Posts by GrapeBunch

Alexa, buy local newspaper.

Alexa, look in obit section.

Alexa, am I there?

If yes, trigger [doomsday machine]

Else, make coffee;

Repeat daily 7 am until [doomsday machine].

Just sayin', another way to get away with stuff is to become terminally ill with an expiry date. If you commit a messy crime but have only two months to live, will they even bother to try you?

Also, it seems in the interest of the company to deliver none of the messages. If a message is damaging, they might get caught up in messy legal muck. "We just did what we were told" may not cut it. Contrariwise, the person to sue them for non-delivery is a dead hand. And foot. IANALBIPADOOOTI

Re: Open source users *are* freetards

Maybe there should be a Freetard Foundation, benefiting authors of free software. Freetards could donate or even leave money in their Wills. By then it's too late to complain, pointless to hold back. There can be no update, so far as Freetard X is concerned. The foundation would take care of different pay-in methods, tax receipts (if appropriate), apportioning. The money could go either to specified authors (these would probably not earn a charitable donation receipt) or to a generalized fund based on need. Bigger complication is the multiple jurisdictions. And of course you'd need careful rules so that Google, Amazon, MS, Apple etc couldn't start claiming funds. Some authors are adamant that they should not be paid and that too needs to be accommodated.

There may be a need for such an overarching foundation even at more organized levels. For example, people all over the world are interested in helping the Internet Archive (especially after they fix the bug where pages are hidden due to a post hoc robots.txt that has a completely different purpose), but they are a charitable donation only in the USA.

None of this will help the poster, but oh well.

Re: Conspiracy theory...

In a recent study of White Rhinos, researchers used fake poos to influence the herd. QED.

Re: "a full third of the package [..] has been earmarked to cover attorney fees"

Anthelmintic resistance. The lawyers have been in the gut of Justice, doing what they do, for so long that, even though we know what they're doing, they just do what they want, ethical outrage has no effect.

Anthem, Anthelmintic, pure happenstance. Just a memory aid.

In the generalized case, class action lawyers who agree to a modest settlement with substantial full-rate fees to themselves from said settlement, could turn around and also receive under-the-table kickbacks from the wrongdoer (oops, they never admit they goofed). The settlement is a "negotiation" where only one side of the dispute is at the table. I wonder if the Panama Papers have been scanned with an eye to this sort of possibility, though maybe even Secret Banking is considered too open for such a transaction. Even if such happened only once: comped privileges at a country club or wholesale pricing of a company's product; it is a monstrous breach of trust.

Kickbacks or none, courts, which are good at picking holes in and nullifying poorly thought-out legislation, are overdue for retooling the class action aspect of their own existence. IANALBIPOOTI.

So ... using modest imagination and not detective work as there's insufficient information and at a distance of thousands of miles ... they might have been running something Really Secure (TM) as their OS, but put a Virtual instance of something Not Secure (no trademark necessary) to run a vital piece of legacy software. It would explain an original WannaCry, and the quick recovery. Only 24 hours, so no Karōshi (過労死).

It's been alluded to before, but perhaps the automotive IT people did prevent WannaCry by turning off some OS service. Perhaps they even compiled a batch / registry file to ensure that all unwanted OS services were still turned off after an OS update. Perhaps said update happened unexpectedly. Perhaps nobody was there to disconnect networking while the update was in process. Perhaps Coupling.

Re: Bosses who don't understand IT and the cloud

"...but again he refused so they refused to do the migration and terminated the support contract. "

That might have been a Life Lesson for me. In my line (not IT), I would sometimes get clients who asked for / insisted on things that I knew Would Not Work™. Especially when the "client" was a committee. I never needed the work to feed my family etc, so "terminate the contract" was there as a resort. But one tends to think that the client is a helpless lamb whom one can save from the full consequences of one or more brainless idea(s). And if one doesn't save that poor lamb, who will?

In the worst instance of this, I did "terminate the contract", pretty much expecting what happened: honeyed words of reconciliation that proved empty; then my agreement to continue. In retrospect, "terminate and don't look back" would have been aces.

Re: Sex offenders covers a lot of ground

Reportedly, in USA they load up the charge sheet so that the accused will plead "No Contest" to some minor charge (such as, I don't know, Disrespecting the State Flag) which will result in a sentence of parole, rather than face a tense and expensive court case with the slight but real possibility of a 1,000 year sentence. So there's a plea bargain with a "No Contest" and (if White) the other kazillion charges being dropped. Of course, it is an abuse of the legal system, and abuse of the innocent. Hmm, we were just talking about something like that.

I agree that North Carolina went too far with its law. IANALBIPOOTI.

Although the opposite (contrapositive?) is interesting too. If legislation protected your tracking number, could you use it to encrypt your documents and thus evade the long arm of anti-terrorism (or whatever they're saying it is this week) laws? "No, occifer, I regret that I am unable to give you my mobile phone password because it is the same as my recent election tracking number, which may not be divulged under S.382 (2018)." - or something like that. Faint hope, I suppose.

Re: Is it not right here in plain sight?

Jupiter's news on the same day 2017-06-17 was that it is the oldest planet in the solar system. It is said to have formed within a million years (just an eyeblink in UT) of the sun. So they're pushing back the envelope towards Jupiter being a failed companion of Sol. Rather like, in real life, the addon party in a minority government that haughtily lords it over the rest for four years, but then at the next election and for the next 4.599 billion years gets put in the deep freeze because everybody found it so annoying. There may be discrete reasons why it could not be so, but in my mind the main reason to dismiss the idea of Jupiter as a failed companion is that it is old and obvious. They would have mentioned it.

fwiw, I'm guessing that 90% of the readers here would be looking for Copies: 2 within one second of learning the scenario. The best stories are iconic.

Re: "...a complaint from an as-yet-unnamed individual..."

Where is Alfred North Whitehead when you need him?

Re: Half Indian names

"Have noticed the same thing when searching MS for help. Canned answers are totally useless."

Agree, MS Help is useless. MS hired tech writers to compose Help files for the software. However, since the software and its associated help files get released simultaneously, the tech writers are working from software specs, not from final version software, nor would it be efficient to let mere writers ask questions of the software producers. See where this is going? This disaster is compounded by other factors. Of course, once you have a help entry established for a question, bean counters say it's hardly economical to hire another team to do the same work again. That's why Help for 21st century Windows can look like it was written (in ignorance) for Windows 95. Not a candy mint? Please consult your system administrator.

PS I have never worked for MS. The above is from inference.

Re: Real world underfunding

"The beards and sandals of local councils will weep that they need that money for social care, but mine still has money to piss up the wall on public fireworks displays, music and poetry festivals, "LGBT history month" and many other crappy "cultural" services so I'd happily cut their income."

Beard and circuses.

Re: curiouser and curiouser

"You couldn't make this shit up. I think I need to sit down and have an Aspirin."

I suggest you chew on a willow stick. There may be a dictaphone in your Aspirin. The Donald's promises to drain the swamp have not included the interlocking ooze of Bayer-Monsanto, nor Goldman-Sachs. No, those BuMG holeS remain attached to ever-thirsty lips. From your wallet to their damp heart-simulacra. Who needs Mar?land when you have Lagoland?

PS: 9 physicians out of 10 confirm that Milk of Amnesia is more effective.

Re: Sunny when it is working

TSR? That brings back memories. You could also understand this as a reaction to "creeping featurism" on the part of the client company.

In DR-DOS I used to use TSRs to achieve needed functionality on a work PC. Difference is, in that world, nobody ever produced a single program to provide the same functionality.

Re: But they'd still be in jail...

"Consider vertcoin, no custom ASICs"

I went to the "get started" section of the vertcoin.org site. After downloading a Vertcoin wallet, the next step is ... buy Bitcoin. There's an unpopulated link for where you can buy Vertcoin directly with hard currency. In other words, you can't buy Vertcoin with dollars. Yet (to be fair). Then you convert the Bitcoin to Vertcoin. So custom ASICs are there, just a layer deeper in the onion than you're used to. OM.