects $20 million per year (if I correctly recall) to run a site which costs $2 million to operate (and I believe that that's pretty accurate).
"I'll pay for software. A reasonable cost. I'll be damned if I'll rent it though."
"Software as a service" and "DLC" - two of the biggest blights of current computing. But then, how could I neglect to mention "in-app purchases" and "any advertising on my computer screen"?
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