Posts by Lysenko 986 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015
My Nokia 925 is still my favourite phone. I have a Galaxy S7 and a WileyFox Swift 2x as well (I write software), but the 925 is the one I prefer to carry. It is also unquestionably the best phone (defining "phone" as a device for phoning people) since it holds a signal in the bowels of our office far better than the other two and outlasts them on battery (despite being 4 years old). And yes, I know this sounds exactly like OS/2 nostalgia ;)
They can prove they've lost money (that's just basic share price arithmetic) and they can also prove what caused it. What the plaintiff still needs to establish is intent. The obvious defence is for Uber to prove that Kalanick isn't a crook, he's just an incompetent jerk with the self awareness of a paving slab and the social skills of an incontinent baboon. That should be amusing to watch.
I was just discussing second class citizenship on another thread. I forgot about the UK Government predilection for relegating anyone who fails to marry and breed to irrelevance. "People" is the natural word to use so choosing "families" ("Hard working", naturally) instead has to have an intentional subtext - presumably that HMG won't be that bothered if terrorists undertake some Aktion T4 on unemployed singles.
Now, if there's provable criminal or negligent behaviour
I can prove that the employee who "fixed" the brakes on your car was qualified in music composition and engaged on a salary far exceeding that of a fully qualified mechanic. Your car crashed because the brakes failed in a way that is demonstrably due to incompetent maintenance.
Is there prima facie evidence of negligence here? Any ambulance chaser worthy of his knee pads would be biting your arm off to get the case. It doesn't matter if the incompetent employee read a Haynes manual in her spare time - the garage paid over the odds for an unqualified employee in a safety critical role. The garage has to settle - the insurers would never allow a trial with no credible defence. The remaining question is whether the insurers take it on the chin or go after the MD personally since his gross dereliction of duty and failure to supervise is what caused this mess.
Liberalism is Adam Smith. Neoliberalism is Friedrich von Hayek disinterring the corpse of the "invisible hand" 200 years later. The meaning is perfectly clear in English, it just gets confused in American because the closest thing they have to liberals are anarcho-capitalists ("Libertarians" in American) due to the unholy[sic] alliance of liberal ("Conservative" in American) economics and statist, illiberal ("Conservative" again, in American) social policies.
A true liberal supports your inalienable right to have an abortion on demand, accompanied by your same sex wife (private sector sperm bank) so long as you can pay a private healthcare company to carry out the procedure. If you can't afford that then you're welcome to have a go with a coat hanger, but if you bleed to death then that's on you. Feel free to make your final moments more comfortable with some private sector heroin.
You used a swear word - "liberal". Half the colonials will see a red mist descend because they think it means something to do with "socialism" (quite the reverse, as you noted) while half the locals will react similarly because they know what it means and as socialists they despise it.
You're being downvoted (I suspect) by the sort of knee jerk animus that would make a Biologist reluctant to discuss Paedogamy in certain pubs.
you entirely ignored the second part of the sentence referring to AJA internment
I ignored it because in 1942 the USA was still firmly in the Jim Crow era so "second class citizenship" was firmly entrenched official policy. An extension of that in wartime wasn't exactly a radical departure. People were still being lynched with impunity back then, let alone interned.
While all countries abridge the civil rights of criminals while subject to legal sanction, few others (if any) permanently exclude them from the democratic process thereby fundamentally altering their status as citizens. If you think cannabis or (historically) gay sex should be legal, it is a bit tricky to change the law if holding and acting on those opinions ends up disenfranchising you. The exact same thing (stop the "wrong" people voting) held off the Civil Rights Act for most of the 20th century and I trust you're not arguing that there were no second class citizens in 1950's Alabama.
The disbarring voting thing applies to felons and doesn't distinguish between natural-born and naturalized so that's a complete red herring.
No it isn't because those laws create a specific class of citizens with fewer civil rights. That is a "second class citizenship" within the ordinary meaning of the expression which is something you asserted the USA does not "do". If you meant: "We don't DO second-class citizens based on naturalisation status, we use other criteria to define them" then I misunderstood the intended scope of your comment.
I agree with your specific point: they're going to run face first into the 14th Amendment with these rules. There has to be some political sub-text (possibly furthering the demonization of the 9th Circuit with Magas?) because it is so obviously unconstitutional only an idiot (but I repeat myself) could expect it to stand.
Oh yes you do, obvious examples being disbarring people from voting because of a criminal conviction at some point in the past (about 6 million of them) and the whole "natural born citizen" business (McCain, Cruz)[1] which hasn't been entirely settled yet.
[1] No, not Obama - unlike those two he was born in the USA.
We transfer EU citizens' data to the United States and we don't rely on Privacy Shield - we rely on AES and a key that never leaves British territory[1]. That's a "Privacy Shield" (unless No Such Agency is further along with quantum computing than we realise).
[1] It's computer generated and encoded on an RFID card which lives in a safe.
thinks Sigfox is significantly better, in security terms, than other competing Internet of Things connectivity standards
What he means is because you can't (legitimately) operate your own base stations you're safe (?) in the SigFox walled garden until someone works out how to spoof a base station or hacks you directly over RF (exactly the same model as cellphone networks with a 2G dumbphone).
With LoRa(WAN) you run your own base stations and (typically) use the internet as a backbone. How secure the station is from inbound IP hackery is up to you, just like any other internet facing appliance/server. Base stations are typically Raspberry Pi class Linux SBCs under the hood so they are perfectly capable of running TLS, VPNs, Firewalls etc. If you don't, that's on you.
In both cases over the air firmware bug fixing for remote nodes is problematic, but LoRaWAN does at least support it (by dynamically switching a device to class B operation at the cost of power consumption) whereas SigFox has a hard limit of <1.6kb of downstream bandwidth per day which means it would take weeks to get an update through even with no packet loss.
("my 10,000 flying robots will overwhelm your air defence systems designed to shoot down conventional aircraft"), it is only recently that technology has advanced to the point where drone swarms are plausible.
Overwhelming air defence systems with drones was feasible in 1944 when the Germans did it with the V1. Every cruise missile designed since then has worked on the same basis, as do MIRVs. There is nothing even remotely "new" about any of this other than the fact that you can now buy your Radio Controlled Model Aircraft on Amazon instead of learning to use a craft knife and a heat shrink gun (if you want to use a "drone" as a weapon then you want wings, not one of those quad-copter toys).
If you're running an IoT device with a PIC16 or something then yes, implementing TLS etc. may not be feasible. You just don't have the MIPS or the RAM for that.
The Wink hub on the other hand has an i.MX28! That's an ARM9 CPU capable of running Linux (albeit 7 years old). However a closer look at the HW is in order: the Wink supports multiple RF protocols and therefore (!) has a bunch of additional microcontrollers including an STM32, a PIC16F and some other Cortex M3 chippery. What was the designer thinking of? There is no valid reason to create such Frankenstein circuitry which must involve at least three different programming languages and at least five different toolchains. It smells very much like someone grabbing reference designs from chip vendor web sites and lashing them together with glorified veroboard. On that basis I classify the device as "works as expected".
If a service is paid for by the public purse, then there should be public accountability
A blanket like that would end up making the guy who washes the Job Centre windows liable to FoI demands - along with every cab driver who ever had a Civil Servant in the back. You need to differentiate between an outsourced government function and a generic service that just happens to be supplied to a government department or employee in a given instance.
I suppose I can't interest you in one of these then...
Correct, you can't. I have a full set myself, but lovingly polishing my Snap On isn't something you're likely to catch me doing. Same goes for reading spanner fan fiction or looking at explicit centrefolds of the latest torque wrench sensation.
I have nothing against "storage" in particular, only the skewed emphasis. In the DC I'm working right now, 0.25% of cabinets (i.e. "2") are dedicated to storage. The rest is made up of the spinning rust and SSDs in the server and blade chassis which were acquired incidentally in the same way that your new car comes with a battery. No-one specified those disks beyond size, it was just whatever Dell, HP and IBM happened to be shipping that month (basically, "storage" doesn't even interest the guys building the DC very much).
Most DCs are not giant, online bit barns dedicated to storing and streaming terabytes of cat photos, pr0n and "Game of Thrones" as fast as possible; and if you do want that you're more likely to talk to AWS or Azure than start purchasing equipment yourself (e.g. NetFlix). Your more typical processing centric DC is no more interested in the minutiae of storage access time (meaning one SSD vs. another) than the exact BTU dump rate of the CRAC units - all that matters is sensible price, performance and MTBF.
Current coverage is like reading a car magazine with an editor who has a rubber fetish ("Feast your eyes on the new Michelin XYZ's with 14.2% more grip and 8% greater fluid expulsion capacity, modelled here by some new Ferrari supercar we're not very interested in." ... wrote no automotive journalist, ever).
No.
"Storage news" is about as interesting to most IT professionals as "Spanner news" is to most car drivers.
I'm not saying there isn't a place for it, but why the disproportionate obsession with storage compared to all the other vital components? Server news? Router news? Firewall news? I don't expect you to pay attention to my own interest (embedded micro-controllers) or "Facilities" stuff (CRACs & Racks), but if you're going to cover the contents of DCs you could do a better job of reflecting what really goes into them. Judging by Reg coverage an outside observer would guess the average DC is 80% storage arrays, 10% servers and 10% networks (it isn't).
Would those be even legal in the UK?
I suspect that they mean "hidden from crims". It is perfectly possible to jam and/or shield a tracker when nicking a car, but in the end you have to find the thing and disable it or else break the vehicle for parts in a Faraday cage. Knowing where to find the tracker on a specific vehicle would be a big advantage and might therefore make the vehicles on this list preferential theft targets.
The industry has been dancing around the Telescreen for years and now they've added the knobs and leather handles of authentic 1950's styling. The devil, of course, will be in the software.
Looks like a variation of the Amstrad Em@iler idea and probably destined for equal levels of popularity.
Isn't that an "Infinity + 1" paradox? A black hole can't "explode" because the energy required would have to exceed the infinite binding forces of an object of infinite density. All it can do is slowly evaporate via Hawking radiation.
I'm guessing he's referring to the highly energetic reactions in the accretion disc outside the event horizon, but the wording implies that the black hole itself can generate repulsive forces sufficient to destabilise it's own structural integrity in the same sense that a supernova does which (as I understand it) is impossible because: math.
Sure, they can try that, but without blocking FB, InstaGram, Twitter et.al. it is futile, as Turkey discovered. Next you need to turn into China and take down VPNs as well - and it still doesn't work.
Dodgy dictators have thoroughly beta tested all available strategies over the last couple of decades and clearly established that you either use the NORKular option or you lose. I'm sure Havana will be happy to explain this to Madrid.
Making an unwarranted demand with menaces with a view to making a gain or causing a loss is a criminal offence under s.21 of the Theft Act 1968. That's one (of many) reason lots of companies record all phone calls. If it happens, advise the extortionist that you're calling the cops (penalty: fine and/or up to 14 years as a guest of her Majesty).
"MAGA" means "victim of a confidence trick". The term originates from Nigerian slang and typically refers to the Advance Fee Fraud commonly known as a 419 scam (example: Maga Don Pay), but it can also be used to mean "gullible fool" in a general sense.
So, given that you bought a hat that specifically states that you've been conned, why are you surprised about this unanticipated defect?
Compare .JSX to .VUE. That should boot React back out again. After that, what's to consider? Angular vs. VueJS[1] which pretty much boils down to how committed to TS you are and whether single file components give you naughty tingles.
[1] Yes, there's Aurelia, Preact, Ember (!?) and other "boutique" options, but if you're doing a "review" and worry about patent litigation you must be semi-corporate which legislates against obscure, niche players.
Uber are by no means the only gig in town ... blanket banned
Contradiction. There is no "blanket ban", they're just terminating one amongst many. As you noted, there is demand for this service so booting a disreputable and (allegedly) dangerous operator out of the market simply creates an expansion opportunity for law abiding competitors (who will need more drivers, obviously). Banning Uber doesn't eliminate app based taxi hailing any more than banning CFCs eliminated refrigerators - you simply get the same utility with less negative environmental impact.
To be fair (!?) a lot of the short termism is down to shareholders or, more accurately, the City and the vampire squid and it's ilk.
"I don't want to discuss the next quarter share price. I'm not even interested in next year. I want to focus on what products we'll be shipping in the decade from 2020 and the investments we need to make today to ensure success."
... three sentence CEO professional suicide note.
IBM would of excelled at in the old days.
No, this is the sort of contract IBM would have bungled in the old days. It would have come in working, on time and within budget - thereby failing to bilk the additional C$180M out of the customer. This is the sort of "success" you get when the C suite is stuffed with members of the Maldives Basketball Association with an attention span calibrated in quarterly share prices.
Not so hard in some languages. ({} + []) === ([] + {}) .... not in JS it doesn't, and if you can use PHP then the scope for "accidentally on purpose" logic and calculation bear traps is so huge there are entire websites dedicated to the resulting WTF'ery. As for a "detonator", the MM/DD/YYYY vs. DD/MM/YYYY (or ISO) date format discrepancy is almost purpose built for the task.
FSB then
More likely the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki). The FSB are somewhere between the FBI and MI5 in that their remit is primarily domestic. The SVR are the Foreign Intelligence Service (successors to the First Chief Directorate) so an investigation in the USA would likely fall under their bailiwick.
What precedent are you relying on here? It certainly isn't true in the general case that you have an action in tort for theoretically elevated risk where no actual harm can yet be established. If it were then anyone who has been anywhere near asbestos could sue even if their lung function is perfectly normal (add vast list of similar speculative actions).
That would be the ARM chip from FreeScale, recently acquired by NXP who were in turn recently acquired by QualCom? I would be very wary of treading that path. Not only is future support in question, it's expensive compared to an AllWinner A64 or similar. Also, Matrix Network? That would be the outfit who recently posted: "Matrix needs you! We are facing a funding crisis."?
Outrageous. That this is the first one I mean. They shouldn't even have survived as an organisation after Aldridge (Executive Chairman at the time) was caught slipping a £1M brown envelope to the Labour Party a decade ago (he resigned).
I was nearly TUPE'd over several years before that but I insisted that being hived off to such a bunch of shysters constituted constructive dismissal. It never went to Tribunal because there was way too much dirty laundry even then.
QNX/Neutrino has been behind infotainment systems since the turn of the Millennium (a least) and crops up in the automotive control systems of Audi, BMW, Porsche, Ford, Toyota etc. etc. The fact that it is still a 800lb gorilla in a market it has dominated for a couple of decades isn't really surprising.
Scripting sucks, programming is still interesting. Working on IoT stuff (for example), the interesting bit is programming the microcontrollers, RF stacks, embedded Linux data consolidators and debugging the I2C humidity sensor that won't work because the pull up resistors are too small. That's programming.
There is also a (PWA) front end based on Angular 2/4/Bootstrap with a Node/Redis back end. That's scripting. Tedious and error prone due to the imbecility of the shoddily typed language (even with TypeScript) and the embarrassingly bad tooling (yes, I'm looking at you Webpack).
I wrote all of it and only the first half was fun, the second half was: "I remember this! (async event queue in Node). Win16 co-op multi-tasking with. What? Nested callbacks? Wow! Blast from the past. What's next? Punched cards?".
Not having fire insurance both works well and saves money 99% of the time. In fact for many (most?) companies fire insurance will be a pure overhead with zero utility for the entire lifetime of the organisation. Numbers can't lie. There is only one rational decision for a beancounter to make. ..... Oops.
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