Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: The cause of the next world war

no matter how oppressed they get, most still remember the state of the country only 15 to 20 years ago.

Bingo. It will take decades (if not centuries) for the generation memory to wear off. That memory is still there and compared to the majority does not see themselves as oppressed, dispossessed and disenfranchised. Just the opposite.

Add to that the fact that when I lived there for a few years during the darkest days of the Gerontocracy, engaging in patriotic brainwashing was the domain of the schools. If you tried to shovel anything like the "you should be special because you are Russian" into your offspring brain in private the rest of the family would have stopped your vodka intake.

The current generation of parents feels special because they still remember the horrors of the last years under the Gerontocracy and Eltsin Idiotocracy. They are grateful that they have emerged out of that and they brainwash their kids to an extent which you would not believe. When I am on a holiday on the Canaries or in Greece nowdays I switch tables if I end up next to a Russian family. My daughter understands enough of the language to start asking questions along the lines of "What is the bullsh*t they are being brainwashed with?" and I have to start answering pointed questions.

It will take decades including many years of economic hardship and oppression (the proverbial Slavic "raise pressure until we blow a gasket") to counter that. Until then, if there will be any revolt it will not be there. It will be our own disenfranchised and dispossessed.

There is an exact description

How deep do the rabbit hole actually go?

I suggest you take Lewis Carrol off the shelf. It is very well covered in Alice in Wonderland.

Same here

but I actually pay for the good/services I use.

Same here.

The only thing which I am interested is consuming it the way I like it and where I like it.

I have a bleeping hard copy, I paid all the royalties, now I would like to have it on my 10TB NAS so I can watch it anywhere in the house, on the 3TB hard drive in the "remote descendant of a GM2 Betty" I use to travel around Europe so that there is peace in the back seats and on the similarly sized drive array at my summer house/office. I do not see why the f*** I should be prohibited from doing so.

Re: If he had been in the UK

It's the same in Netherlands or anywhere in Europe. Their disability legislation is as good as UK if not better.

The issue, however is - in order to start pushing the buttons on the lawyer's launch panel you need money. If you do not have it, you are nobody. Even in the UK an initial consultation with an ACAS certified lawyer is > 250£. Case filing if memory serves me right is at least 750. And from there onwards we go.

I suspect NL is pretty much the same.

There is no justice for the poor and broke.

Re: Bah!

Well, it is called two factor for a reason.

How did the miscreant know the SECOND factor?

If he can explain that, than he should be blame ATT for all it's worth. If his authentication was JUST SMS code, that's still SINGLE factor, not two factor.

Re: how much is twitter paying for this?

Not a lot.

Twitter (even with pics and everything) is not a major consumption element in the daily data menu for most people.

It is a clear case of Twitter doing a deal to try to stay relevant.

Meah... excuse me while I yawn...

Re: Inhouse IT

Even if it was, it should not have anything to do with the canteen payment system. It should be self-contained.

If you know the right people, there are plenty of opportunities to make money on a dead horse.

Concur - your local supermarket is always in need of cheap hamburgers and/or branded frozen lasagna.

Re: It us just you

WPP is a huge, British success story

You forgot the gigantic "Sarcasm" tags on that. Or at the very least "Joke Ahead" sign.

Re: let me guess...

With the latest results the tocamac designs look like ~ 10.

Realistically, 50-es did not have the material technology, magnet design and most importantly magnet control technology to do fusion. While the principle has not changed, we got there on the last two within the last 10 years. So 10 lapsed, 10 more to go for the tokamak designs.

At that point we run into another wonderful non-proliferation issue. Fusion reactors produce fast electrons, which can be used in a classic breeder design (in fact they are too fast - you have to slow them down a bit somehow). Anyone in a possession of a working tokamak fusion coil can potentially stamp out Plutonium by the ton as a byproduct.

mutual self-destruction

The Day After, the director's cut. Something ABC never dared release and probably will never release (it came under immense pressure by a number of US administrations to keep that hidden somewhere deep in the cupboards).

Re: wonderful

They don't tell you how they feel,

The old soviet block joke comes to mind:

What is a pessimist? A well informed optimist

What is an optimist? A well instructed pessimist

That looks like it will be part of the core programming.

Re: Harry, you're a beast!

über-cool Bay Area

What exactly is uber-cool about an area where it is an essential career requirement NOT TO HAVE A LIFE.

Corollary: Do you expect people who do not have a life to have normal social attitudes and being capable of normal social interaction.

This just comes with the territory. It does not matter what companies do, what companies claim. As long as the employees are expected to spend all of their life either in the commuter vehicle or at their desk, the issue will persist.

You seriously underestimate just how ridiculously empty are the Southern Indian Ocean and the Southern Pacific. There is practically zero communications coverage so even if the transponder equipment was not off (that is where the whole thing started) it would have failed to upload anything.

There is one clear takeaway from the whole debacle - aircraft must have connectivity to the new low altitude broadband constellations being launched in the next decade. These do not do anything above the vast expanses of the sea deserts anyway so the operators are not likely to have any objection to a regulatory mandate for the airlines to use them.

As a corollary to that, China can go f*** off on their regulatory requirements mandating any aircraft to turn off broadband connectivity entering their airspace and MH370 and the number of Chinese citizens who went down with it is a good enough explanation of why this should be the case.

There are already, they are usually used only for display brightness, not color adjustment.

Re: The Bible

Esteemed Author» The issue appears to be a small rainbow featured on the website.

You are not very observant.

Two rainbows, second one on the badge worn by one of the adults which may or may not be both female (the cartoonist needs to learn to draw first before taking on serious political topics).

So in total 3/4 characters in the cartoon.

IMHO, the cartoonist needs to learn to draw, my 8 year old daughter draws better. There is nothing worse than using a very proper political cause to get preferential treatment for very shitty workmanship.

Re: Well it's known...

Come on, not the perennial joke about the electron on the shrink's couch.

Surely Linux didnt get 50x as much as apple?

Not clear if flash, pdf, etc are counted as separate or only for a particular platform.

Someone in the US military authorised the use of Russian...

They have authorized use of Russian missile engines (ULA uses them to launch military hardware) and have authorized the licensing of Russian VTOL tech (F35B licenses Yak-141 designs). So there are precedents of cats sleeping with dogs.

Hanlon razor

It's a backdoor - by mandated design.

Not even Hanlon actually. ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.’ is a saying by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Re: School boy mistake

Really, where did this Robert David Steele guy get his education?

More interesting question is wtf did this guy do @ CIA and how many more lunatics are left there. Frankly, I am no longer surprised at its tendency to sponsor lunatics. Fruitcakes sponsoring fruitcakes.

Re: I've no problem with this if the general was fulfilling required flight hours...

Unless the said general is current in a flying instructor position, I fail to see the need for him to keep himself current.

Want to tell it to this guy?. He happens to be a president of NATO country and is still flying up to the required limit for a fighter pilot.

Not on alpha jets either - he uses the board number 29 - the one seen banking out of formation on the photo and can fly it like probably only a handful of people can. Officially Mig-29 cannot do the Pugachev Cobra or a Bell. Unofficially, if you have an outright nutter at the controls - it can. So I suggest you convince him to push a pen as he should as he has been a "pen pusher" according to your definitions since 2000 (last 17 years).

It is not like the Duke of Edinburgh and the First Sea Lord practice A.S.W., the Chief of Air Staff goes on strafing runs with an Apache or the Chief of the General Staff goes for sniper practice.

Maybe that is the problem in the first place.

Re: Apocryphal tale

Dunno about Telex, but I have run into the classic "Secretary, nylon underwear, nylon tights and polyester pencil skirt" more than once. Bzzzzt... here went one more motherboard.

Re: History disagrees.

Until the tools are leaked and incorporated in the malware du jour.

Location is of little interest for malware du jour. It becomes of interest only if the meatware attached to the laptop becomes a target. That is definitely not part of the malware du jour repertoire.

Re: There's an opportunity here

Make it big enough to accommodate a hoverboard and I think you have a product.

Re: Well, MAYBE this will get their attention

an idiot user was using a work PC to do some personal business and a friend e.mailed him the virus

That is exactly the point of having a secure network. Any number of users can do it and the infection should remain contained to them only (ideal case) or a very small pocket which can be surgically removed and replaced.

Re: Last I read...

... planes had yet to be fitted with bomb proof holds.

There was an attempt to bomb-proof containers (as used in a lot of airports for loading and unloading) shortly after the Lockerby investigation concluded. The attempt was successful - the container contained an explosion with high explosive of the same quantity as the one which was used at Lockerby. The incremental increase in weight of the container even with that level of technology was minimal.

It was not implemented because:

1. The whole chain for loading and unloading of luggage would have needed to be modified and containers which are optional today would have become mandatory.

2. The containers today have canvas sides - that would have had to become hard requiring extra maintenance and once again changes to loading and unloading

3. Probably the biggest issue. There is no way to design a fire suppression system when fully enclosed containers are in use. So while the explosion was contained in the experiment, further experiments with LOWER energy explosives which are easier to obtain and result in both fire and explosion were failures all of them - no fire suppression system could effectively mitigate a fire inside the container.

Clarification needed

a firm that has publicly prostituted

You are mistaking prostituting (taking payment for carnal activities) and whoring (doing them for fun and pleasure). Those two are not equivalent. While the former may be a form of "for fun and profit" of the latter, it is usually done as a last resort - when there is no other source of daily bread.

I will leave which one MSFT and nearly all large US corporations excluding Apple(*) specialize in.

(*)_{disclaimer: I am not an apple fan and I do not own any apple devices or stock}

Re: Get the popcorn

Umm, but isn't that a Russian company,

No. German company. Telegram is registered in Germany and run out of there too.

So, in fact, this is exactly what we will see one day (especially if Teresa continues to get things her way).

Re: Hey...

Look further. Up and back.

Ben Bova, Asimov, Clarke, Lemm had this figured out.

Increasing the speed of an aircraft is diminishing returns. The true solution for high speed travel beyond 3000 km or thereabouts is going ballistic via suborbital trajectory.

The main issue there is not so much technology. Wwe are going in that direction with Space X and ReactionEngines and will be there in a couple of decades well before quiet supersonic aircraft is productized. It is the fact that with the current level of paranoya and militarization nobody will allow you to lob a payload the size of an airliner cabin on a ballistic suborbital trajectory to LA, NY, Moscow or Berlin.

Re: "he said Roskomnadzor had demanded Telegram give keys to decrypt "

This is about Telegram 1:Many services aka channels which IS NOT end-to-end encrypted.