Posts by jake

Re: 'we shouldn't stigmatize the unvaccinate'

"How many of those illnesses require booster vaccines"

Most of them. 4 polio, 6 diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, 3 hepatitis B and 2 each mumps, measles, rubella and chicken pox (again from memory ... my daughter's vaccinations were long ago, I'm going by what I remember of my nieces and nephews).

Later, as Adults, recommendations for some of those return ... although chicken pox becomes shingles if you're old enough to have had the actual disease. I also add reoccurring 'flu, rabies, anthrax, cholera and a couple others to my mix. (It's a lifestyle issue; I'm nothing if not pragmatic.)

"they don't confer sterilising immunity and the protective effects wear out rather rapidly."

But they DO provide protection from the worst of the effects, leading to it perhaps not even being noticed vs being stuck in a hospital, in an induced coma, with a machine breathing for you and perhaps leading to rather nasty after effects that might last a lifetime (we just don't know yet).

"Perhaps the 2.0 batch will be better."

One or two jabs per year to tide you over until The One True Jab is invented is a rather small price to pay for that kind of security, no?

Re: Ahh, the libertarians will be up in arms

Whatever. Nut-jobs suing mega-corps and mega-corps falling flat on their faces (and sometimes both in the same article) are nothing new around here. ElReg reports similar weekly.

More importantly, neither have anything to do with the discussion at hand.

Bad misdirection attempt. No cookie.

Re: 'we shouldn't stigmatize the unvaccinate'

Here in California, K-12 kids are required to be vaccinated for polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox[0].

Thanks to vaccinations, cases of the above requiring a doctor's care are so rare in this state as to make headline news when they occur. Prior to mass vaccination, these diseases killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of people yearly. For centuries.

Covid-19 is killing and/or maiming hundreds of thousands yearly all by itself. And yet people refuse to get vaccinated against it?

The mind absolutely boggles. Of course we should stigmatize the unvaccinated ... or at the very least, ostracize them.

[0] That's from memory ... I may have missed one or two.

Re: I really don't get it

"So, what's the issue I'm missing?"

People are intentionally, willfully & even stubbornly ignorant, and are often willing to fight in order to somehow substantiate their beliefs, despite all evidence that suggests those beliefs are irrational

As far back as the ancient Greeks, philosophers have been pondering the balance of knowledge, ignorance and opinion, and how it affects the individual, small groups, and society as a whole. Most have come to the conclusion that people just want to coast along, without thinking, having faith in what they think they know to be facts ... and will defend their right to do so, even to the point of taking up arms. Opinions are divided as to why, but it seems to be embedded in our genes. I suspect it's part of the "us vs them" survival function gone awry.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Anonymous (often falsely attributed to Mark Twain)

Re: I'll bite :)

It's not "fear" so much as dread ... Fear implies a loss of courage, dread does not. There are some people that I dread coming into contact with, but I'm not in fear of them.

But play with tactical syntax all you like, if it floats your boat. It says more about the commentard than it does the subject matter.

Re: When will I be able to ...

"When the GUI in Windows 11 goes TITSUP what else is there?"

On a sensible OS, the Kernel is still ticking along, doing it's job. Crashing the GUI shouldn't be able to take out the kernel.

Re: Using "AI" to amke guesses

I'm going to make a wild guess that the people who worked on this probably know a little bit more about how to justify recieving grant money than people (like me) who got our degrees, and then got out of Uni and entered the real world. Otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it.

Re: Using "AI" to amke guesses

It's actually not even wrong.

It's a fabrication, a guess, a story, and has no place in (especially!) forensics.

More to the point ...

Will all of us existing programmers be forced to use only non-binary programming tools? Or are we just going to be put out to pasture? Or taken out behind the barn ...

Re: Stick to the knitting

The Linux Foundation is now dedicated to keeping itself in power ... like any bureaucracy, it has risen to the level of its own incompetence. Thus the Power Point presentations.

"You'd have a much better argument except for the fact that the most common use of MASTER is in the MASTER and SLAVE relationship."

Like the MASTER and SLAVE brake cylinders in my vehicles?

The MASTER and SLAVE clocks around here, and on my network?

Etc. etc.etc., ad nauseam.

Technical terms, when used by technical people, in a technical manner, are not inherently evil. They are the words that are used to describe something quite specific, in that context, and are used to avoid disambiguation.

People assuming that any word which might, in specific circumstances, be offensive to specific sets of people must therefore always be offensive to everybody in every context are the worst kind of censors ... they are trying to pervert the language to the point where nobody can communicate freely about anything.

Re: Nuclear football

"Everyone's seen the X Files."

I watched about ten minutes of the first episode. Does that count?

Re: Bluetooth

Personally, I rather enjoy NOT being at the beck and call of other people when I'm riding ... and I'd rather listen to the music of my bike than any tunage.

"Football" is nothing more than an easy to remember codeword.

Re: Conservative?

" But for now, in the mainstream Linux world, systemd etc have won"

I categorically reject this comment. There is no win or loss, there is only survival in the FOSS ecosystem. I believe that the systemd-cancer will eventually be left by the wayside, perhaps becoming vestigial for a short time before it fades away completely.

Re: If you want a conservative, stable distro you have Devuan.

No perhaps. If you haven't tried Slackware for a couple decades because you think it's "hard", perhaps it's time to give it another try? It hasn't stuck around all these years because it doesn't work ...

Re: Install Firefox directly from mozilla.org

We've noticed. Your point?

Re: Install Firefox directly from mozilla.org

Tarballs are not hard, nor do they require "strong tech knowledge".

Firefox does indeed receive tech updates (if you allow it).

EVERYTHING in the world of computers requires ongoing maintenance, and anybody who says otherwise is either an idiot or a liar.

Firefox interacts as well with the OS (Linux) as any other large program ... it has issues with some Distributions, though. That's hardly the fault of Firefox.

Re: Once again ...

Slackware-stable doesn't have the "latest and greatest" (whatever that means).

Slackware-current is quite up to date and modern (whatever that means).

-stable is just that. Comes with kernel 4.4.276 and mozilla-firefox-68.12.0esr. It just works.

-current is the dev branch (some distros call it a rolling release). It also just works. Comes with kernel 5.15.7 and mozilla-firefox-91.4.0esr ... these are subject to change. Will eventually become Slackware 15.

Re: You have to wonder

I have a pile of CDs that I picked up in random Silly Con Valley parking lots right around the time of the events in the article. All contain network aware malware that will run if autorun is enabled. Needless to say, so-called "security" at those companies poo-pooed me when I pointed out the obvious implications.

Shortly thereafter I simply washed my hands of anything Redmond. Life's too short.

How much money would YOUR company have saved if it had made the move from Windows to Linux a mere ten years ago?

Filename extensions are fine.

Meaningful filename extensions, however, not so much.

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will learn what magic numbers are. Eventually. You folks running un*x-ish systems, try "man magic" ... you can poke around in /etc/file/magic for more. The concept is older than UNIX[tm] itself ... Meaningful file name extensions should have died with Digital Research's CP/M.

_{Rest in peace, Gary, my friend ... you are still missed by many, you cantankerous old goat.}

Re: The power consumption thing

You won't get them.

Interesting fact: Free-range hens are much, much more likely to die from being dismembered alive by predators than battery hens. Here in Sonoma, California I typically lose about 50% of my layers per year to predators because I allow them the freedom to come and go as they please from dawn to dusk ... my neighbor, who keeps his in a covered run, only loses a few if one of his children leaves the door to the hen-house open.

Free-range for domestic foul ain't what the PETA set would have you believe ... Chickens just aren't built to survive in the wild.

Re: The dark equation of harm versus good

"Such a calculation would require quantifying human stupidity, which seems like a difficult exercise at best."

Some of our greatest minds have worked on this problem. A selection of results follow:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. —Albert Einstein (supposedly)

Apart from hydrogen, the most common thing in the universe is stupidity. —Harlan Ellison

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. —Frank Zappa

Re: The power consumption thing

The point is that they fired up a natural gas generator, they didn't re-commission and fire up a disused coal burning power plant plant, as commentard iron disingenuously suggested.

One can make an awful lot of electricity with little pollution on a standard, common or garden commercial-grade low pressure natural gas connection.

Re: Actually....

Hasn't stopped illegal pot growers illegally siphoning great quantities of power to feed incredibly inefficient lights (read: cheap) in order to increase profits, now has it?

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

The truism that young people get scammed by old ideas masquerading as new proven.

_{Or, if you prefer, those who forget (or never learn) history ...}

Re: The point is ...

Don't be disingenuous. It doesn't become you.

Re: A more easily understandabe file tree? Yes, please!

"Then you're chasing unicorns"

Says the guy on record as trying to fix stupid ...

As a side note, a combination of find and grep, perhaps with the addition of a filter or two (to dig into archives), will easily do exactly what TOA wants. This has been possible for well over three decades.

Re: All to be superseded

Can you show me where here on ElReg anybody participating in this thread has lauded EMACS in the last 5 years or so? Other than tongue in cheek, of course.