Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"Napoleonic law starts from the principle that everything is forbidden."
Huh? What is this "Napoleonic" nonsense? Isn't every single country in the world operated on the principle "everything is forbidden, we just choose to not enforce any of it against you unless you show up on our radar and piss us off"...?
"They do not need to take your passport, what the ruling obliges them to do is to ensure you have authenticated somehow in a way which ties you up to a traceable identity. That is technically trivial."
Wait, what? How exactly is any of that supposed to identify me "traceably"? First off, I have no Facebook account. I do have a Google account but all they have is my phone number. Which is a prepaid card, even if "they" could persuade Google to divulge it to them. And do please consider this is Eastern Europe I'm talking about, not the "how many Stingrays did you say you need?" USofA. Then again, I might decide to log in with a Google account that has not even that much on me. I hope you don't delude yourself thinking email accounts are "traceable". Our McDonalds tries to do something like that using a captive portal nagging you to "register" before you log in - which is not something I'd ever bother to do, they can shove their wifi where the sun don't shine.
You could ask me for my home ISP login credentials - which free wifi hotspots sprinkled around my town, run by my ISP already do - except I never log into any of those specifically because of that. It's none of their business what I do when I'm not at home (or even when I _am_ at home, but that's a different rant). Finally, if you seriously think I'd ever consider whipping out ANY sort of official document in a bar or restaurant to use their wifi... hahahahaha, think again.
Right now everyone is just printing their passwords (if they have one at all) on their menus here, and that won't change any time soon regardless of what gets ruled where. The only relevant piece of kit you'll find anywhere is the first bog standard off-the-shelf commercial router whoever they sent to go get some hardware could get their hands on. Yes, local authorities could push the issue if they wanted. Emphasis on "if they wanted". Specifically, on "_IF_". Do tell, what's in it for them? Yes, you got it, that's exactly how many shits they give.
Significant changes? Until 2020? In four years? Exactly none. Sure, everything will be slightly different, clouds will be even more cloudy and ads will be even more obnoxious, but all in all, significant changes take a decade with things that have this much inertia. Oh, and mark my words - unless they start pushing IPv6 via some new vector we'll still be using IPv4.
Oh, I'd reserve a special level of hell for the fuckers that "dim" the whole page and throw up some ransom demand, be it monetary, ad- or login-related. Generally I just leave and never return but occasionally when leaving is not an option for some reason I just make a point of NOT complying but whipping out a page-editing add-on that lets me point to a page element and disappear it with a click. It usually takes 3-4 clicks to remove the dialog, the dimming courtain, its transparent but still page-obscuring full page parent div and its transparent but still page-obscuring full page parent div, but after that I'm clean through their aggressively pretentious would-be gate keeper.
Hallelujah! Finally, someone who understands blocking scripts with any granularity is simply flat-out not an option if you're actually trying to use any websites at all. None of them will even display, let alone let you navigate. As you say, one either has to put up with this or stop using the internet, full stop.
"There is almost always a combination of script allows that makes a website work without letting it load unnecessary cruft"
Except 99.99999999% of the sites I go to are sites I never saw before nor will again any time soon. Sure, I could spend hours per site _trying_ to painstakingly engineer a recipe that works for each of the less-than-a-dozen sites I visit regularly (and would likely end up having to accept to run every single script they want me to anyway), but those are so small a blip on the total of my browsing that they don't even register.
I actually do sometimes - on those text-only Google ad results (the only kind of ads I ever see), whenever I happen to be actually looking for something explicitly and they seem to be offering it. I don't see anything wrong with that, those ads do meet my "non-intrusiveness" criteria and I don't see why I would purposefully avoid them if they're actually advertising exactly what I'm looking for - if I didn't go to a specific retailer's site directly it means I'm open to reasonable suggestions...
"We used to call this racketeering"
Well, yes and no. There are subtle differences between saying the classical "nice outfit you got here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it" and saying "you might be interested to know we left an unguarded open crate of machine guns and grenades right next to your door - would you like us not to do that?"
I think they are quite aware that they're replaceable - they just figure that as long as they're making small and subtle enough changes most of their current user base will not see a need to move on elsewhere; and they're quite likely right.
Well, being a vampire is a job requirement to get anywhere near the server room (it's a natural habitat for sunlight-averse creatures after all) which is why the safety of the systems involved was never a priority. Unfortunately, the designers seem to have neglected to consider its effects on the hardware itself...
Unfortunately, voting is meaningless until there's a mandatory, valid "none of the above" option on any and every voting form. How exactly the votes falling under it should be processed is up for debate, the only non-negotiable point being that under no circumstances can they be redistributed to any of the original parties present on the form. Until then, all we ever get to do is rationalize away voting for one of the two or more equally horrible options (you don't get to pick any lesser evils - they are not even on the table nowadays, sorry).
"the salesperson reports it to his manager, who phones head office, gets the buyers involved, they chase the manufacturer who consults with Microsoft over the wording of the contracts and hammer out a deal to get OS-less products made, all before lunchtime?"
There's zero need to "consult" or "hammer out" anything at all; in Eastern Europe laptops are routinely sold optionally without an OS (I'm looking at a random site right now: laptops with Win10 - 111, laptops with FreeDOS - 186...). All it would take is some interest on the part of the vendor, they are free to sell all the OS-less hardware they reckon they can...
Contemporary philosophy seems to be simply that there's nothing you can't solve with a big enough hammer, and naturally by being one of the "good guys" because of course "we" are always the good guys and ends always justify the means. *sigh* ...keep teaching that kind of shit and I think we really are screwed.
As Andy Warhol kindly reminded us some things are not meant to be multiplied indefinitely, and as much as it was supposed to be just one of the many ships of the Federation, the Enterprise was certainly one such thing. That, in turn, makes Trek in general uniquely unsuitable for basing an MMO on (the only game that seem to exist nowadays) where nobody can be "the" hero. Yes, if all you want to do is skip from planet to planet, fight some Klingons with your org mates and just be a good little pawn of the federation in general you'll have a grand time - unfortunately, that's not at all what Trek was about. Grand Adventure needs the whole Universe to revolve around YOU which is what MMOs can never do, and thoughtful social commentary needs a painstakingly engineered narrative that contemporary "masterpieces" proud of being open-world sandboxes absolutely, categorically refuse to even consider.
Funnily enough, none of this would be much of an issue to a single player game, but we apparently forgot how to make those a few centuries ago...
Hopefully, nobody will pick up the unknown smartphone and ask "who forgot this here?" during the day and a half it takes the printer to print anything more meaningful than a keychain-sized Yoda head. And the phone's battery won't go flat either after the first two hours, seeing as how it's crunching numbers at full tilt. Nor will anyone find it surprising that, due to the same, the phone is burning hot.
Right there with you, except I haven't even bothered with the second. Oh, and even though I could never really warm up to "Enterprise", I enjoyed their Doc quite a lot - the episode that has him happy to have the ship for himself for a few days only to end up literally on the edge of going nuts alone by the end of it is still one of my favourites... :)
"It's nice to know you have the budget to replace the entire machine when your el-cheapo USB keyboard fails then."
Oh, I suppose he would just have to shear off the cable somewhere and braze on the new keyboard directly to the copper wires...
"Since the article is specifically about how 2016 is 50 years since TOS first aired, you will probably have to wait until 2037 for your Part 2"
Well then why did the article mention season two and three at all?!? We should only talk about those next year and two years from now!
"Unavoidable accident" is just a phrase
Hahahahaha.... wait, you're serious! Hold on, let me laugh harder: HAHAHAHAHAHA....
...I take it you never heard of pedestrian idiots who take sharp 90 degree turns into a crossing never slowing down to check whether you will / can avoid them, having never exhibited any intent to cross beforehand? Or just people suddenly emerging from between cars where they were equally undetectable to LIDARs and human eyes before...? Or ever heard of things like black ice...?
People who think they cannot possibly ever get in an accident simply because they're "cautious" are just as big of an idiot as those who think they cannot possibly ever get in an accident because "they can handle anything".
" Everyone is always "it's best for the majority", but when it's your personal ass on the line it always gets a little different."
Which is why I much prefer selfish assholes like me who simply laugh at such fluff - none of us are actually better, but we're at least honest about it...
"Whether any one individual is a good driver or not, we put our lives in the hands of others who may be less than ideal drivers every day."
Interestingly enough, there are a whole bunch of other circumstances where people "put their lives in the hands of others" with a lot fewer qualms - such as going to a doctor, who might easily kill you without anyone actually realising he fucked up (at any rate, he has to demonstrate astonishing ineptitude to get blamed for anything - otherwise it's just "natural causes" and "complications"; no doctor ever got in trouble for not really giving much of a fuck about what actually happens to you...).
At the very least, robo-cars might exhibit wide awareness and caution, but not actual intelligence or a self-preservation instinct any time soon, which is something most but the stupidest drivers definitely do demonstrate some level of. I do believe that much like with road accidents vs. plane crashes, it won't matter whether robo-cars turn out to be safer than human drivers (make no mistake, all cars could be self-driving and we'd still have fatal accidents daily, even if not nearly as many) - most people will still fear having to trust a black box more than taking their chances driving themselves or letting a trusted person drive (if you're willing to ride with a person you don't trust well... good luck to you and congrats for the Darwin award).
"Adult, fed up with petulant child whining, takes out 3 inch wide leather belt, and gives child deserved ass whipping. Child gets message."
Actually I think by saying "adult" he has the exact same thing in mind, only in reversed roles.
"Clean up you room!"
"No."
"Clean up you room!"
"No."
[...]
"Of course if he is really honest (yeah right) about having an adult conversation, he should then also actually listen to what experts have to say."
Oh nonono, I think you misunderstand - I reckon he means "adult conversation" in the "now listen missy, as long as you live in this house..." sense.
"the amount generated soon grows to fill and exceed that capacity. I don't see this changing anything"
Look harder. And don't conflate the amount of information available for storage clogging purposes with the amount of information required for a specific application. Yes, there's so much information floating around in the world that we can always capture more of it to fill any storage medium - on the other hand, I still remember the time when games couldn't afford to include recorded sound (making do with synth ships like Adlib) and full-motion video was absolutely unthinkable simply due to lack of availability of sufficient amounts of storage. Also, storage needs don't quite scale at the rate memory capacity keeps growing - first, you afford to store digitized music, then you afford to store music losslessly, then you afford to store all the music you'll ever care to listen to - then you're done, music-wise. You don't really need more storage. Sure, you can move on to video, but that has a similar nature.
And beyond all that, one should keep in mind that more storage capacity is not really what this technology is about at all - but rather the elimination of the need for two different kinds of memory in computers. Unfortunately, the fact that I can reliably crash and corrupt Firefox down to an actual snow crash within sixty seconds of loading Google StreetView each and every time I use it does not bode well for the implications of no longer having a more or less "clean" state to reboot from. Server software may well be hardened for long term use but we have absolutely, absolutely no idea how to write user applications that don't crash miserably, sooner rather than later...
"First find your infinitely long wire. Then find another."
Bah, that stuff is easy, but everyone is asking all the wrong questions. What I want to know is given a disaffected railway line, how many amps do you need to pass through your freshly acquired infinite conductors to rip them off the sleepers...?
"A map is not the territory."
Yeah, about that... I never understood what that was supposed to mean. Unless there exist such simpletons who actually believe Melbourne is now somehow magically actually in the northern hemisphere purely because of a map. Or is "a clock is not the time" a thing now too...? Assuming nobody ever saw two different clocks not quite agreeing what the exact time is...? So it needs spelling out one or both of them can be wrong...? How much further into "this bag is not a toy" territory do we really need to nanny ourselves...?
You mean like "Sir you are being hunted"...?
"Can you spill a glass of water, while underwater?"
Well, in this case, yeah, you kinda can. The problem is that unlike cows known to be quite practically spherical, the ISS isn't exactly a point-sized object, yet the "no falling" perfect equilibrium orbit applies only to its centre of mass. Everything that isn't in that single point keeps not falling out of orbit out of sheer determination and, well, due to being attached to the rest of the ISS. Putting it differently, there _is_ gravity inside the ISS too, stuff does fall instead of just hovering motionlessly - albeit really slowly. So dropping an unsecured wrench outside would sooner or later see it drift away too - but you'd likely have lots of time to reach out and retrieve it if you just left it there floating...
.gz and the app won't work? Sigh
"Why would you expect a serious robbery *not* to take a safe unless its so large as to be impractical to move?"
Because if it isn't bolted to the floor* it's called "security theatre" not "a safe", unless you need a forklift to move it (and even then, you should know better).
*if said safe has its own floor, complete with giant-ass submarine-style hatch door weighting many tons, you officially have my permission to not bolt it to anything and still call it a safe. Although you might prefer to call it "a vault"...
"The crowbar's in my bag, though."
Isn't that a bit risqué, though? These days that crowbar is all our most distinguished public servants and keepers of the peace aka the fuzz need to nick you on the spot, for carrying tools you obviously intend to break into the first house you see with, no...? At the very least, make sure you never wear a hoodie...
The article's description of entanglement is not doing truth any favours. You can't "change" any of the entangled entities at will, not even once - all you can do is make a measurement on it, at which point all entanglement does is assure that whatever you would measure on the _other_ one would be related to whatever you got on this one. Influencing on purpose what you get on either end is NOT what entanglement allows you to do. How exactly the entangled entities "tell each other" instantly and at distance what the measurement's results should be is up for debate, what isn't, however, is that entanglement ends the instant you actively manipulate any characteristic of any of the previously entangled entities. There is no "entanglement telegraph", sorry.
Not that I condone molesting anyone with a laser of any kind - but didn't they say the typical modest "laser pointer" class lasers (not the "overkill" version that can pop balloons, mind you!) was limited to that power level exactly because it can't damage the eye before its blink reflex closes it - so to do actual damage you'd have to forcefully keep one's eyes open...?
That's because the High Council of the Illuminati (or maybe the lizard people?) decided to drip-feed revolutionary new stuff to the hoi polloi. "Your generation already got cell phones and the Internet - bugger off, no more new tech for you! You all kick the bucket first, _then_ we can talk about batteries, storage and jetpacks!"
...to notice that nowhere does it say any cryptographic keys were leaked?!? Yes, figuratively, the all-powerful policies that were leaked are a "key" to restricted bootloaders, sure, but why is everybody talking like the actual crypto keys that signed them were leaked? They were not. It's still a failure of Secure Boot of course, and yes, an important secret has become public, arguably making the point the article's title tries to make, but... come on... no keys were leaked.
"I sometimes wonder what he might have come up with, had he been around longer."
A fair question albeit one that I always find amusing - thinking of short-lived geniuses people always tend to assume for some reason that they would have kept on "geniusing" at a steady pace, forgetting that actual evidence suggests sparks of insight are actually mostly fairly solitary events: eg. Einstein certainly wasn't short-lived and while his legacy is impressive, it's not like he kept coming up with another theory of relativity calibre thing every five to ten years...
The more surprising thing is that the other 99 are actually right. Functionality comes first, anything else including security comes second. The best most reliable and secure car is completely useless if it can't actually take you anywhere - yet a horribly insecure one with no ABS or airbags is not, as long as it moves.
At the end of the day, a browser is just a tool, and in a home settings its job is to get you where you want to go, NOT to keep your system intact; it would of course be extremely desirable if it could do that TOO, but that's not the priority. People barricaded into an underground post-nuclear bunker might be remarkably safe, but they sure as hell don't get much done / get to go anywhere.
By all means, let's kill Flash and make browsers as secure as we possibly can - but in the mean time the top priority is to keep stuff working, and it really doesn't matter at what cost.
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