Posts by DropBear

Re: A lot of self righteous types in today

Now that you mention it - I prefer to avoid shopping from work, so no Amazon, yes. My personal mail I can access any time through my smartphone, but if I use the laptop, it's a webmail interface, and the browser is always set to permanently incognito browsing; I just need to close it. Social media I just flat out don't do. To be fair though, there IS some personal information on that laptop, considering Dropbox keeps a local copy on everything that ever tries to sync with it. Then again, all of it is encrypted with EncFS, which I manually start and enter the password into whenever needed - soooo... given the chance I'd prefer to wipe that cache and de-auth the sync client but ultimately I don't really care who looks at that gibberish, either from work or from the cloud.

Re: We can't we just admit that sandboxes don't work?

It would change largely nothing. You would still be vulnerable to all sorts of things that are supposed to be pure non-executable data, but contain instructions carefully crafted to trip up the parsers that are supposed to display them to you.

Re: Sometimes I wonder...

Probably because you don't typically try to compose Facebook posts while urinating. Neither do I, but admittedly I pay a high price for that - I have friends I could hold much longer conversations with on Facebook or WhatsApp than I can verbally WHILE we're sitting at the same pub table...

Re: Military helicopter & drone collision over Staten Island, US (Sept 21, 2017)

"But drone pilot would have been aware of the military chopper as they are not quiet or discreet, and could easily have dropped his altitude until the heli passed over. Probably lacking brain."

Not so sure about that at all. We have a medical chopper flying over the city fairly often at fairly low altitude coming in for the landing at the hospital (to be honest, I never saw them fly anywhere at any sensible height, even further away, as if they are perpetually hypermiling or something - the sports aircraft that operate out of the nearby sports airfield are flying incomparably higher, even when nobody is jumping out of them).

My point being, the chopper passes literally in a few seconds at that altitude. If I were flying with FPV goggles as a fairly high-flying quad is likely to, by the time I look around and manage to locate the direction the chopper I just heard is coming from, I'm pretty sure it will have already hit me if we're on a collision course. As for dropping, they may have been doing just that - who knows what height that quad was at when the pilot heard the chopper...

"If we are in a simulation then it is generally taken to imply something must be running the simulation. That leads to recursion - as at each higher level something must be running that particular show."

I don't see how that follows at all. That would be true only if we were to posit that existence is only possible in a simulation - where indeed someone must be running a higher level one then for each level - but I don't see why we'd need to go that way. Why would it not be possible for an un-simulated form of existence to simulate another?!?

Re: You miserablists

"Interesting thought experiment for all: Would you be proud to work at Dyson? I bloody would."

To be perfectly honest, past typical hearsay I don't factually know enough about them to base a serious job application on - but if they are indeed like Apple, I certainly wouldn't be willing to work for them for any wage (yes, really). And by "like Apple" I mean "successful mainly via being good at talking easily razzle-dazzled suckers out of their money as opposed to actually delivering tech worth the prices they ask". People who actually have a clue about technology typically don't forgive people who do that sort of thing, regardless of how rich they manage to get or how much the real world seems to validate them financially.

And sure, Isambard Kingdom Brunel may well have been a consummate businessman but coincidentally he was also a remarkably good engineer, and that's why he gets a pass and respect from most of us all around. Had he been just another "never mind the substance, feel the hype" P.T. Barnum, rest assured we'd ridicule him day in and day out too - kinda how Edison is a bit shunned in certain circles these days thanks to his business acumen being arguably a bigger part of his success than his actual tech prowess. Whether I'm right or wrong (which I may well be), that's the "illustrious" company I see Dyson in, and in my book, that only gets them contempt and scathing ridicule. And if there ever was a properly mean, vindictive bastard - I'm it...

Can't speak for the OP, but as far as I know, due to elevator designers not being total numpties, elevators typically get counter-balanced with half of their maximum load, so either full load or zero load are both worst cases vs. the typical half-load which might barely exercise the motor. Not to say that was the case - maybe any elevator motion triggered the problem but they only used it at night for freight...

Re: I was hoping...

...and tricking the boss into saying it by some particularly convoluted logic. Like how TV shows manage to order stuff via Alexa, sort of. But hey - these days I'm just happy top see BOFH is still a thing at all...

A 800x600 window? Luxury! My mythtv box has the same res (hey, analog TV-out...), but I have to additionally remember NOT to switch off the machine when it hangs at every kernel update, because after 40 (yes, FOURTY) minutes it will actually realize I have no FDD then un-hang itself and proceed booting, and that's the only way it will ever boot again...

Okay, as staging support point, sure. But dang - that refuelling diagram broke my brain...

Re: Bah

Actually, I'm looking at the (very few) alternatives for this sort of app, but having it available _only_ via Google Play gives me serious pause - and the author's insistence on that point gives me even more pause, even after having read most of his so-called arguments. This is NOT acceptable, regardless how much fancy hashing tech it has behind it.

My brain has this funny glitch where every time the Essential gets mentioned I start hearing the "bear necessities" sung by Baloo in my head...

See, that's the funny part - you're not the one who gets to decide what is interesting and what isn't. All they need is just "six lines in your handwriting" after all - but you might get lucky, they might pick someone else...

"How would it know to do that, especially if the app accesses the photos as files rather than as images?"

That's just it - no app should access files other than its own unless it's generally meant to handle files or receives access to open certain files directly. An app that just needs access to photos should just receive a string of small image thumbnails (then the selected image in full resolution, if any) from the OS unless it also gets granted access to metadata. To be honest, it's already _hella annoying_ that any app is simply supposed to be able to access _everything_ on the SD...

Re: A three-sun tidal wave!

I think defining what "gravitational energy" is supposed to be would be a good starting point.