Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
I would have thought that the threat to turn on/off the water flow to a city of 1M+ until all major pipes rupture from hydraulic shock or the threat to dump a few hundred tons of industrial chemicals, sewerage, etc into the nearby river (and call the EPA immediately therafter) are considerably more effective ransom demands than encrypting a hard drive.
1. Based on the reaction - they have won
2. The "We are Charlie" or "We are with Charlie" moment lasted less than the walk down the Champs Elissees yesterday. Looks like the UK politicos in the front row have failed to understand what are they marching for.
Charlie Hebdo == being offensive is not a crime. It is a essential, non-revocable and inseparable part of free speech and democracy. Well, to be honest, I did not expect Mr Cameron and Mrs May to get it.
The ONLY corrective action which needs to be taken after last week is the immediate revision (with the view to revoke most of them) the blasphemy, hate speech and various other laws of the same ilk. While I am sympathetic to the ones being offended, let's face it we cannot draw a universal line (as needed by law) on what offence is permissible and what is not. We cannot regulate how thick skinned we are supposed to be. So being offended inclusive of historic and religious reasons is a normal part of life and the right to offend is a fundamental right.
By the way the revision of laws across the Eu should go as far as an ultimatum to the states in Eu which have a blasphemy law (Ireland, etc) - they are either in without it or out with it. We cannot have the moral ground to critisize Taleban abroad when we allow them locally.
It is really sad - it took only a day for the politicos to join the proverbial Christian, Jew and Mulsim from the Charlie front page cover "Charlie Hebdo must be veiled!". Oh well, to be honest, I did not expect anything else.
Quote: they actually put users at risk by publishing code that exploits the issue
1. The quality of software development employed by your average crime syndicate located in the Wild East is on an order of magnitude higher than the quality of the average big corporation software development located in the not so Wild, but Warm and Humid South-East.
2. So the value of protection from not releasing the code is NIL. The description (or often the patch itself) is sufficient for an average Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian (or anywhere around there) software developer contracted to a crime syndicate to produce a working exploit in a few days (tops). In fact, I know people who are capable of doing so in an afternoon between two espressos (with no description, purely on the basis of patch analysis).
3. The value of the exploit as a working test case is priceless. Anything else aside, the "developers" (quotes intended) in big software corps located in the "sweaty" part of the word look at testing and testcase writing as a job for lower caste subhumans (I have had "developers" threatening to quit when being told that they have to test and write tests for their code more than once). So they are _NOT_ going to write a test exploit (even if they were qualified to do it). The availability of a test exploit allows the current test staff in your average large corp to test the fix. Otherwise they would have been unable to do it.
So the disclosure style and substance are spot on. It is the timing which is idiotic. Even google itself does a partial lock-down over Xmas. This time should have been accounted for in the "90" days.
Yes and no.
Depends if the release date is reasonable. Not patching stuff for years after it was first reported (as in some 2000-es Oracle vulns) is unreasonable.
109 days instead of 90 is actually reasonable especially in this case.
There is a mandatory freeze and do-not touch period in most institutions around Xmas. While the 90 days mandatory disclosure is somewhat reasonable, the lack of adjustment for the 15th of December to 5 of January is extremely counterproductive.
So in this specific case I agree with Miscrosoft (which does not happen that often especially on security).
If it is a computer at all. Based on the console style it looks like a verbatim clone of some piece of old Russian military equipment.
Some of these are analogue. Also, while (even if it is a computer) it may have a fraction of the computing power of a Pi it will probably be alive and kicking after the EMP from a nearby 300Kt airburst. The Pi will not be.
All of this if they Norks did not f*** it up while cloning. The way they did trying to clone RedHat (or whatever else they cloned for their distro).
You mean re-started lashing, right?
It took a case brought by Italian parents in front of the Eu court of Human Rights and SIX (yes, SIX!!!) years after losing this case for UK to ban corporal punishment in schools. The UK government also defended the case to the last minute by all means necessary.
My SWMBO pinched Roald Dahl's autobiography from the daughter during the hols. She is still depressed after reading the description of systematic, vicious and unrelenting abuse which was permeating the UK education system in those days. All I could tell to her on that was: "Well, I have told you more than once that 'The Wall' is a documentary".
Quote: Highly questionable research practices in microbiology labs,
1. Trans-species plasmid transmission is extremely rare (and difficult).
2. The most common bacteria used in a lab are Gramm negative B. Subtilis and E. Coli, not any of the really nasty antibiotic resistant species from the Staph and Strep family which are Gramm positive
3. Going back to 1. If you manage to show an antibiotic resistance plasmid transmission from G- to G+ species in the wild you can probably ask for a Nobel straight away.
4. I used to play with both bacteria, yeast and cell cultures for a living (and as a part of a degree) for years. Even in the "Darkest, Deapest Eastern Europe" (the place where "lab assistants" for UK and USA professors tend to orginate ya know) waste goes into the bleach bucket _AFTER_ it has been through the _HEATER_. The latter is because we (as I used to be one before going to IT), the "cheap" lab assistants are f*** lazy and hate to scrape agar from petris. It is much easier to melt it out so it was a standard practice to use a "dirty" sterilizer for the purposes of melting out all the crap into a tray to go into the bleach bucket. With all due respect if _THAT_ was the origin for antibiotic resistant species we would have all been dead by now. Surive steam at 160C, then bleach? Yeah... B***cks...
As far as 2-3 weeks course (in your point 1), you are talking syphils, other treponemas, asperghillosis, yeast infections, lime disease or other "specials". You are definitely not talking staph, strep and various bacterial "colds". These are either dead within 72 h (we treat them for 72 more just to be sure) or resistant so 3 weeks are as useless as 1. In fact, these (3 week or repetitive prescriptions instead of changes) are to be blamed for at least some cases.
The few good points he has made are not sufficient to result in the summary conclusions.
Scrums suck, no doubt about it. I have yet to see a scrum that is not a waste of time.
Test driven development as used in most companies does so too because in most cases developers write tests to test a piece of code and NOT THE FAILURE CONDITION BEHAVIOUR. However test driven development does not suck as a general rule - it is doing it wrong which sucks.
Other elements of agile - retrospectives, etc are quite useful when done properly.
Quote: Yep. Vauxhall / Opel cars operate exactly the same. Whoever sold the car to voland's right hand obviously didn't explain that method of releasing the brake - the dealer that sold my car didn't show the other way to me. The car will do both though I've yet to see a use case for the 'manual' method.
Rented car, figured it myself. As far as the use case - try driving in central/northern Italy or Spain. Somewhere in a city with 15% hills and try joining traffic uphill. Bonus points for doing so with a proverbial Sicilian driver stuck up your a*** behind you leaving only 15cm between yours and his bumper.
Quote "Seemed like a brilliant idea."
Bollocks. Now try to join into traffic from a 15 degree gradient side street uphill. With someone behind you and minimal visibilty (something quite common in Spain, Italy, Greek islands, Dalmacian coast, etc). This is not just "uphill start". It is uphill start with "hesitation" which is an essential part of driving there.
With a normal manual handbrake you can easily nudge out, see someone driving across, stop, wait, nudge, stop wait then join on the 5th attempt. Your hand is on the handbrake, clutch is down, other foot on the gas. You do not move any of them between controls. Trivial with manual . In fact it is a mandatory driving exam exercise in a lot of countries (I had to do it 20+ years ago when learning to drive). Trivial with automatic too - the gearbox does it for you (slipping back on a hill will light up a gearbox fault).
With a magic handbrake? The moment you depress the clutch it deactivates so you are now committed to behaving like the proverbial german car driver - accelerating the Me109e onto an attack vector and the other drivers be damned. You cannot abort "the attack" without _MOVING_ a foot or a hand to another control. This is why it is a bad idea. Utterly stupid design - both Audi and GM.
Trust me, it can be worse - a button activated handbrake on manual which will work only if you put your foot on the footbrake so you can no longer "start off handbrake uphill".
The imbecile in GM which put that on the new Opels should be made to drive in mountains for a week as a punishment. I was in a place where 10% gradient is considered "flat" last week and it was "fun". Trying to join into traffic coming uphill from 15% gradient side street with such "hand brake" was definitely not a rewarding experience.
As far as push buttons for gears for auto, the UI for that has settled for automatic long ago as well. There is no point to reinvent the wheel - BMW M series and Daihatsu F-Speed have shown the "right" button based gear shift decades ago.
FFS, either run WiFI in a major conference or interview for example the IETF network support team. Trying to run WiFi with device numbers in excess of 100+ per AP and device densities in excess of 1 per m^2 is actually very hard.
While at it, Mariott, Hilton and especially Hyatt WiFi including conference areas indeed sucks rocks sidewize through a thin straw. Major conference support teams (IETF, IEE, etc) usually spend a week or so fixing it before every event. After that it works like clockwork for some time until some cretinous imbecile decides to "improve" it by jacking all APs to max xmit power and setting them to auto-channel selection.
Err... Knowing how much some teens and pre-teens (and adults for that matter) fidget during even the smallest mental exertion... I have some doubts here...
This also means that the next gen polyugraph can now by bypassed using copious amounts of ritaline... Interesting...
Most importantly - it is roughly the price for which you can get a proper _UPGRADEABLE_ AMD A4 based HP which can take 16G RAM (specs on HP site lie to undersell the kit - all A4 systems can take 8G+), has proper video subsystem and not an Intel joke, can take a proper hybrid or SSD hard drive and can be used for real work offline.
In fact, I bought the one I am typing this on for 245 or thereabouts (discounted because of a scratch on the lid). It was a fairly decent Linux machine even without the upgrades. With a 16G upgrade, spare battery and a hybrid drive it is on par with a 600£+ business spec laptop.
China is the oldest continual civilization
Err... Bollocks. Multiple dark ages, multiple empire collapses, multiple history rewriting too. By that standard the modern specialists in accounting fraud residing on the south eastern edge of Europe are a part of the Ellinic civilization and their neighbours across the local pond are continuing the traditions of Chehiz Khan and Tamerlan empires. Or maybe not.
A more apt description is "the oldest continuous history rewriting for ideological purposes". Including now. There were great civilizations on the territory of modern China. The region as a whole however is renowned for one thing: innovation not surviving.
Just one example: they had fleets, naval power, ability to navigate in open sea long before Europeans. They did not just lose it (as many other discoveries), they carefully went around and erased any mentioning of it from their history books to ensure that this moment of greatness is not remembered. As a result we do not even know what the ship design was today. It was not the "junk as we know it" - they were according to the few remaining records 2-3 times bigger than Santa Maria. Nina and Pinta. And this was done again... and again... and again... After all - it is difficult to claim greatness when quite obviously you are sh... compared to your progenitors.
Quote: " the only country they're interested in nuking".
Are you trying to tell us that the conflict on the chinese border is settled and so is the Tibet situation? I do not think so.
If anything they are for the "other" neighbour... The one that _ALSO_ has nukes, ICBM, submarines, aircraft carriers and a BIGGER GDP.
Dunno about man-rating of the launch system. The first stage looks like it passes the tests for a successful ICBM with a global reach in its own right. If it walks like an ICBM, it quacks like an ICBM - it is an ICBM.
It has a suitable payload already as well. Curiouser and curiouser... What's next, China developing SDI? They have shown anti-satellite weapons already so that is not far off...
Here's hoping that this doesn't (further) neuter creativity within the mainstream movie industry
What creativity are you talking about? Creativity is a dirty word in a world where a director team which is known to be creative (Andy and Lana Wachowski) is being publically chastized that they have done something original instead of going with an existing franchise - it was all over the tweeter feed when they released the trailer for Jupiter Ascending.
By the way - cheezy or not when it comes out in February I will be going to see it out of principle - because it is original and not a piece of regurgitated Marvel vomit. I will probably get the Interview on Lovefilm out of principle too. Anything else aside, the right of parody, humour and free speech should be supported.
It is hangover. It cures it.
Thisi is a statement of the fact which has been established through extensive experimentation during my first couple of years in a University in a country where you could get tripe soup in some small eateries here and there (by now mostly extinct).
As far as indigestible, it is perfectly digestible - if it has sat for a couple of hours in milk and after that has been boiled for about the same amount of time the average Yorkshire Grandma boils vegetables.
They are bonding much larger number of channels. Modulation plays a role, but not as much. The big changer here is that with this cable is morphing from predominantly linear TV (channel) delivery mechanism into a data delivery mechanism. Cable ops are now expected to start delivering more and more of their content over IP as this frees channels used for content that nobody is watching on a particular HSFC strand at a particular time.
Badly.
Even if the economics did not affect it, the current sanctions bill awaiting Obama's signature is likely to cause complete termination of any cooperation on any project anywhere - basically, we will be back to Andropov's days.
It is also likely to drag Europe back into recession too. Ditto for China, at which point we will be back to 2007 economic state if not worse. Actually worse - that was a paper crash, while this one will be a fully blown structural.
The really bad part of it - Putin emerged out of the previous crisis like this - economics + Chechen war (a lot of which was actively sponsored by the West too). The Chechen war was The Day Democracy Died for Russia. If we did not sponsor "freedom fighters" that took bus hostages in Southern Russia on a weekly basis, used pregnancy ward patients as human shields and dead-man-switch rigged schools... Well... things may have developed differently over there. We are reaping what we sawed. Literally.
I would not like to think what will emerge now and frankly he was spot on in his interview at the 20 summit in Melbourn - some people are playing with fire without understanding the full consequences of what they are doing.
@h4m0ny
Solar is nice in a stable climate in a location where you have sunshine at a good angle 300 days a year. Solar sucks brick sidewize through a very thin straw the moment mother nature decides to throw toys out of the pram.
Solar did not produce even 10% of its projected capacity in any of the installations around Southern/South Eastern Europe this year because the rain started in March and stopped last week - on the 12 of December. This is in a region which is supposedly optimal for solar (up to 300 days of sunshine in some locations).
So the idea that solar will rescue us if climate change (warming or not) continues is a delusion because we do not know where to put it. We put it in a location which was supposed to deliver and it "delivered" this year. Nicely. A NIL by ZILCH squared worth of electricity.
@ToddR
I live in the UK. I just happened to be in Southern Europe in summer and last week and frankly, the Somerset levels winter of 2013/2014 pales compared to what is going on there at the moment. You have flooding even on hills. The underground water level everywhere is equal to surface level including places that usually see 250-300 sunny days a year.
There is another reason here too. It just does not work if nature goes haywire.
Let's see how renewables fare against the backdrop of what we have this year in continental Europe. Let's take Southern and South Eastern Europe, shall we? Sunshine for 6+ months a year, perfect for solar, nice steady breeze along coasts, perfect for wind, etc. Some agricultural surplus for renewable fuels too.
So how does this look this year as an example of climate change. This year the rain started in March and stopped last week. There was one sunny week - in August. Rain every day, every second day an inch of rain, every week at least one deluge with several inches at a time.
Solar - you gotta be kidding.
Biofuels - you gotta be kidding too. Last week I drove on a road between what used to be two sunflower fields for the last 20 years (used for biofuel in the last 10). The water was draining off one paddy field (looking like Vietnam) into another across the road in a nice steady 5 cm sheet. That was on a hill by the way, the ones further down looked like a lake.
Wind - well, that may produce something, maybe. But that is just one reneweable and a flimsy one too. Goes to show - if nature decides to start toys out of the pram ALL of our renewable strategy is immediately OUT of the window.
There _IS_ a renewable that can be made to work and one which has enough energy to run the whole Earth civilization for the foreseable future - it is the world oceans thermal gradient. However, we do not have a clue on how to exploit it and we are not investing into figuring out how to exploit it. So as long as we are not doing it, we might as well stick with something we can build to withstand Nature being pissed off - Nuclear (do not point Fukushima at me, that was _NOT_ built properly, other Japan nuclear stations with correct designs shrugged off the tsunami).
Once you have established that the chain/hotel is OK - yes.
If you are going into unknown territory, Booking.com is the best choice out there. It is not rigged like yelp or tripadvisor, the review score + review contents are a fairly good gauge on what you are going to get. It is a quantum leap compared to Opodo, Xpedia and any other of the hotel brokers that predated them. You can find hotels even in the most remote backwater too.
There is a reason why they have become a near monopoly - they deliver something which the customer likes (and the hotels not so much). As far as price parity - Amazon does the same by the way. It is the same conditions as the Amazon marketplace. There is a way around it too - loyalty rebates (though trowing an Eu competition sueball seems to be easier).
The key element of EasyPricing is dynamic demand driven pricing. That works well with airlines, hotels, car hire and long range bus services because they have a natural availability constraint.
It does not work with trains period. Short range/commuter trains are packed until they bulge to the sides so no way to operate skin yer hide pricing as there is no way to price gouge more than is already being price gouged (unless you put into the network at least 4 times the current capacity). There is just no point (and no way) to try to charge 32£ for a weekly season ticket bought half a year in advance vs 400£ for one bought on the day. You can (and rail companies do) charge 400£ throughout. You decant a pint of blood and a first born and pay it.
Long range trains nearly everywhere in the world run under capacity. The very few exemptions which are long range _AND_ have a capacity constraint (hello Eurostar, Elipsos, etc) operate "skin yer hide" pricing already and there is no way they will allow anyone else to operate the same route.
TLDs should not be subject to a single country law, period. International law, international treaties - yes. Single specific country - no.
And I am not even going to comment to applying hillbilly village (aka US State) law to this.
In any case the correct precedent is elsewhere - maritime. You can put _ANY_ ship under arrest for unpaid bills. You however are _NOT_ entitled to confiscate the ship's flag or all ship flags of a particular country of registration. Similarly, you cannot just go and confiscate let's say the Liberian, Panama or other small country ship registry either (despite the fact that a lot of them are actually operated mostly out of New York and London, not out of their countries).
Not if the order is fulfilled. Then it becomes interesting.
F.E. When United cocked up their pricing algo a few years back they honored their tickets. Under similar circumstances a few years ago another airline (which we can safely call Scumbag Air) did not. They should not have been allowed by consumer law, but large companies in the UK can generally get away with mass murder if they want to. Small ones - not so much.
The problem this time is with companies which have taken the AWS economy to its ultimate extreme - their shop front is AWS, their payment is AWS and their _FULFILLMENT_ is A(W)S too (the mechanical turk, warehousing and logistics). So the orders were fulfilled before the owner could do a thing. Outsourcing your core business without leaving a _SINGLE_ control point - gets you every time, all the time. It is not a question of will, it is a question of when and frankly, I am finding it a bit difficult to commiserate here - you get whatever Christmas you deserve.
Actually, I hate dynamic pricing. When suppliers try to game the system for their advantage,...
That is OK, provided that you can play the game too. The problem with UK is that unless the seller is a small company they can wiggle out of a dynamic pricing cockup. F.E. Ryanair did a while back. So did Tesco and a few others. It is small companies that suffer in cases like this.
In fact, this is something where I agree 100% with some of the small Eu regional airlines which have completely abandoned their earlier experiments in dynamic pricing - it is not a game which a small player can (and should) play. If the pricing algo cocks up you cannot absorb the costs so you might as well (grudgingly) accept lower margins and lower revenues, but stay alive instead of maximizing and taking the risk of going bankrupt on a cockup.
I heard the same from a couple of blokes on the plane yesterday - it is 15year old IBM mainframe rebadge by Lockheed.
I ended up on a plane brought in "manually" half-way from a divert to Charles De Gaulle. Funnily enough, the people guiding it took a considerably more optimal path - the 320 cut in across Croydon and leveled onto approach somewhere over south London instead of taking the usual lumbering scenic route over all of London.
The pandemonium at LHR was complete - the few planes coming in to land on manual guidance could not unloaded. The few planes being unloaded could not get their luggage off the plane because the luggage transport was full of bags for the planes scheduled to depart. You name it.
In any case - as most mainframe based systems it looks like it has an over-reliance on the mainframe never failing and no true primary-to-backup fallback. Mainframes fail very very rarely, however once they fail, you pay for the fact that the system was designed without system level resilience. Just like in this case.
High power lasers tend to heat up the atmosphere on their way. This provides significant (and non-linear) beam attenuation limiting them to a close-counters weapon within the Earth atmosphere.
Overall, in the battle of gun vs laser I will always bet on the gun. Especially with the "rail" prefix on it. There is f*** all a laser (or a close defence cannon) can do against a hailstorm of unguided lumps of metail falling on it at Mach 7 fired from 300+ miles away. It is not that much different in space by the way (though there particle beams may have a chance too). Ditto for orbital weapons - a salvo of kinetics hitting something at re-entry velocity is no different from a small nuclear strike. Delivering the same amount of firepower with laser is simply not feasible - the atmosphere will dissipate it.
What all the stories omit is that the Chemistry dept was across the street from The Eagle and the "analysis" of the X-rays was taking place in the evening there. All experimental protocols, etc omit a key variable - the number of pints it takes for the images to do a double helix in your head.
In any case - nuts as his opinions may be, he is entitled to them and the way he is being treated for them is not cool. Pity it takes Gasprom to secure his pension.
With all due respect if an ambulance is called to a place where I have smashed myself to a point where I cannot call it, I would actually _WANT_ it to have my full medical record handy - correct blood, correct list of allergies and intolerances, etc.
If the call is with just "location, car, fuel type" it is completely useless, thank you.
The system is idiotic as designed. What it should do instead of having a car GSM phone is to use paired user phone(s) (something that can be identified and opt-ed in to match to correct medical records) to place the calls instead. The relevant functionality is in every bluetooth car stereo already - all you need to do is to hook it up to the airbag activation circuit.
Quote: Shouldn't that only get the satnav manufacturer into trouble if, as the article states, the law does not cover those receiving information.
Actually most SatNav software on sale in Eu will not display camera warnings in France and if memory serves me right in Switherland for this exact reason without you going in and tinkering with the settings.
Law is an ass and napoleonic law doubly so - it _DOES_ not leave the magistrate _ANY_ freedom of interpretation as in AngloSaxon law. This is a double-edged sword as if there is no offence specified there is no way for the judiciary to engage in creative interpretation and sentencing as they do in the land of the Common Law. However, if there is an offence (as in this case) they have no choice, but to administer the assigned punishment which they did. C'est la vie.
It is legal because there was no test case to prove it illegal.
There needs to be a test case. Even if taken by a lawyer on a pro-bono basis (not likely), there are still expenses to be had so someone needs to start dangling a cup on one of the public financing sites.
So I concur, I am more likely to walk of a cliff than wear this.
Assuming the Empire was overthrown you are still looking at at least Tie Advanced or Tie Defender there. As far as nearly any interpretation of the Star Wars universe in games, etc is concerned the Fighter was obsolete shortly after the beginning of the Rebellion when the Rebels deployed X-Wings instead of the ancient Z95 Headhunters.
Err, try disarming an opponent with a short (or long for that matter) sword with the standard twisting + "take the blade" (easiest starting from 6th). If the sword would have had a "magic cut through everything" guard that would have been "your wrist just went missing" moment. Granted, the technique is useful only against a much weaker opponent, but... none the less...
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