Posts by JLV 2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
I suspect that even PETA is not really expecting to have the game changed.
(cunning plan) making this unreasonable request means media coverage, leading to some people, apparently not us robust commentards though, feeling guilty about bacon.
Foiled!
Given the specific nature of this data it should have been extremely well protected. I mean you hear how some F35 design data might have gone missing. Big deal, potentially, if there is a hot war with someone who got that data. This stuff is presumably highly defended.
However, OPM info is not just _potentially_damaging. Anyone who has it wanting to coerce or turn US govt employees can use it right away, no need for a war. Think back about the Cold War and all the spying going on in those days. This would have been the jackpot, for decades. In a fallback they can always turn it loose for identity theft - for profit or destabilization.
People up and down OPMs IT org should be _fired_ over this. Not _just_ top managers, also any techies/mgmt in a position to remediate/mitigate but incompetent enough to let it happen. The only real excuse if points where it can truly be shown to be a flagged budget/resource shortfall - then that axe should chew its way up the relevant management, from the levels where spending authority starts, going up.
Not scapegoating, no, but rooting out incompetence, yes. "Pour encourager les autres"
Stalin, like Hitler, had a fetish for edge-based defense. Their whole idea was to repel enemies on the perimeter and not give one inch of sacred Russian soil. It would therefore make sense to have everyone at the borders. Also it might make sense as well to station lots of troops in Ukraine - Soviet induced famine in the 30s probably meant a certain lack of political enthusiasm by the locals. Maybe - speculation here - even reliable NKVD near Moscow and potentially mutinous troops further away? - he seems to have been a grade 1 paranoid and the 37 purges were recent.
Stating, as a fact, rather than as a possible, but highly uncertain conjecture, that Russia was planning a 41 invasion, is wrong. 44 or 45? You might be right. 41, no. You can dredge up all the troop positioning info you want, but that remains speculation based on facts that could be interpreted differently. While Soviet historians in the 40s and 50s had plenty of motivation to tweak history and explain away why Uncle Joe could not possibly have been as spectacularly wrong as he was.
To return to the original article, several prominent members of the French Communist Party got expelled in 39-40 when they spoke against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when that became public. And in the interest of evenhandedness towards "nice" countries, wasn't there recently a case of lese majeste in Thailand where the convicted was also prosecuted for citing a recognized historical fact?
>Stalin would have attacked him around the winter of 1941.
No. Read up on the early days of the Barbarossa campaign. The Russians were totally caught with their pants down. It took forever for them to react appropriately to the Nazi attack. Now, I have no doubt that Stalin hadn't suddenly become bosom buddies with Hitler. But his exact long term intents are secrets he took to the grave - maybe he would have screwed Adolf later, but he probably thought he would do it much later, on his terms. In 41 it was all about getting along with the Nazis and avoiding a casus belli.
To be fair, most of WW2 was won on the Eastern front, with Russian blood. But it was despite, not thanks to, Stalin. Even Stalingrad was a victory despite him - German-based spies, not believed to that date, had told the Kremlin of the coming offensive. And his generals somehow managed to convince dimwit that he could not afford another defense-in-place fiasco with Vyazma-level losses. Hence the tactic of giving ground till Stalingrad where Russian numbers finally counted.
You have to be pretty special to believe any ethics shortcomings and desinformation in Western governments is comparable to the crap Putin and his gang are pulling off in their own country. Including this particular anecdote, but also political assasinations, invasion of neighboring countries (remember Georgia?) who are scared shitless. And an incredible level of corruption - it took Canada $10B to host the winter Olympics, but $50B in Russia, for example.
I realize that we are now being fed a staedy stream of "bad Russia" news because it's flavor of the month. I really do. But that hardly means there isn't something fundamentally wrong with modern Russia. Starting with the Chechnya Wars, during which they were still seen as "good Russia" here, but were already conducting a counterinsurgency war with an incredible disregard for civilian life, against nominally their own citizens. Remember the botched hostage rescue in which the police gassed about 140 people dead?
I really hoped better from the Russian people post-Communism. That period's behavior was imposed and not really their fault. But I am starting to believe there is really some deep flaws of character when supposedly informed and intelligent people can be nostalgic for someone like Stalin, who was Hitler-level in his atrocities. And the folk running the Russian Orthodox Church should be ashamed to support the rising bigotry there.
Saudi may be investing but their per capita income is near Mexico. Long term, a country needs skilled people to be rich (Wealth of Nations), but Saudi hasn't really figured that out. Skilled or hard jobs are mostly expats. Couple that with a religious drive to have as many children as possible and a parasitic nobility. Then take a govt which coopts a particularily nasty strain of Islam, Wahhabism, and gives its clerics free reign as long as "King by the Grace of Allah" is religious dogma.
9/11? Mostly Saudis citizens. Mosques in France? Unwisely left to be financed by Saudi in the 80s and 90s. Pakistan & Taliban? Saudi money. Bin Laden. Whatever fuckups they are up to in Yemen?
If you tell me Norway is cleverly investing for post-oil, sure. Saudi? Hahahahaha. The cleverer of the princes are probably just lining their nest eggs. And it's not that much of a surprise that their subjects are cranky.
IMHO we'd have a generally less problematic Islam if some more competent, gentler, folk were living around the Muslim holy sites or if they had no oil $ to corrupt everyone else with.
p.s. to be fair there was a string of terrorism against the House of Saud 6-8 yrs ago that somewhat opened their eye that their crap wasn't just everyone else's problem.
So, basically abstinence, right?
That has a long track record in the US. Long, but hardly good, results-wise. Well, if by results you care about teen pregnancies rather than preaching your own beliefs onto others.
To each his own, but I also hardly see the positive in settling with the first person you bed. Tastes, ambitions, ethics and your own willingness to make a relationship work take a while to settle and your perfect match may not be the first person willing to bonk you. Which kinda presupposes a notion of, horror, potentially exploratory sexual relationships.
Best done safely, with sufficient sexual education and birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STDs. For the rest I am a damn sight more concerned about real issues like rapes and spousal abuse than about "macarena at toddlers parties".
Not directly related, but did anyone notice that Win10 doesn't support the old .chm help file format? Really great when you have old software that still runs, but w.o. help files.
The best thing one can say about 10 is that it is not 8. But really MS is doing its best to frustrate as many of its loyal users as it can. I mean, the Linux folk are elsewhere. The Mac folk too. They are not coming back. They won't be pleased regardless so they don't matter much to MS.
But this constant stream of fairly high profile glitches and annoyances, along with telemetry, security holes, churn in system UI, bad system UI is not doing much to keep existing users around on Windows. No, they may not care about FOSS principles and on Linux. They may not be stylish and cost-unconscious and on Mac.
They may not be cutting edge IT and they may not even really know what an OS is.
But at some point, they may still just get fed up with Windows and leave. I don't see that happening any time soon with corporations. But individuals? What is the patience point when it is just not worth getting another PC with Windows? I suspect that's one of the reasons why tablets are replacing desktop/laptops for a lot of casual users - at least they are on Android/iOS, not Windows.
Homebrew's got some good rep going for it, true.
But MacPorts seems to work just fine for me in practice (since 2009-2010).
No hassles, packages I want are available, no security snafus reported... This is strictly my perception as a user, did not try to upload package changes onto their service. Nor to change ports itself.
If it changes for the worse, yes, I know I can count on Homebrew - good feedback overall - but for now I am happy enough with them.
The move to GitHub? Probably a good thing overall. If done right, users won't notice the switch much.
MS Jekyll - No more of this cancer stuff. Open source is good, openness rules. Let's go beyond Mono and open up .Net. You know, let's add bash to Windows. Let's be hip and cool. Let's support Linux on Azure. Let's use 8 and 10 to clean up a lot of underlying cruft in the old XP stack.
MS Hyde - Ribbon. Metro UI! We rulez and know best!
MS Jekyll - After Win 8, we need to be nicer. Let's upgrade our customers to Win 10 for free.
MS Hyde - Yummm! Telemetry. Yummm! All your data belongs to us. Forced Win 10 upgrades. We know best.
MS Jekyll - SQL Server on Linux!
MS Hyde - I know, let's send out an Anniversary Edition before QA is done on it. ME, AE, same difference. Let's pretend we use Telemetry to figure out our customer preferences. But then... aha, totally ignore whatever UI/behavior changes they request from us.
MS Jekyll - Powershell for everyone. Go talk to customers, meet your customers where they are. We’re confident that if we help our customers be successful we’re going to prosper.
MS Hyde -
... not there yet, but I am willing MS is more than able to bazooka its feet off several times in the near future.
Truly, I wonder how MS can be so bipolar these days??? How can it move on significant cultural changes, like accepting that it's got to play with others? And be even more bloody arrogant, and incompetent, than it ever was under Bill? Esp when "good MS" is mostly visible to geeks, but "bad MS" makes the front page news quite often these days.
There is the seed for a more mature, respectful company, but they insist on chucking it out.
True, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, the Depleted Uranium rounds fired by the A-10s gun makes for really bad PR after the fact. Lots of current wars end up being waged in a counter-insurgency context and excessively messing up the place up for the locals is not a clear path to hearts and minds.
So, if it's all the same, why not clean it up? Though I totally get and appreciate your quip!
It's a complex issue for sure. At the company level, I don't buy the "won't understand our customers" much. And, while we shouldn't tolerate negative hiring discrimination, there is little joy in having incompetent coworkers of any color. And, yes, there are cultural problems within some minorities.
But, at a larger scale, once your country has sizeable minorities, it is in everyone's long term interest that large segments of the population are capable to fully participate in economic opportunities. If that doesn't happen everyone else gets stuck with societal unrest, possibly criminal activity and welfare bills.
So _some_ nudging from the pure meritocracy path can be warranted. Even from the perspective of a white taxpayer.
Call me an optimist, but I believe success breeds success. Once some members of an ethnic group succeed, their status can motivate others to follow. The reverse effect is, IMHO, responsible for a lot of underperformance - if all your buds are on the dole easy to blame the dominant group and retreat on yourself.
In many cases, there a mix of some negative discrimination by the majority coupled with a culture of non-participation by the minority. Complex to break this kind of fail, but doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
I'll add that I also consider it the decent thing to do. But there are cold hearted reasons to do it anyway.
Last, and cynically, in our age of Internet outrage, a company may find it in its best interest to at least appear motivated to diversity. So why not try to do a good job if you're stuck doing it anyway? As long as you don't just hire underqualified folk.
JJ being a twat, again.
Compared to what, dufus? Letting alone that a recent compare point's Anniversary Edition is making the news for instability. The article is all about relative weights of what's being changed. Ie x% drivers. Not how much % of the code base is being changed in absolute terms.
Are you really that dense? That you can't comprehend a short article in your native language? I mean it's one thing to be partisan. Or a troll. But a dim partisan troll?
The thing has a remote control function. So you can send the missus a vibe during the day instead of a text. So it makes sense that there is a mothership server to intermediate through, but less so that they store and even less that they are not secure.
That said people struggle to use secure passwords on banking sites or routers, can't expect too much resetting of factory defaults on a sex toy.
Why the hate?
This is just another hack of an IoT device. One of a class of device that also happens to have some potential for embarassment/blackmail to its users. Funny to the Reg crowd, cuz we are often, hmmm, bit weird. But it's still a depressingly common thread of IoT to have bad security. No more, no less.
Duh. Of course US companies have high, unreasonably so, tax rates. In practice though, the actual tax payout is highly variable w all the loopholes. US govt should figure out how much/little it wants to tax corporations and set a sane simple tax system with as few loopholes as possible around a simple base rate. Then... drumroll... make them pay it.
Of course, with a huge industry of tax accountants, lobbyists and strident lefties defending the rarely-applied-nominal rate, the likelihood of that happening is the same as Kim Jong-Un dropping 20kg and not being bat shit crazy.
Still doesn't make your post any more intelligent though.
Reality is more complex, with higher Canadian taxes partially offset by not having to pony up as much health coverage.
Odd that you are pundit-ing on energy generation, yet you don't know about the concept of baseload. As it impacts solar energy generation roughly 12 hrs a day, even in sunny California :)
Far as the article goes, cautious support, assuming a coherent directive has been put together. Energy saving often hits a short term vs long term conflict. Getting $18
back on a laptops energy consumption seems optimistic though.
@Boltar
“in the US under very tight controls”
Now, I rarely hesitate to cast the first stone at the flying pig. But what it reads like is that the Americans do not trust that laser near potentially affected systems, on their territory. On a related subject, there's an ongoing tug of war in the US between the Navy and another agency (EPA?) about the impact of sonars on whales and corresponding restrictions. Hardly means that sonar is useless on an attack sub. Nor that the UK is obligated to follow the US lead wrt to the laser.
Do agree that having severe restrictions on laser training use might impact operational readiness. But that hardly seems like a big deal compared with all the rest. Not least the steadily dropping volume of F35s to be deployed - which will make it pretty useless in any serious operations against any big player. Read up on Tiger IIs if you want to catch my drift.
You know, I wonder which is the most deplorable. A rather tacky sexist ad? Or the predictable enraged social media crowd?
There are plenty of ills in the world. Not least in the field of professional opportunities for women and sexual harassment. But is this worth much more than a shame faced retraction by the company? Followed by perhaps a change of creative agency?
SJW is more and more a shortcut term for idiots to avoid. Like their ancestors the PC crowd. Or bigots, racists, and misogynists.
Agree. Python at #3 is cool, that being my primary language these days.
However... if you look at, and analyze, job postings, there is no way it rates above C++ and C#. What is happening instead is that it is an incredibly powerful Swiss army knife that can assist any developer or sysadmin, so it often gets added as a desirable trait.
So the posting instead typically looks like...
Need to have
Go - 8 years experience
Windows 10 - 5+ years system experience
....
Nice to have
Python or Ruby scripting skills
Or you may also find it on a QA job because their scripts are using it. Core, line of business, programming in Python, outside of web apps? Not, quite, at #3.
>Linux docs are comprehensively incomprehensible.
True, but the good thing with command line stuff is that it remains static from release to release. You can put it in a quick text note and paste it in years later, it most likely will work.
My favorite combo is to find a good bit of documentation, let's say on using the arcane find command. Often as not on SO. Very rarely from man pages.
Bookmark it privately on Pinboard and paste in the actual command I used to solve my problem in the Pinboard note area. Later on, you can search on bash, howto tags, look for find and you can see what you did or you can go look at the original url if you're still confused. Way better than using Evernote.
Try doing that quickly with a 3 level deep dialog-based configuration that changes from release to release!
re. MS's documentation, I think seeing less of their drivel would be a good thing.
I don't know about SQL Server's doc, but a lot of their Windows user doc is godawful. The product is what it is and I can live with it when I have to. But their docs often take incompetence and vagueness to a whole new level. Even while paying lip service to caring via "did you find this helpful?" links.
For the few actually good documentation entries, their value is hamstrung by Windows' frequent terminology and user dialog navigation changes between releases, sometimes even between 8 and 8.1. I.e. the same common problem can be resolved by the same actions in 7, 8 and in 8.1, it's just that they've moved stuff around and relabeled (pointlessly) and didn't bother to update their core documentation.
Documentation and help is not sexy, but it is key to user acceptance. Using CrackBerry as a de-facto help and documentation site certainly didn't do BB10 any favors - it sucks up all the Google searches, but it has an incredibly low S/N ratio. Much like MS' doc.
I also wonder how SO vendor support is going to play out when the docs point out bugs and errors in the products. No, that particular dig is not limited to just MS.
Eh, eh. If you want to be more depressed, go hang out at Stackoverflow.
I mostly hang out on Python topics.
Now, beginning Python is really, really, simple to work with. About as far from bare metal as you can get. Syntax is clean (as long as you don't mind significant white space) and language prides itself on legibility. There are abundant learning resources and tutorial.
A huge proportion of questions coming in are 1 paragraph university assignments. With the guy or gal clearly not having thought it through for 10 minutes before going to SO. Most often, the question text is a clear copy/paste from the assignment. SO strongly encourages people to post the code they've tried so far, along with the issues. These people almost never bother, because they didn't try anything before posting.
This is basic stuff, not big O notation, not obscure problems, not exotic libraries, not even the weird little Python gotchas that trip beginners.
For a programmer, they are 5 minute problems, 30 minutes if you had to do them in a language you knew but not very well. For a beginner... more time, but you have to learn those concepts before you do anything else.
Not only is this cheating, it is cheating on stuff that could very easily be done on your own. If you can't do them, you'll never be able to move on.
p.s. you know, maybe there is a place for a utility that compares originating IPs of low ranked questions with universities ;-)
No one says you should trust them. I don't like them much myself and I am not trying to convince you that they are trustworthy.
But for people who want to use Windows, this is potentially very good news. Then they can turn off the telemetry, as people have been asking for the last 18 months. Well, maybe that's jumping ahead a little bit, but I really hope that the French initiative, esp if it is supported by the EU, results in an opt-out option.
Just like they had to offer alternative browsers to customers in Europe, on XP. And, yes, I also remember that they "forgot" to put in that option when 7 (Vista?) came out, so that users were once again stuck on IE.
Trust them? No, not really. Distrust and verify would be more appropriate. But I also don't think a world with only Linux and Apple as choices would be a great result, so a better behaved MS is a good thing.
Vive la France!
And fuck you and your unwanted, unhelpful and un-opt-outable data collection, MS! This is exactly the kind of abuse that consumer data protection laws are supposed to cover, so it's very good to see them used in this context.
Seriously, even if you like MS, this is actually a good thing for them. This allows them to climb down from their ridiculous telemetry program without losing face. Or tips the hand of their executives who support a return to sanity.
Even if (big IF) you don't assume nefarious intent behind it, and only the desire to gather unbiased usage stats (i.e. without the pro-MS bias that would come from an opt-in telemetry user base), the goodwill cost of that data harvesting (and the Win10 install nagging) has been tremendous. Well on a par with their late 90s monopoly trial dirty laundry in terms of public perception.
It's an airburst, it will not have the fallout of an explosion that churns up ground matter.
Not to forget that both superpowers could be fairly irresponsible at times with their test subjects' exposure, especially early on. And that radiation exposure can have long term effects that wouldn't show up immediately.
With friends like you, nuclear energy (which I support) doesn't need enemies.
p.s. Anyone else think that explosion looked like a really, really, bad early generation CGI special effect?
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