Posts by veti 4498 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
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?
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.
This, right here, is the thing. The kind of training that can feasibly be delivered en masse to those sorts of numbers of people - is going to be of questionable value. Heck, the very fact that it's being given to everyone is probably enough to devalue it for some people, who will assume - not unreasonably - that if the bosses really cared, something more targeted would be happening.
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?
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.
What makes you think that Libre's "support" would be better than Microsoft's?
Office 365 gains from network effects: everyone uses it, if there's a serious problem then it's big news, you hear about it quickly and it generally gets resolved pretty quickly. LO offers no such confidence, let alone a formal guarantee.
Yeah, file corruptions happen, and the canny MS Office user has a danger list of functions that should just never be touched, like 'fast save' and don't even get me started on list templates. But again, with so many people using it, the war stories are all out there - you can learn from them and learn what not to do, without having to do it yourself.
"Making an example" of him is exactly the worst possible thing to do. It won't improve anyone’s attitude, it will simply feed into the paranoid, us-v-them siege mentality that got Trump elected.
We need to show bigots that we're *better* than them. Not just "opposite". Opposition fuels opposition.
Trump is currently trying, with some success, to frame the election as a choice between him and his cronies on one side, versus a crowd of violent antifa and angry black people on the other. If he succeeds in making people believe that's the choice, he will win. Do NOT play into that framework, however satisfying it might feel. It's a trap.
So 24 in 25 flagged matches are wrong. So what? Without knowing the false negative rate, we still don't know enough to tell whether it's useful.
Hypothetically, if there are *zero* false negatives, this would still be a very useful system. If you have one suspect to identify in a crowd of 1000 faces, it's entirely worthwhile to have a computer just show you 25 faces to take a closer look at, rather than the full 1000.
Of course I know it won't be that accurate, but without knowing *how* accurate it is this "96%" figure *still* isn't enough to pronounce it useless.
And yes, I realise it will also victimise people based on skin colour - but let's be clear, that's an entirely separate issue, the cops don't need any automated help doing that anyway.
I don't mind the lobbying. If a proposed law is going to affect someone's business, I think they have every right to speak up about it.
It's when "speaking up" becomes "paying up" that the corruption sets in. The problem is the whole system of campaign finance, which in turn is intimately tied to the advertising business - and hence, all media.
I personally haven't seen a lot of stars as any more than points of light. Planets I have seen, and there is no conclusive evidence that they're round. They seem to change shape, much like the moon.
As for the proposition that gravity always acts on the CoG, perhaps you can suggest how I could verify that experimentally. (Keep in mind that "always" is a big claim, and the finding must be valid at very large scale.)
I would, but I'm too busy researching the flat earth theory that someone told me to last year. I've got as far as demonstrating curvature, but I'm sure you'll agree that's no reason to give in to the "round earth" conspiracy right away.
When people say "research it", what I hear is "I am too ignorant to understand the difference between Google and research".
And all the space and weight that you would normally use supporting the meatbag, keeping it alive and comfortable, and giving it a way to control the plane - all of that can be given to some other purpose. Or better yet, cut out of the design altogether.
A drone can pack the same firepower and air-to-air capability into a platform half the size of the F35, and with less than half of the radar signature.
The British did well out of the slave trade for a century. Then they spent another half century or more pouring blood and money into stopping it. The Royal Navy at its height chased slavers not only in the Atlantic, but all around Africa and the Indian Ocean too.
So... sure, there's guilt. But there should also be some credit there. History is long, it's ridiculous to take one episode or period and claim this is the true character of a country.
OK, let's say that's true. (Debatable of course, but let's accept it as written.) What difference does it make?
If "the example of other countries" can be as salutary as home grown violence, the conclusion is the same - violence is still not the only way to get the political change you want. I'd go further: it's also not the best way. (Unless you really want despotism, of course.) Violence polarises. What you need is reconciliation.
The civil war didn't make England a democracy, it didn't even move it close. It did neuter the (previously, abnormally strong) centralised monarchy. But when the dust of counter-revolution settled, what was left was aristocracy - power firmly in the hands of a hereditary ruling class.
What made it a democracy was a series of reform acts, from the 1830s onwards, extending the franchise. In parallel with changes in education and the acceptance of pluralism, of course.
I think you're wrong. Sure, political change can happen that way - Russia and France being the most prominent poster children - but do you really want to end up with what either of them got?
But it can happen non-violently too. Britain transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, over the course of about 80 years, without a revolution. India became independent without a war. The Soviet Union fell because soldiers refused to fight their own people. Violence is not the only way.
I mean, why Zoom? How did they get to be The videocall platform of the pandemic?
I don't know about you, but six months ago I had barely heard of Zoom. My employer used MS Teams, which worked fine for them. Personally I use Skype when I need to. But then came the pandemic, and suddenly Zoom was the default platform everyone talked about - and on. How did they pull that off, exactly?
America is fast approaching fascism on its own behalf. As for communism, the only reason to hate that is because it's used as a cover for despotism, which the US is now encouraging around the world.
Don't get me wrong, America has done great things in the past hundred years. But right now it seems bent on undoing most of them, and the goodwill it had built up is a finite resource, now nearing exhaustion.
"Lobbyists" are not some mysterious svengali caste. They can't just pick up a cause and translate into instant results.
Lobbying is about representing the specific sectional interests of your community. That's where their influence derives from, because politicians know who they are representing and why they matter. You can't simply "lend" them to another cause, no matter how strongly you feel about it, because they would have no authority to speak on that subject.
You are playing Trump's game. If you are sincere in wanting to see the US return to some sort of sanity, this is not how to do it.
Trump is trying to make the 2020 election about the red/blue culture war. That's how he won in 2016, and it's by far his best chance of winning again. And you're playing straight into his hands. Language like "coup" and "illegal" (hint: if the relevant court says it's legal, then it is - there are such things as appeals, but your own conscience and opinions do not qualify as a higher court) are the language of violent revolution, not persuasion.
Don't try to fight dirty against Trump. He will drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.
Sadly we've seen what "engaging the voters" looks like. Full on cultural warfare.
That's why half of America is now bent on getting back to business as usual without *any* acknowledgement of social distancing or masks or anything else that suggests there might be something bad happening.
When your political system is leading to tens of thousands of excess deaths, it may fairly be said to have failed. Utterly. After all, the whole point of politics is to prevent exactly that outcome.
Then change the law. If it's not up to the job of preventing shenanigans, then why haven't you complained about it before?
Like Trump with his tax returns. If you want "publishing your tax returns" to be a prerequisite for standing for president, then change the law to make it so. Don't whine because someone is breaking a rule if you never made it a rule in the first place.
That's true for the regular spammed attacks, but there's a whole lot of spear phishing and other highly aimed hacking that's being directed at the medical industry right now.
If I had to speculate, I'd guess it's happening because unaccustomed amounts of public funds are being poured very quickly into medical care and research. Anytime that sort of money is sloshing about in places that aren't fully accustomed to it, there will be opportunities for scumbags to siphon some of it off.
A characteristic of both sides in the US is that they don't much like the constitution. Leftists hate the second amendment, rightists aren't too keen on the first. I think it's probably possible to define every major faction in US politics by identifying "which bit of the constitution they want to repeal".
Trump and his scum really hate the 14th.
As for the "spoiled generation", you can apply that description to a generation who have grown up with their private wealth jealously protected.
Well yes, if Amazon really wants the data, I'm sure there are ways they could get it. Ditto GCHQ or the NSA or the Illuminati. But what would they do with it?
Bear in mind that if anyone twigged and could prove that they'd accessed it, there would be big, big repercussions, both legal and reputational. What gain would be worth running that risk?
In case you missed it, the Pm explicitly says that if you choose to upload the collected data, it will only be available to health services. Police don't get it.
As for businesses, when did you hear of one that was reluctant to gather and keep information about its customers? But NZ data protection law says that you have to tell people in advance what you will be using their data for, and you can't change that after the event.
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