Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
“Windows 11 uses the power of AI to generate a continually updated app control policy that allows common and known safe apps to run while blocking unknown apps often associated with new malware,”
I'm sure there's a simple answer to this, but how is anyone supposed to develop or publish new software?
No. No, they don't.
It's not a new phenomenon (George Orwell wrote a scathing essay about it), but it's getting worse. Partly because in Orwell's day, there were people who called themselves "journalists" who filtered and added coherence to what they were told before passing it on. That's not really possible any more.
Which is exactly why they need Excel. Nobody in the whole history of business computing has ever understood a non-trivial problem well enough up front to write a spec for it. (Like, literally nobody. Not once. Anywhere, ever.) It takes experimentation, trial and error - often lots of it - to hit on something useful.
By imposing some half-arsed waterfall development methodology on them, you are erecting an insuperable barrier to at least 95% of all people who might otherwise be persuaded to take that route. (5% may be willing to attempt it, but they'll probably fail. The exceptions will be people who've already done the analysis themselves. Using Excel.)
Any alternative that involves making users more dependent on the IT department is going to be a very hard sell.
It's not enough to just store, query, analyse and share data. Users need to be able to do all this ad hoc, experimenting with dozens or hundreds of permutations of queries, parameters, operations and presentations, before they hit on some formula that they think makes sense.
And they "need" to be able to do all this on their own, without discussing it with another living soul. There will be failures. Many. There will be all-nighters. Reputations are made and lost that way.
Short of telling them all to learn SQL (and just imagine how much safer that would be, even if you could talk them into it), what else do you suggest?
Not necessarily. There are a great many "truly beautiful" spots on earth. It's quite possible that basically everyone (who has enough leisure and income for it to be relevant to them) has at least one such spot within a couple of hours' travel.
If everyone just sticks to their local beauty spots, all will be fine. It's fame (virality) that does for them.
Yep, that's what usually happens. Since then I've transited through Thailand, Dubai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea (the common thread being "go nowhere near the US"), and not had a moment's problem in any of them.
And to be fair, it probably happens in the US most of the time. But not in December 2001.
Last time I transferred at a US airport was in December 2001. It was chaos. When I've got off a 12-hour flight and have another one to look forward to in about three hours' time, I really don't enjoy having to spend those hours queuing, filling in forms that don't apply to me, and being interviewed by unsmiling immigration officials who threaten to throw me out of the country because I don't have an address.
"Look, I'm getting on another plane, I'll be out of the country in a few hours" - was the answer, but their form didn't have a box for that. They'd only just changed the rules to say that international transfer passengers must go through US immigration, and immigration officials weren't used to seeing people in this situation. Why they made that rule change, or how it was supposed to make the country safer, is something I don't understand to this day.
Citizenship still has nothing to do with it. The 4th amendment makes no mention of citizenship, nationality or anything related to them.
The 14th amendment, on the other hand, says that legal rights ("protection") must apply equally to "any person within [the] jurisdiction". It would be unconstitutional to exempt Americans from a process that can be done to foreigners.
I disagree. When people say something "weighs" 1kg, they are making a statement about how much of it there is. That's what's important when, e.g., baking a cake or doing the shopping.
Scales will of course be calibrated to local gravity (as happens here on Earth, gravity is not the same - 1kg in, say, Greenland is about 0.5% heavier than that same kg in Ecuador). But it's still "1kg".
On the Moon, I'm guessing 1lb is quite a bit more than 1kg.
Government and commercial snooping are distinct and different phenomena. They're undertaken not only by different people, but for different reasons and in very different ways.
It's not unreasonable to try to tackle only one of the two. To suggest that any effort is worthless unless it immediately solves every problem is pure whataboutism.
230 gives power without responsibility. It means publishers can use things like "recommendation" algorithms, without accepting any responsibility for what they recommend. And they can censor whatever they want, based on criteria that they don't even have to publish, much less defend.
And the publishers are using these - not exactly "loopholes", more like "whale-sized breaches in the dike" - to make bank. Terry Pratchett, who knew a thing or two about publishers, has a good line about them: their dream is, universally, "to have so much gold in their pockets that they would have to employ two people just to hold their trousers up". Of course they will fight like demons to defend these "rights".
It's precisely the "recommendation" algorithms that need to die in a fire, not "be improved".
If I go on YouTube, let me search for a subject, then show me the results of my search. That's all the "recommendations" I want from them. If I don't find what I'm looking for at first, then I'll go back to the search and either click on another result, or refine the original search terms. If I'm done, then I'll go elsewhere. That's not the end of the world. I'll be back.
There is NO CASE in which I want an endless list of "next videos I might like based on my history and recent activity". Just - switch it off. Forever. Become a platform not a publisher. It won't entirely solve the problem of "fake news", but it will make it much harder to spread.
I don't think it should be beyond the wit of humanity to draw a clear line between publishers and platforms.
Usenet, for instance, is a platform. Anyone posts anything, and the platform makes no attempt either to moderate or promote it.
That's the key. When you promote some content over others, or censor content you don't like, then you are a publisher. That's what publishers do, it's quite literally the only thing they do, and it's exactly what laws about publishers were designed to control. Those laws should apply just as much online as they do in meatspace.
The fact that the US has a dubious history in the Marshalls does not conclusively prove that no one else has any nefarious plans involving them.
In fact, the one is not even tangentially related to the other.
To be fair, the reporting requirement (average salary broken down by race and gender) could be an absolute PITA.
It's hard enough fitting people in predesigned "race" boxes already. Races mix and match. I might describe myself as one thing when applying for a job, but something else when filling in a form later - depends largely on what the options are. As for gender... give me strength. In neither of these categories are you likely to find consensus even as to how many boxes there ought to be, let alone who fits into which.
And I haven't even touched on "what counts as 'salary'?" Surely the likeliest outcome is a significant increase in the amount of remuneration being given as options, bonuses, time off...
What makes you think it's getting taken seriously now?
There have always been people clamouring about this sort of thing. I don't see any rush by the legislative branch to do anything about it now, and it's not clear that the executive can do anything about it.
The US desperately needs a nationwide data-protection regime. One that requires all companies to actively delete all personally identifiable information as soon as it's no longer needed to provide an ongoing service to the subject.
Let's not forget that Trump's most-repeated single campaign pledge in 2016 was, very specifically, to prosecute and punish her for that crime.
And yet, when he actually took office, it was the very first promise he calmly announced that of course he'd never meant.
Probably because he didn't want the whole evidence coming out in a public trial, where even his supporters would be left saying "wait, was that it?"
$8 is approximately what it costs to send someone round to read the meter every month.
Obviously it wasn't always so expensive, because there's economies in reading a whole street at a time. But now the reader only visits maybe four houses on each street, it's much less efficient.
Getting rid of meter readers is unequivocally a benefit to everyone except the meter reader. Remote reading is way cheaper, far more reliable, and can be done as frequently as necessary, typically daily.
Cutting people off remotely - well, if they do that without justification, I suggest you sue the crap out of them - exactly the same, in fact, as if you were cut off locally. At least it will only take them a few minutes to reconnect you, not the best part of a day.
Piss about with tariffs - if you don't think it's to your benefit, then don't choose those tariffs. Tadaa! Problem solved. You're welcome.
You may be right. Also I haven't budgeted for the revenue gain from the increased capacity, which would presumably offset the cost.
But I think my basic point is sound: $5m is no more than a drop in the bucket you would need to meet that full demand. Reducing load is *much* more cost effective in the short term.
Well, let's just crunch a few numbers here.
Apparently, a solar panel installation in Texas costs about $2.73/W. Let's assume the company could get a significantly better deal than that, call it $2/W. Then that $5.5m translates to about 2.75MW of generating capacity.
Divided between 22,190 customers, that's a shade under 124W each.
A central aircon unit in Texas uses, on average, over 3kW, so 124W isn't going to go very far toward keeping it on.
Thanks for the kudos.
Whatever you think of them, it's demonstrably true that a large number of journalists are partisan hacks, and a large number of those are left-leaning. Natural auto-filtering ensures that the most mindlessly partisan are those who make the most noise. That applies on both sides.
Fox isn't a bastion of anything. Since I don't watch it, I'm not really qualified to comment on what, if anything, it's good for. (But since I spent more than ten years working as a journalist, I do feel qualified to comment in general terms on that profession.)
If you've been following the subject in detail for years, you should know I'm absolutely going to judge your position by the quality of the links you choose to represent it.
First off, before I get to my main point, let's get one thing clear. Trump is an utterly amoral, vicious, sadistic, completely selfish, lying, cheating, murderous cunt. If America had the ghost of basic common sense, he'd have been in jail years ago.
Having said that - as president, he wasn't particularly bad.
His nominations to the Supreme Court were a disaster, but they were a disaster of the Republican party's making, not specifically of Trump's. His treatment of international allies was shocking, in the technical sense that it shocked people, but it got results, which is partly why countries like Germany, after decades of dragging their feet, have finally started to ramp up their defence spending. His negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan was shameful, but then Biden didn't have to follow through with it the way he did. His policy towards China, which was seen as dangerously radical before his election, is now perfectly mainstream.
And then there were the Abraham Accords. They're not much, of course - treaties between Israel and a handful of Arab countries that have never really cared much about it anyway - but even so, it's more than any American president has achieved in the past 50 years.
Trump is odious, brutal, corrupt, utterly selfish and evil. He debased his office and corrupted his country to the best of his ability, which fortunately turned out to much more limited than he thought. But his presidency? Could have been a lot worse. (Probably will be, if he gets a second chance.)
Nothing in the constitution disbars a criminal from being president. Trump "should" have been disqualified from the moment in the first nomination debate, back in 2015, when he was the only person who refused to affirm that he would respect the final outcome of the election.
But he wasn't, and today millions of people around the world are paying for that.
That's exactly what journalists already spend practically all their time doing.
If they'd just report facts, every news article would be a great deal shorter. (The only exception being those that reproduce whole speeches.)
The trouble is, nobody - for statistical values of "nobody" - wants facts at all. They want to be told a story. And so news reporting has become a game of who can tell the most compelling story. Which is inherently biased, because different stories appeal to different people.
Nice hatchet job.
Perhaps it's time to consider, just consider, the possibility that left-leaning media, including the Intercept, aren't as fair and openminded as they'd like you to believe? And a journalist of real integrity might be repulsed by the level of partisanship he sees around him? At which point, what other platform does he have?
Excuse my naivite...
Wouldn't it be simpler for new compilers/interpreters to maintain backward compatibility with old versions? Then require each program to declare in its header which version it's written for, and therefore which set of rules should be applied when parsing it.
That's what HTML did until v5, and it kinda-sorta worked.
That's usually the way: when someone has decided that a substantial part of their future livelihood depends on something, they're apt to react strongly to the suggestion that it's a pile of obsolescent shite that any right-thinking employer would ban from the premises.
(And any mention of "downsides" will be mentally parsed into "it's a pile of obsolescent shite etc.")
I didn't say you wouldn't need A/C, I said the need would be much the same all year.
The Central Line has a *lot* of air coming in from outside. Through the tunnels, through the escalators... in fact I'm pretty sure the stuff is purposely pumped in to keep it fresh. A data centre would be a *lot* more sealed.
Yeah, but people have been saying that for 30 years. I see no reason to imagine it's true now.
Even if you think existing stupidly-high-res streamers will remain forever happy with their current resolution (in itself, a risible idea once you write it down), there's the other 90% of the population who aren't even at that level yet. To say nothing of the other four members of each of their households. And all the stuff they want to download and watch in parallel.
And that's without even considering "new stuff". VR, IOT shit...
Look...
A butler is one who manages a whole bunch of other household servants. Hires, trains, maintains rotas and schedules, budgets for each part of the household, promotes, fires if necessary... You know. Management. It's a high powered, high responsibility job.
So can we please stop saying "robot butler" every time someone claims their metal mickey can open a cupboard without wrenching the door off?
All they need to pay for is maybe two meetings (half of whose attendees will be tele-, anyway), one person to type up the report, and maybe the other $50000 to pay "reasonable expenses" to the poor sods tapped to be on this committee.
It's not like they're being asked to do actual research.
Yes, it helps to get the result you want if you first "disqualify" the most glaring counterexamples...
I daresay you can also find grounds to disqualify Myanmar, Rwanda and Iraq, among others. But at some point you would have to say, exactly what countries *do* you have in mind?
(Hint: the two intellectual powerhouses of the Enlightenment were Britain and France, and they spent a century at each others' throats even after abandoning all pretence that it was about religion.)
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