Posts by DNTP 726 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2014
I tried to heat-anodize titanium alloy parts in my dorm room with a torch, because it was inter-semester and the machine shop across campus was closed. Let me tell you, there is a world of difference between "well ventilated" and "adequately ventilated" and a college dorm with the window open is not good enough.
Metal fume poisoning is no joke and I was horribly sick for a day. Fortunately I recognized the acute symptoms before I needed emergency treatment, stopped what I was doing and got the hell out of there. From that point on I always used a ventilation hood or worked outside on that stuff.
Twenty+ years ago, when I was a highschooler taking an IT internship (with the town educational system, coincidentally), I was keen and green and ready to find and tackle any computer problem I could get my hands on. A week later, my boss told me something I'll never forget:
"Kid, I know you think you have something to prove and you might just have a career in this. But if you have an engine where one part is made tougher than all the others, it tends to wear down everything around it and the system breaks down."
In other words, he was telling me that the strongest link breaks the rest of the chain. Uh, OK, I'll get right on that sir.
And recognize your individual heat signature. Combined with heartbeat sensors they can tell which products get you excited, then flash ads for "related products" on the next smartscreen you pass. Pheromone sensors developed from the sniffers used for explosives detection give information about your diet, personal hygiene product preference, recent sexual history, current emotional state and pregnancy status. Low-level electromagnetic emitters in doorframes attempt to suppress neural frequencies in your brain associated with long-term planning.
According to Barracuda's blog, they took a $68 million deferred tax asset valuation allowance at the end of 2015. My limited understanding of this is that it is a financial maneuver performed because they have been experiencing long-term losses (thus generating tax credits to offset those losses), but they don't anticipate making profits soon enough to benefit from those tax credits before they expire.
So they create… artificial losses? By arbitrarily taking money out of the company? That somehow help if they don't make money in the future? And then try hard not to make a net profit for the next seven years? Seriously, someone who knows this stuff, please help me out here.
I've said it before: the point at which this great idea fails is the point at which a management higher-up decides the security rules don't apply to him, then gets some poor first-line rep sacked for insisting on protocol. Good luck getting anyone to follow the protocol after that.
Never offer anything in "infinity" or "unlimited" amounts in a contract, unless it's for a buffet.
It always indicates either extreme ignorance of what people do with their computers given the opportunity, or if its an ISP then it's a weasel word for "we have a data cap and don't want to tell you."
We don't want responsible people to not be allowed to own cool things, which is why we think idiots who deliberately do stuff like this to pilots should be charged with assault, battery, reckless endangerment, attempted murder, whatever else, and given thirty-to-life so they have plenty of time to realize that for once in their god damn worthless lives, their actions have consequences.
He had a single residential grade DSL line to a consumer grade Wi-Fi access point, for a twenty-unit building, and charged fifty bucks per month PER TENANT for access. The fact that his Wi-Fi security was crap didn't change the fact that there were 30-40 tenants trying to use this one DSL line.
Coincidentally, he did not permit any ISP to perform installations in any unit. Years after I moved out I heard he went to prison for fraud, which sure was a loss to the business community.
…then how will manufacturers lock you into their brand, go bankrupt in six months from vulture capitalists looting the company for short-term gains, shut down the central server that all the devices need for privacy invading marketing "some reason", and force you to repurchase everything from the next IoT company?
A common standard? Sounds like commonunism! Won't someone think of the children?
But sometimes these lawsuits are a requirement imposed on the plaintiffs by their own insurance companies. As a condition of receiving payment they may be contractually required to file a suit for recovery from any tangentially related party who has money, especially given that the actual reckless driver is likely to be judgement-proof.
A: That they manage to sell it to people for two hundred bucks.
(Then again my hair care philosophy is cut never/wash weekly, and some people think I shouldn't be allowed to own hair in the first place.)
Edit: Spending a few minutes trying to figure out why "Kerastase" tripped a vague cultural appropriation alert, then remembered that India has a place called Kerala.
I used to historical fence with a longsword waster (blunt practice sword) made of high-density nylon. I used that thing full-contact for almost two years, against other wasters, shields, and two-handed strikes against pells and it never cracked or split (and believe me after hearing some of the accidents, you check your practice gear religiously for signs of that damage.)
Then I lent it to a 12 year old for Halloween… and got it back snapped off at the hilt after he swung it around carelessly in one hand and struck a tree. How does that make any sense?
Is your wife perhaps an astronaut, or involved in any other occupation which involves travel at relativistic velocities? Have you ever seen her leave for work with a futuristic spandex body suit under her street clothes? Are there closets in your house that seem mysteriously larger on the inside?
(My GF and I used to do time traveler roleplaying involving lots of spandex, we never accessorized the experience with 'paychecks from the future', she took the spandex when we broke up.)
Laziness, outsourcing, or both.
Seriously, though, what if a user deliberately set their device to an incorrect time zone, thus unlawfully interfering with an advertiser's monetization of the user's metadata? Clearly the App Developer has to be On Guard against this kind of Economic Terrorism by implementing their own badly coded resource abusing snitchy permission snaffling spyware network time query assessment.
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Well, they get paid more anyway.
And copper-glycine complexes won't try to deceive you into signing up your dead relatives and their pets for seventeen Wells Fargo accounts. I guess while chemistry is basically accessible to any decently intelligent person, it takes a real "special" kind of operator to run a banking business.
Say I run our chemical stocks, as a safety officer and chemist, and my job is to distribute materials for other units of the company. I could simply assume that workers know what they are asking for and provide the safety sheets as the legal minimum corporate policy requires- but you can bet if someone requests something unusual or dangerous I am also going to make personally sure they know what they are getting and what not to do with it before they walk out. In the long run this benefits everybody, and to paraphrase Isaac Asimov, "It's my responsibility because I know about it."
Unfortunately bank executives, who get paid on average way more than CSOs and have advanced knowledge of a much more intricate system than physical chemistry, somehow don't feel the need to exceed a minimum standard regarding advising their own customers.
Because then three people are dead, diplomatic relations becomes a little more strained, America suddenly looks like the villain here, and the US still doesn't get the drone back, which is, symbolically, the point on which a nation is going to lose or gain face here. It is very unlikely there is anything in the drone that is classified. There is nothing here worth irrevocably killing people over, or setting a precedent to kill people over.
Assuming it even has a self-destruct in the first place. And honestly… even if the Chinese knew that American UUV's came standard with destructs- would that really be a deterrent? They might just be willing to expend a few troops or workers to take a chance at capturing the next one, or creating a potentially fatal incident for diplomatic capitol.
In the US at least this would be foolhardy (in my opinion). Your legal defense, obviously, would be that you just provided a service and had no idea what the clients were doing with it.
The prosecution would argue that a generally intelligent average person would have had cause to be somewhat suspicious based on certain activities/requests on the part of the client, that the client was involved in criminal acts that you were aiding. Then they would argue that you, as an expert and specialist consultant in the field possessing knowledge beyond that average person, could not possibly have avoided realizing that the client was doing criminal acts with your assistance.
…responsible for the conduct of management at a couple of its franchise stores?
Heck yeah.
99% of the time, when you have a situation where a small-time manager is being encouraged or permitted to break employment law, the rot goes all the way to the top. If a top accountant stole $2m from the company he'd be in prison, but the diffusion of responsibility that broke the law and cost that same company $2m in settlements is just hand-waved away.
The real news here is that Symantec apparently has valuable ideas and assets in the first place.
Or maybe its that they still have customers relying on that stuff. I want to find these people, and sell them bridges.
A short near-future story about the potential of electrotethering for orbital insertion and maneuvering.
The Japanese engineers are applying the concept of "anything that can maneuver prograde, can also retrograde."
Now that a few have blown up I'm sure they can override mere property laws under public safety or anti-terrorism grounds. This phone has such a uniquely powerful and unstable battery using cutting edge lithium science technology, a terrorist could make a much bigger battery fire than with any other mobile device on the market. What if a pedo was using one to take pictures of kids and it blew up, harming the kids? Think of the kids.
I have this exact power, only replace "DNA" with "T-butyl Lithium" and "buildings" with "my lab bench".
Note 1: I have a deliberately fire-retardant labwork coat, purchased with my own money because it seemed like a good investment,
Note 2: The way to tell if the stuff is still good is when the little bit on the end of the transfer needle catches on fire you get a chemistry boner from handling it.
"Hey, my password didn't work because they haven't set up my account yet but I logged in anyway and set one up for myself. Also tell the HR department that they shouldn't write their login/password under the keyboard of the PC in the interview room that they use to test the skills of new hires."
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