Re: half humans fault
Nono, half-halfling. One quarter kobold, you know...
4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"air your concerns about this obvious failing by NASA"
Frankly I'm not all that convinced that NASA's assessment regarding the origin of of the spots is based on anything more educated than "well what else could they be?" - which doesn't mean they're not exactly just that but isn't an exactly convincing argument either.
Pardon me but since when does being inside a "TV cabinet" mean the same thing as being inside a "television"?!? Not the least because getting inside a modern flat TV would be nonsensical, while getting inside an old CRT-based one would require nothing short of a contortionist. Hiding in a piece of furniture is a lot more understandable, even if hardly any comfier.
"Lima or liar?"
That might actually matter were it not for the fact that the English translation of the "totally open source" bit is "we really intend to make it open source at some point in the future, honest! Please stop bugging us about any information until then!". Also, the fact that the "$9 computer" is actually $29 shipped and the crew is apparently intentionally ignoring the 10001 "at least let me buy several of them at once with that kind of shipping charge" cries does not bode well.
"originally the founders intended for patents to encourage innovation and people building on each other's ideas"
I have a very hard time trying to imagine how any such disclosure is supposed to encourage people building on it, considering all it tells you is "this is how you're NOT ALLOWED to do this - unless you're willing to pay me" - which, as we well know, nobody ever is prepared to unless there's absolutely positively no other way to do "this".
All a patent does is artificially exclude everyone but the first to arrive from the low-hanging fruit, regardless of whether or not any number of them would have been quite able to reach it on their own. Forcing them to either pay up simply for not being the first or try for the higher-hanging fruit is certainly not "efficient" either way, not to mention that fruit might not even be there at all - rest assured, if it is, and it's so damn incredibly compelling, it will be reached without artificial prodding.too.
This has nothing to do with innovation, it has everything to do with a mad dash to stuff as much fruit in your pocket as fast as you can to scurry it away from everyone else. I feel no obligation to assist you with that - I'd rather eat some of it myself instead, especially considering that without a patent me eating that fruit still leaves it there for everyone else.
Just kill it with fire. From orbit.
MakerBot moved too fast with untested technology thought they could just keep selling at a price an order of magnitude higher than the market norm without offering any obvious advantages and that's why it was forced to cut 20 per cent of its staff. FTFY.
"...making it possible to develop finished products straight from a printer..."
3D printing as we know it today will never, ever be able to compete in actual production simply because of the ginormous slowness of the process. One-offs are a different thing, but that's hardly the same as a "finished product".
Right - that's not how you retro-game with style! The proper way is digging up an actual Speccy then jacking the tape input to your smartphone's headphone output and have it play back whatever you want to load at crystal crisp quality - "tape loading error" is not invited to the party...
To be fair, if I had a penny for every time I wished Windows would just stop executing any process that hasn't terminated within 5 seconds from shutdown I'd be filthy rich. As it is, I never get to see my laptop actually power off (eventually) when I leave - not even an angel could stick around for that long, even if seemingly nothing at all is open anymore. Anyway, I find the concept of relying on system shutdown to save one's otherwise unsaved work exceedingly curious to say the least. No program, ever, should wait until it's terminated to save anything it has to save - nor should any human ever rely on that.
I look forward to the first trial where a legal whiz-kid asks the gubmit-org-of-the-day to prove beyond any doubt that by keeping the secret-mcguffin-of-the-day secret, they can ensure that NO lives are in ANY danger anywhere. Yes, that includes bricks falling from rooftops and the Vogons showing up to disintegrate Earth, no matter how remote the possibility. And if they CAN'T do that, get the case (and any future similar ones) summarily throw out with extreme prejudice.
That's a two-way highway and what you're trying to do is ride the dividers in the middle of it.
On the one hand, anything is mundane and trivial for someone who has lived with it all his/her life, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's no reason one should be expected to spend one's life busy being awestruck by the sheer genius of the wheel, running water, lightbulbs or indeed airplanes or mobile communication. Appreciating that they're all thoroughly remarkable is one thing, continuously acting as if they're pure witchcraft is another (and thoroughly dumb). Fear not, people will still be appropriately awestruck when they see the first teleporter, replicator or warp-capable spaceship.
On the other hand, anyone can play at the "wondering at the marvels of whatever" game if we get down to it, we don't even need any technology (or indeed humans at all) for that - it's easy enough to be awestruck by the way clorophyll works, or DNA does, or how a few numbers with specific values result in all that incredible stuff forming and twirling around in space, the mere proportions of which justify getting wonderstruck all on their own.
But to simply lament that people don't walk around perpetually baffled by stuff that may have been interesting or new at one time for YOU but has been in existence for most or all of their lives is farcical at best. Maybe next time you'll get hauled around half the world instead of the direct route by a greedy cabbie you'll be busy admiring the wonders of the internal combustion engine instead of raising a stink - but somehow I doubt it. In the mean time, I'll be complaining about my drink, thankyouverymuch.
"It's when the cowled man looks like he's carrying a scythe that you really, really need to start worrying"
I suppose even that depends a lot on the specific circumstances...
To be honest, in specific Romanian context, all my cards are chip-based - every bank around here decided at some point in the last few years they definitely want us to carry new chipped ones (they still do have the mag-stripe of course...). Still, I'm wondering how secure all that is considering all one needs to empty any of those cards online is the card number (printed on the card) and the CVV2 code (printed on the card)...
I got uneasy and started racking my brain where else did I see this "have one more than the last N values the system checks and denies" scheme, then I remembered - certain printers refuse to use the last (chipped) toner cartridge even if you refill it / reset it / whatever successfully, because they store its read-only serial number (and that's stored in the printer not in the cartridge so you can't just reset it) - so obviously, people just use TWO sets of cartridges because only the last serial is remembered. Yeah, life is strange...
"Redirecting surfers to a website under hacker control is rather more serious, because this sort of thing can easily be used to spread malware."
I don't see how "merely" defacing a website is "rather less serious" in terms of risk, considering once one has the ability to upload his own index.html, there's nothing preventing one to also attach some malware to it, whether that too gets uploaded the same way or hosted somewhere else.
Idea? Business plan? Nah. That's myth no. 11 right there for you. What you actually need to succeed is the combination of a tech-savvy geek nerd STEM aficionado and a people-savvy vicious sociopath college dropout business professional (at least in the tech biz) - oh, and a s##tload of luck and just the right circumstances. After all, quite obviously not everyone can deliver all that raw talent and back-breaking hard work that it takes to succeed, like, say, Justin Bieber can...
"Meanwhile I will help you out with some Internet"
Much obliged, although to be fair all I've found there is a fellow awfully enamoured of the sound of his own voice - desperately trying to appear knowledgeable recounting a bunch of security trivia any interested party would be aware of by now - who's entire point (if he has one at all, still can't quite tell) seems to be that there's no such thing as perfect security. Well, d'oh, mate... -->
Nonsense! They have this whiz-bang new market strategist at the helm who will certainly sort things out - granted, the bloke is freakishly short of stature and there are rumours he has been stealing underpants in the past for some unknown reason but that is surely just malicious gossip...
Indeed - to those people who think there's some mythical, rigid order of "hunting-gathering -> inventing fire -> learning to read/write -> flushing toilets -> library of Alexandria -> walking on the moon -> congrats, you're now qualified to use a cell phone" I have only this to say: "You know nothing, Jon Snow..."
"These days the only people who use it (Iridium) are on the US government payroll"
...or indeed anyone not living constantly within a city/town and/or straying off the major highways who still values being able to contact other people when needed. I've seen even lowly boiler technicians carry these as even only a few miles from a major city it is exceedingly easy to wind up in a remote-ish village without usable GSM coverage, needing some tech detail about a specific boiler you're trying to coax back into service (and for the record, the firm wasn't paying the bill - it was a personal device bought out of necessity)...
Except the part that no real-life process follows exponential law for more than a transitory phase - Moore's law is probably the most enduring example, but it's not exempt of hitting a brick wall at some point either (arguably already has). You simply never get anywhere near the point where "all of land gets covered with railway tracks" and he seems to have a problem grokking that.
Data may not have intrinsic value, but it certainly does have a value one is prepared to pay to acquire it and another value one is prepared to sell it for. And the millisecond I assert my price of selling my private data to you is exactly infinity dollars that data becomes priceless - and that's as fucking REAL a price as any other, considering you can't have that data unless you're prepared to pay that price. Simples.
The smarts here are provided by MythTV.
...which will probably stop working with YouTube equally promptly at the switch-off, and may or may not start working again (real geeks don't watch YouTube since you can't do it on the command line prompt, therefore the number denoting its priority in the 'fix it' queue probably has over a hundred digits, Beetlejuice style). Even if it does, it will likely require an upgrade to the latest MythTv which will promptly break the rest of the things that were still kinda-sorta working on my box after half of the functionality I managed to get up and running got nuked by the previous two upgrades.
I found that a good Logitech Harmony Remote (When properly setup, which IS a bit trickier then they make it out to be!), is generally MORE THAN capable of taking on that lot
Too bad it tends to cost an arm, a leg and two dozen kidneys while still not having any way to configure it that doesn't involve "the cloud". Oh, and then the "Activities" button flakes out on you, which is the only one you can't reassign and also absolutely CAN'T use the bloody remote without (integrated metal dome switch under a piece of flexible PCB - lemme see you DIY fix that one!). That dust periodically gathers _under_ the LCD cover is just the icing on the cake I suppose. Yay, from a "satisfied customer"...