Posts by veti

Re: CSV?

"What's wrong with CSV?" - is that if you double-click on a CSV file, on most Windows boxen, it'll open in Excel. Quietly, and without fuss, deleting everything below row 32768 anyway.

So that solves precisely nothing.

Re: Oh HELL No!!

Given the number of places now inviting you to give them your fingerprints, I think that ship has sailed. At least Amazon is still giving you the option. That's more than certain countries' border control agents do.

Re: Last election

Or the Russians have learned to improve their tactics over the last four years.

Everyone knows what happened last time, so that wouldn't work again. But the Russians can learn too. This year, the focus is on painting Biden as an unprincipled centrist who isn't worth voting for. It's a caricature, but like all caricature there's enough reality in it to convince some people.

This message is being pushed not just by sock puppets on Facebook, but through connections to other media too. I've seen two variations of it in the Guardian in the past week. Also in the Guardian, a few weeks ago, I saw a story by a freelance writer on how he was conned into feeding Russian propaganda. I don't think these things are unrelated.

Re: WTF

Sure, of course you can hire people to do the same work, but that's true of approximately everything that computers do. There's a reason we use computers anyway.

Re: Time to hit ransomware criminals

We've seen where that kind of thinking leads. Google "Andrew Finch" if you've forgotten the name.

I used to wear glasses. Then I paid a bunch of money for a doctor to shine lasers into my eyes, and now I have 20/20 vision. Is that augmentation?

Re: @Death Nija Backlash

Trump is going to get a Nobel peace prize right after "Mike the FlyingRat" gets nominated for one.

I'll give Trump credit, he's done something good in the Middle East. Assassinating Gen Soleimani was a bold move, and more importantly a smart one. But it doesn't really offset the mayhem he's caused by the rest of his hamfisted policy toward Iran, to say nothing of his see-sawing on Syria, his interference in the internal politics of Israel, his support of murderous and corrupt despots in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, his idiotic and needless intervention in Lebanon, and probably more things that have slipped my mind for the moment.

It's not as if Chinese and Russian programmers aren't perfectly capable of developing tech at least as good as anything the Americans have come up with in this field.

I suspect it's an attempt to close down a market in which IBM doesn't rate its own performance.

Re: Can this really be that complicated*?

"Then I'd humbly suggest that you're developing/producing/maintaing software wrong."

If the customer buys it, how is it "wrong"?

Re: Competence? We've heard of it.

There is a sliding scale of skulduggery, and Nominet is still only on a fairly low setting. They haven't (yet), for instance, tried to hawk ".bbc.uk" to News International for purposes of discrediting the other party.

Although that is an obvious next step. I wonder if it will happen?

Besides, isn't this precisely what we wanted? If prices go up, online advertising loses some of its advantage over other media. Maybe there will be less of it. How is that anything but a win?

Re: My contribution ...

Whenever such systems have been tried, they are roundly and routinely abused by basically everyone. There's the poser who claims to be mission-critically busy for weeks on end, and the chancer who sets that status when they want some, ahem, uninterrupted Internet time.

And, of course, the huge majority of people who completely forget/ignore the whole thing - who neither set their own status, nor pay a smidgen of attention to anyone else's.

Re: Interesting note from the field.

Police in the USA kill, on average, 2-4 people every single day. Why pick on any one of these incidents over another?

Re: So it goes

Yeah, cos that worked so well for Sweden...

There is no way of fixing the economy without getting the pandemic under control first. The US is an abject lesson in what happens if you insist on seeing it as a tradeoff - you get a huge economic crash *and* a huge pile of dead people, both at the same time.

New Zealand, on the other hand - has (until ten days ago) no covid-19 and unemployment that actually went *down* in the first half of the year. Now it's got a new outbreak, but it's far better placed to take care of it than most anyone in Europe.

Re: DHS head has no authority

If the orders themselves are unlawful, then it makes no difference who issues them - any federal employee would be obligated to refuse them anyway.

If they're not unlawful, then who needs "cover"?

It's a good solution. Let them witter away amongst themselves, just don't expose new people to their nonsense. This way FB keeps them where it can see them, but doesn't help them to recruit.

Re: Huh?

Writing laws is hard. In order to get enough people to vote for it, legislators often find it... expedient to leave some ambiguity about the terms.

That way, everyone can kid themselves that the courts will apply "common sense", they can all vote for the law and pretend to their supporters that it says what they want it to, and move on to the next headline.

The alternative is not only hard work, but would also drastically reduce the number of laws passed. That would undoubtedly be a blessing in many ways, but might be very awkward in others.

Re: Clueless

You can make what inferences you like, but the committee's job was to report on what it actually has evidence of. If Manafort never talked about it or wrote down his reasoning - and why would he? - then it seems pretty likely, there is no evidence on this issue.

Re: So, let me get this straight

Don't get your hopes up. Even if Biden wins, he won't try to reverse everything Trump has done. Just as Obama didn't undo Bush's follies, such as creating the DHS and fingerprinting incoming travellers.

Re: Then let him do something about it

You're thinking of the old Republican party, as built by Reagan. That party is gone. There's no place in Trumpism for fiscal conservatism, because Trump realised - ahead of the rest of his party - that only a vanishingly tiny number of people ever cared about it.

Re: Sadness

Sad to say, Firefox's market share is now less than 5%. While I'm sure Google does care about those people, I doubt they are prepared to go far out of their way to direct their searches.

See your videos, and I raise you https://xkcd.com/2030/

Re: You get what you pay for

You mean, for the same group after it changes its name three months later. Or for factions of it after they inevitably fall out.

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

I hate to break it to you, but I only recently realised this myself:

Nobody reads those emails anyway.

Now I assume that any manager will not read any paragraph of more than four lines or two sentences, whichever is less; nor will they read more than one such paragraph, unless the first paragraph mentions a specific sum of money.

Email has become a write-only medium. If you actually want them to act on something, you need to find another way to tell them. Of course, if you're just covering your arse, it doesn't matter.

Re: Only Jeff bothered to find an interesting room for the video-chat hearing ...

If you don't like what your representative is doing, vote them out. That's the simple correct remedy regardless of party or sex.

As for the report, perhaps you can point out specific instances of questions or participants that you think have been misrepresented?

Re: Skype sniping

Why should Ms care about that?

Re: Common Sense

The financial question is, what is the return? Sure you can give basic training to everyone for £x thousand, but "basic training" will only do so much. And for the same money, you can probably hire one or more full time infosec specialists - which may be a better use of your budget.

Re: Small and local

I read the story thinking, that's one expensive database. But eventually it becomes clear, that's not what the money refers to: it's more like the total value of work being directed through the platform.

In your case, it sounds like you don't have a very clear understanding of the costs. Who pays for the list of approved suppliers?

Re: My computer, my rules.

Right, which is one reason why I haven't set foot in the USA since 2002, and fully expect to live the rest of my life without ever doing so again. I was a regular visitor once, but it's just not worth it any more.

Re: In Real Time?

What exactly does "now" mean, in this context?

The same goes for Word. If you really understand how to use Word the way it's theoretically meant to be used, with correctly prepared styles and templates and outlines, LO Writer is a horribly substandard substitute. But if you use Word like 95% of users do, making up your styles as you go along, it's fine.