Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
shakedown artists in the EPA.
Who told you it is EPA and EPA protocols? The article does not make it clear where did they cheat - USA, Japan, Eu or somewhere else. According to the BBC it is Japan and not emissions - fuel consumption data. So, while I understand your desire to vent your neo-liberal anti-EPA spleen, it is probably misplaced in this case.
One of the reasons why Java has not become a niche language is exactly Android.
Having it as the only language for a platform this size makes up for a considerable change in economics of Java, its toolchain, educational interest and potential, etc.
In any case, the whole spat is about a massive case of sour grapes: SnOracle tried to artificially restrict and prevent the use of the full Java potential in mobile (retarded idea No 1). SnOracle tried to artificially restrict any security mechanisms on a multi-application java platform to be "internal" and Java only instead of a combination of external (uids + zygote) and internal (retarded idea No 2). Google showed Oracle the middle finger on both and delivered.
In reality, both restrictions should have been subjected to competition law scrutiny wrong ago. Google should have started with that first (it would have succeeded at that point too).
Really? Does a solar flare remove all knowledge of electricity from people's brains then?
True, it does not. However, exercising that knowledge becomes a very interesting proposition when you cannot repair even the most primitive generator without bringing half of it from across the globe (because an MBA in the finances department has been penny pinching and enjoying a slave trader fetish).
The countries to fare best in a Carrington-class event will be the countries under sanctions - Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc - they have no choice but to have a significant local manufacturing base. And China of course as it manufactures nearly anything. USA and Europe... Especially if it happens in mid-winter... That will not be a pretty sight.
Frankly, it is no longer necessary to hit a city with a nuke. Or hit a target with a nuke.
Blowing a few 100 Kt up at ~ 80 miles up is enough to knock out the grid in a 500miles+ radius. There is no defense against this either - it is outside the short range interceptor range and it can pretend to be a satellite as far as anyone else is concerned all the way until it needs to execute Boom().
Don't be so sure.
There is prior art.
Try printing dollar or Euro bills on a high class color laser printer (something that can print a realistic enough replica) or try to copy them on a color copier. They probably no longer do that on the low end SOHO kit, but the high end proper office kit still has it.
As any of the el-reg readers who have tried an "ad-free" (quotes intended and quotes needed) experience can testify, it is not ad-free.
It is simply what in the Soviet Union used to be referred as "Queue for the ones do not Queue" or as George Orwell once wrote in the Animal Farm: "Some animals are more equal than the others". This means being served ads by the ones who have paid more.
So until the publishing industry develops some resemblance of honesty and treating the customer differently from the way it is treated by marketeers and admen, any attempts to monetize the "ad-free" experience are likely to be a very challenging proposition.
All the company needs to do is hire for a different position (with same job spec). Then you need to prove that the two job specs and positions are equivalent and that is a very tall order and requires a massive amount of resources. Most people who have been made redundant do not have access to such "justice for the rich".
A backup containing encrypted files is not particularly useful you know.
You have to have layered "defence in depth" backup going back weeks if not months to deal with this. That is generally not available for an end-user PC in _ANY_ company. It is done only for servers.
In the US
In the UK we have what is known as "citizen's arrest". Similar statutes with different rights exist across Europe.
So while you are not allowed to shoot 'em you are allowed to rough them up and "unintentionally" pull their arms out of their sockets in the process of restraining them until the police shows up. Just make sure it looks unintentional enough.
Expensive and _USELESS_.
The v4l2 drivers for the built in cameras are presently broken across the board. I found this to my great displeasure this weekend when assembling two new "house control" Pis - one for my summer house and one for my workshop.
So running anything like motion is out of the question. You can sort'a use some of the utilities that the Pi foundation rebadges out of the broadcom refence toolkit, but that means no motion detection, no off-the shelf video streaming, etc.
So, if you need a camera, just get a good quality USB module - ELP on amazon ships some (with pluggable IR interfaces, different optics, etc). This also solves a lot of issues with cabling and enclosures as a USB is much easier to protect than a flat cable.
That is what I ended up doing as I actually need the at least some of my Pis to double as CCTVs. The built in cameras are now back in the spare parts drawer.
Could you explain the part about utility companies?
In Bulgaria any attempts of utilities to collect money directly online has failed. They collect money either via the local (and quite successful) PayPal rival epay.bg or its competitor EasyPay set up by the banks.
Both have realtime data feeds from every utility and most city councils. Both give you detailed electronic monthly bills. Both allow you to both pay for pre-paid services and pay bills. Both have integration to most ATM cash machines for some of the services including initial authorization, etc.
Epay also serves as a local PayPal equivalent allowing person to person transfers. As they do all the 2FA, insurance, etc a lot of companies do not even bother to do online payment processing - they just integrate with them. For example - even the incumbent airline will not take cards online - it will redirect you to Epay.
That is somewhat equivalent to what has happened in the UK with worldpay, with the difference that it requires you to have an account and actively uses 2FA to ensure that it is you who is authorizing anything. Worldpay should have done that in the UK, but they never had the guts to try that. Also, AFAIK, Visa/Mastercard and the banks actively prevented them from doing it before RBS bought them. Once they were bought that idea was buried to never rise again.
As far as I know, Bulgaria is not unique - other ex-soviet block countries have similar systems. They were all marked as high fraud risk in the 90-es and early 2000-es which resulted in difficulties for any local company to set up Visa and MasterCard processing. This allowed rival (and much better) systems to emerge. Compared to them what is used in USA (and to a lesser extent UK) looks like distinctly stone age tech.
I wish I could afford such Luddite approach. Unfortunately I cannot as I have old ongoing "retirement site" projects in another country as well as old relatives to support there. So I have no choice but to pay all bills there electronically as well as regularly pay various people (builders, insurer, security, etc) by bank transfer.
Similarly and for the same reason I am regularly out of the UK for months at a time - if I rely on getting paper for anything I will not pay stuff on time and/or not be able to pay it from abroad.
So all I can do is mitigate the risk and do exactly what the survey has observed - limit my activity online to minimize the risk of a data breach:
1. Bank. I would suggest changing the bank and/or credit card company if they are data/security/online (or all of) clueless. I fired HSBC a few years back for that. In the UK Nationwide are pretty good (so far). Abroad - the situation gets better the higher the security threat. The most clued up banks I have dealt with were in Eastern Europe (they have to be - to survive). The ones in biggest need of a clue bat are in the USA.
2. Shopping. Use as few online shopping sources as possible. You may loathe Amazon, but it is pretty good at keeping your data safe as well as allowing third parties and merchants only enough data to complete a transaction. Ditto for booking.com - it is universally hated by all hotles, but it mitigates your risk when setting up travel.
3. A continuation of 2 - never ever shop trawl for a cheaper bargain outside the "well lit" areas. Google can show as many prices as they like when I search. Stuff 'em.
4. Adblock on all machines, no-script where applicable and a transparent proxy with AV for the whole house.
5. No financial transactions or banking apps on Android, iPhone, etc. Sorry, their security is nowhere near a well maintained Linux box with Firefox armed to the teeth with no-ad/no-script extensions,
6. If available in the country (unfortunately I have seen it only in Eastern Europe), payment of utility bills through a 3rd party payment processor/aggregator which uses 2FA. For example - the local equivalent of PayPal in Bulgaria has had a fantastic (and rather bombproof) system to do that for nearly 10 years now.
You have not deal with Slavic languages - especially Russian. Everything has 5+ meanings and everything is a double entendre. That made the life of censors in USSR lots and lots of fun :) Though even that cannot excuse them for allowing such gems as:
"Our history is a fairy tale, sprinkled with a few decorations of truth" (from this one: http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0081256/)
I bet the poor guy who let that one through got fired shortly thereafter :)
So if the cops are left alone to club, tase, and shoot whomever they want, then the murder rate will go down
The Daily Fail (and itis local equivalent) readership will support it. Martial law tends to cut down crime quite a bit (at the expense of the thing called Freedom which they are unable to grok).
Control group with normal laptop/tablet on-net, no prohibitions.
Group with f***book, tw*tter, instant messaging and email blacklisted, but with allowed internet access (rationale - so they can search on stuff they are being taught).
Group with electronic devices off-net, just for notes taking.
I suspect that the difference observed in the experiment will show up between group 1 and 2 with 3 giving a marginally better improvement in an academic setting (albeit easier to police).
Do whatever you like for years and get any necessary permission in retrospect if someone notices.
Not quite. Do whatever you like for years, then hire a PR consultant.
Seconded.
I have some recollections from an old trip to Finland in early July. I remember swimming and windsurfing off Espo in Helsinki bay which had the water at 24C and the air at 30C with 22 hours of non-stop (albeit a big hazy) sunshine. The only unpleasant part was the ridiculous humidity.
At the same time, the supposedly subtropical Black Sea* was still at freezing cold 16-18C (I was there just the week before going to Helsinki).
*In those days it was nowhere near as polluted and overfished as now so there was none of the positive feedback of algae->better absorb heat from sun->more algae blooms of today.
Conceptually, it's one advantage and then a long list of nonsense.
Conceptually it is one advantage and a long list of engineering and logistics problems to address. Funnily enough 85% of them have existing solutions in railway engineering.
1. What happens if it fails? Same as wit a train - it is no different from a heavily loaded train line like the east or west coast mainlines in the UK. Speed differs, but so does breaking
2. 1:1 pairs, maintenance, etc - that is a trivial dual track design with regular interchanges.
And so on...
No it's not. That might be their official whine, but that system is not designed to deal with Russian missiles
No. You are presenting only what was in the USA media. When dealing with cases like this you need to take what is printed in USA/UK media, what is printed in Russian media and remove all differences. The remaining (usually quite small) amount of information is likely to be true.
In any case, the Russians were extremely happy with the system to be put in place, under one condition - if it is against Iran and North Korea, they would like to cooperate and provide it with live radar feed from their early warning systems in Caucasus (which by the way cover all of Iran) and possibly more radars further East. That by the way was printed not only in their media, but in several Eu newspapers at the time.
Bush said "no way". That immediately defined for them this system as hostile.
Even old Patriot can deal with low-trajectory ICBMs.
In their final approach - yes. If they are not maneuvering (Bulava and its recently tested Chinese equivalent). That is something Patriot can do. Sort off...
In their takeoff phase - not a fecking chance in hell. Patriot has >40 seconds response time from hot. By that time a low trajectory ICBM will be disappearing over the horizon on the other side of the Patriot battery that is supposed to intercept the launch.
For that you need a different class of anti-missile system - something like the David's Sling and other Israeli missile defense components. Even they will have difficulties in this particular configuration as the ICBM is going "away" from them, not towards them so they will be chasing it. A short range ICBM is past Mach 4 by the time an interceptor has launched and is not going towards the launcher. At best it is an overflight, at worst it is away from it.
If you can catch it on the way up
That is what the Shrub and his advisors thought. That Russians will try to do exactly that and will just put more missiles, more expenses, etc - the whole Reagan age race scenario.
They smiled and changed to suborbital trajectories - Iskander, Bulava and most likely the Son of Satan go on a much lower trajectory than USSR ICBMs. As a result USA wasted an ungodly amount of money on interceptor stations which was countered by one battery of Iskanders in Kaliningrad at something like 1% of the cost. Similarly, Bulava and its associated supersonic glider warhead prototypes cost a couple of percent of what USA invested in the reinstatement of Star Wars.
We are now in a reversal of the 80-s scenario. The ones wasting a ridiculous amount of money and not delivering are not the Russians.
What has changed to make the outcome different?
No more tit-for-tat competition. Old USSR bankrupted itself trying to do what USA did - Shuttle program (Buran), gas turbine driven main battle tank (T82), etc - all these projects were a disaster financially and technically.
Putin's Russia has no such intention. It has concentrated on what Russians do best - simple engineering and evolutionary changes instead of gigantic technological step changes.
Examples: T-92 (and the new tank prototype shown 9th of May last year), a full range of new fighting infantry vehicles designed mostly for warfare against militants and based on observing the NATO clusterf*** in Afganistan and Iraq, AA missiles, sub-orbital trajectory ballistic missiles (Bulava), upgrades to the avionics and weapons of anything and everything - Su-24, Su-25, evolutionary (instead of a Raptor/F35 like big bang) step changes from Su-27 to PAKFA, etc.
All of these programs are relatively cheap. They are pocket change compared to some of the money floating around Russia nowdays (even with all the embargos and downturn).
They also have reduced the size of their active "combat deployable in a few hours" army and nuclear deterrent. It is much smaller than it was, but it is now really deployable and it got fangs and claws (that is not my personal opinion by the way - it is Jane's Defense analysis of Syria's "holiday"). It is also still more than sufficient to wipe out half of the planet so why really bother for more?.
1. Stop tracking me. The content I am looking at is the only thing you need to know in relations to what ads you to serve me.
2. Stop serving anything but small text-only ads.
3. Stop any flash, popover, popunders or video ads.
Then I may consider removing ad-block and slightly loosening my default noscript settings. Until then - block 'em all. God will recognize his own.
Looking at the depiction of said worker its label should be "Foxconn Assembly Line Worker".
I like the "KISS"/Bowie series of Icons though. It is Rock and old git like me can understand (pity the meaning of that lightning across the face is lost to the predominant emojii audience).
Based on dealing with fallouts from disks and flash deciding to just stop working wholesale with no prior warning and no SMART indication that it's going to fail... Well... All I can say - they are made for each other.
I'd rather stay with HDS, Samsung and the occasional Seagate (after I have followed complains and blames for a particular series/model for a while and it does not show as problematic). Tosh has also been generally OK lately.
You missed the point.
The perp did it in a city. Germans actually have some serious speed restrictions in residential areas. They are:
1. Quite vicious - actually lower speed limits then the same type of road inside city limits elsewhere in Europe. F.e. - places where for example Czechs ask you to drop to 70km/h, in Germany you get 50. Where Czechs or Hungarians ask you for 50, you get 40 and so on.
2. Policed the way German police polices things.
3. Cameras all over the place. I have been flashed by one of these once. The flashing itself is a penalty - it is bright red, it is right in your face and it blinds you for a split second even in broad daylight. Like someone shooting at you. If you are not shaken after that, you surely will be once you get the "congratulations, you have been framed, now pay". These are also entered into their equivalent of an ANPR database, so even if you are driving a foreign vehicle, you can get pulled over a few months later and on-the-spot fined.
Nope.
Amazon and Paypal are king.
Experian and other carder information thieves get info only when you do a direct purchase. If you do a purchase through a marketplace they only get the info: "bought from Amazon" or "paid via PayPal".
So you can (and probably should) chose your poison. Funnily enough Bezos is actually not particularly forthcoming in terms of selling your data to every scumbag marketeer on the planet. Sure, Amazon uses it itself, but that use is relatively harmless compared to carders' data sales. You are not likely to be targeted for mortgage, insurance, double glazing and other typical "legitimate" scams based on that. PayPal is slightly more forthcoming with its data, but once again as both of them are actual payment processors they funnily enough (due to different liabilities) sell less of the data they have on you than Experian.
I had absolutely the same experience.
If their data is as good as the data going into their anti-fraud service... Well... The only thing I can say about companies buying it for "decision making is": Marketeering scumbags feeding off each other. They all should get whatever Christmas they deserve.
Actually, no, there is one more thing to say - their "knowledge" about is worse than what google has proportionally to the difference in their capitalizations.
This does not solve the root of the problem with "offshore money extraction".
A significant part of the offshore tax arrangements of big companies and 100% for the smaller ones which have offshore dealings is exactly for that reason:
To move money into a jurisdiction where paying to a physical individual involves little or no tax. While it is theoretically possible to ambush that money on the way back when it is paid to an individual who is non-resident in the tax-heaven, this is difficult as there is little or no audit trail to prove that the money is from tax fraud. In fact, once it is offshore the horse has bolted, there is bugger all you can do short of blanket taxing 40% any financial transaction coming from Panama, Virgin Islands, etc.
So anything making it more difficult for companies to move their profits offshore into a tax heaven jurisdiction also results in increased personal taxation rates of the highest tax bracket as a direct consequence. As someone who pays highest tax bracket on income tax where I reside and highest tax brackets on local and council taxes in two countries I am all for it.
In Blighty too.
I regularly see wasps patrolling the spiderwebs in late summer and trying to take out the spiders in my garden. They are nowhere near as successful as some of the subtropical and tropical species (these are specialized spider killers), but still give it a go. Rather not surprising too - with all the pesticides being sprayed around, their primary food source (bees) is nearly extinct so they switch to other alternatives.
Your worrying about the wrong bit.
The picture described in the report is as if two airspeed sensors have gone bonkers, not one. That is a fault which should not be "sign-able off" for a take off.
why the plane behaved like it did That is not the only question. The second question is - why did the captain decide on a take off despite it behaving like it did. I also stay by my opinion that they got lucky here. Why did the airspeed sensors not work correctly is unclear. It is a fact that they did not and landing a "heavy" passenger jet without correct airspeed reporting is in the realm of dice rolling.
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