Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
Is it a bug, i.e. something that is supposed to work, but does not, or a feature request, i.e. something someone wants, but isn't a bug (and which they don't want to pay for, either).
Devs have to eat too, and devs working on free open-source software don't get paid for it.
Where I work, feature requests are paid-for work, bugs are things found during QA testing, and defects are things that didn't get spotted and made it into the wild. There's no such thing as a "feature bug".
I'd argue that failing to incorporate handling of insufficient system memory into your design is a vulnerability, especially if it could be exploited, for example, to cause a denial-of-service attack.
This is my point, the terms "system reliability" and "vulnerability" are pretty vague, and mean different things to different folk, they're certainly not technical terms that carry a universal, agreed upon, and strictly defined meaning, and they carry a fair amount of subjective bias, especially in a field as complex as security.
Are you running a proprietary "non-smartphone" OS on a general purpose computer, such as a server in a data centre, or a work laptop?
Nope, didn't think so. You might as well be complaining that you don't need a CNC milling machine to hang a picture on your wall, because you've got a perfectly good hammer to bang a nail in with. That, good sir, is a non sequitur, if nobody was suggesting that you use said machine to do that with.
On the other hand, you probably could use your Nokia 3210 as a hammer.
If there's a new "feature" patch from MS that is badly written and contains a flaw, thus producing a future zero-day exploit, then you're fine with that being automatically rolled onto your device with no interaction? That knife cuts both ways.
The main thing that I hate about "SaaS" is that you have no control over when or how the software you use changes arbitrarily, often forcing unexpected downtime while it updates, or causing lost productivity while you re-learn it.
I certainly seem to have demonstrated that spreadsheet jockeys are not only extremely defensive of their previous Excel, but also completely lacking in a sense of humour.
In all seriousness, though, the number of times in my career where Excel turned out to be the right tool for the job can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It is always a "quick'n'dirty" stopgap measure that ends up being bent into something more, and which manages to be nothing other than an administrative overhead.
My understanding of the Holographic Principle is that it applies only within the event horizon; light, and thus information, can't escape the event horizon, but to an observer within it, information coming from any point within that sphere can appear to be indeterminable from that coming from a point on its surface, or something like that.
From an outside observer, the Holographic principle would surely only mean that it's impossible to tell whether the "surface" of the event horizon is black, or everything within it (ignoring for a moment that the curvature of space caused by the singularity would probably mean that all you see is a distorted view of what is behind it anyway).
As for information escaping an event horizon, there is a possible mechanism through Hawking Radiation, although how information might be exchanged between a particle falling into the black hole, and one escaping it, in any meaningful way, remains to be explained.
I want something with a Schwartzchild Radius to make sure there's no chance of information escape. You know, just to be on the safe side, just in case there's some massive solar prominence in the future that looks for all the world like it spells out "VLOOKUP" in the sky.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
Please explain the difference between an issue with "system reliability" and a "vulnerability".
Is the ability to bypass the login prompt in WinXp a system reliability issue, but a backdoor in the Unix login command a vulnerability that was found later down the line?
Is it possible that people's judgement of where blame lies comes not from an objective assessment, but in a preconceived bias?
Could it be, just maybe, that all software can have flaws in it, and those 1s and 0s that come from evil capitalist Microsoftland are indistinguishable from those that come from the Glorious Socialist People's Republic of Linuxania? (reductio ad absurdum here is merely for effect, and no political commentary is implied or should be inferred.)
Okay, here's a better explanation of why you are wrong...
An operating system would be pretty useless if it could only run software provided by the provider of the OS (although MS would probably love this, I shouldn't give them ideas).
So, third-party software is allowed. For obvious reasons, it can't go near OS functions.
Similarly, the OS should be able to run on a wide variety of hardware (unless you are Apple). It should not be incumbent on the maker of the OS to provide drivers for that hardware, so third-party drivers are needed.
Those drivers need to have low-level access to parts of the OS, so the OS needs to trust them. This applies equally well to any general-purpose OS, not just Windows.
Sadly, software flaws exist. Again, it would be poor form to not allow third parties to provide defence against these.
Low-level system and antivirus software needs to interact with OS functions at a low level, so the OS needs to trust them. Again, this applies to any general-purpose OS.
So, you have a situation where the OS doesn't normally allow access to, or interference with, some of its functions, except where it has to, in a limited way, for trusted third parties.
CrowdStrike is (was?) in this instance a trusted third party. Now, trust in computing is a whole PhD thesis topic of its own, but your argument essentially boils down to a claim that MS is in the wrong for trusting CrowdStrike, whereas the more nuanced argument would be that CrowdStrike is in the wrong for not living up to the terms of that trust.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-dropkick-you-if-you-use-that-spreadsheet/
Anyone who disagrees with me can go along for the trip. I'm sorry it has come to this, but it's for the good of humanity.
The last time I saw it written that way was when a school teacher incorrectly "corrected" the spelling in an essay I did about what we'd done at the weekend, when I was maybe 11 years old?
It was enlightening in the sense that it taught me that teachers don't necessarily know what they are talking about, and that you shouldn't blindly trust authority figures, especially when they venture outside of their sphere of expertise. Whilst I'm not advocating going full flat-earther with the advice to question everything, you should be able to question anything you randomly feel like questioning that day...
To be fair, deleting excel.exe is probably a good measure to improve organisational efficiency. I was literally only just having a conversation with someone about why Excel should be destroyed with fire, and then the ashes launched into the sun (and only then because there aren't any convenient black holes close enough by to dispose of it there).
People like you are the reason billionaires exist. I'm willing to bet that your value to the organisation you worked for was vastly more than £40k, yet that surplus value didn't go into your wallet, but almost certainly into that of a private equity investor somewhere who doesn't work a minute of their life. Without going "full Karl Marx" here, it doesn't take an idiot to realise that the checks and balances that are supposed to keep capitalism reasonably fair have been eroded in recent decades, and that a readjustment is overdue.
People are too easily led to focus on "scroungers" who just about scrape an existence "living off benefits," whilst ignoring the very real scroungers who live like kings off the backs of everyone else's labour.
That last point is a very good one. I'd be inclined to say that council budgets should be paid out of general taxation, council taxes should be abolished entirely, CGT is brought in line with income tax (and treated the same, there should be no difference in the tax you pay on earned income through work, and unearned income through being rich already), and more higher tax bands are added for the super-rich, say 50% at £200k, 60% at £1m, 75% at £10m, and 100% for anything over £100M*. Nobody needs £100M, let's keep dragons fictional, and not have humans sitting on piles of wealth while the serfs in the village starve, eh?
*Figures are, ummm, figurative, and as an example only, implementation details TBC...
Strictly speaking, it's based on the "banding" of your property, which I think has more to do with the type and size, than its value directly. For example, all 4-bed houses in an area would be the same band (D I think IIRC), and attract the same level of taxation, but could be worth wildly different amounts due to the state of repair and location.
Yeah, I'm not against the idea of wealth taxes, especially on people who own assets that far outstrip their day-to-day survival needs by many orders of magnitude to the extent that the mere existence of their wealth means that many others have to go without.
There's a bit of a difference between tangible assets, like cash in the bank, or bricks-and-mortar property, though, and some intangible notional entity like bitcoin, which hasn't come into existence by depriving someone else of their assets.
FWIW, I, too, mined some bitcoin in the early days, at a time when dedicated USB ASIC chips were just starting to appear. At one point, I had about 0.1 BTC, which at the time, was worth about half of what I'd spent on the hardware (as a curiosity), and used in electricity in mining it. Fast-forward several years, and that was worth a couple of thousand, and I have gradually, over time, "spent" pretty much all of it on various online transactions; a bunch of Amazon vouchers, a couple fo 4K monitors, a nice gaming chair, a high-end laptop for my wife included. None of that has taken me anywhere near the CGT threshold of course, and I've been careful to not do anything with it that might attract the attention of the tax man.
If I'd held onto it, it would nominally be worth a bit more now than when I "cashed out", but all-in-all, I've probably ended up with about 20x what I put in, as a curiosity something like 15 years ago. With hindsight, I'd have just bought a bunch of bitcoin in 2006 or 2007 and retired on the proceeds, happy to be taxed on them. Hindsight still has 20:20 vision...
I think tax officials are only really interested when whoever holds the keys to those wallets liquidates some fo those thousands of bitcoins for actual currency, in which case there's the matter of capital gains tax.
After all, lots of things have hugely over-inflated "values" which are set by supply-and-demand, or perceived intrinsic worth. You could be living in a house that your parents bought in the '70s for a couple of grand and it could nominally be worth something like half a million quid now. Nobody is asking for that nominal half a million to be taxed, until you try to sell it.
Now, there's an argument that people who hold assets worth vast amounts of money should pay a wealth tax on them, but such a thing doesn't (yet) exist, and capital continues to accumulate capital. Also, trying to identify bitcoin wallet-holders based on a nominal worth (of something with an inherently unstable value) is a bit of a fool's errand, as a wallet is inherently anonymous until someone tries to do something with it other than a direct transfer to another wallet (at which point, in most countries now, there is a requirement for "exchanges", payment processors, and vendors, to establish the wallet owner's identity).
Interestingly, one of Craig Wright's main arguments in the past has been that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and thus those early bitcoins should all belong to him, and therefore whoever has the keys to that wallet should hand them over to him. The glaring logical flaw in this argument should have already established today's news, that he is categorically NOT Satoshi Nakamoto, beyond reasonable doubt several years ago.
My money is on the real Satoshi having sadly passed away only a few years after the original invention of Bitcoin.
I'm pleased to see those trigger words have invoked the Pavlovian response in some people to reflexively down-vote my post.
I suppose it's too much to hope for that those who did so pause for a few minutes to reflect on whether the world really is as black-and-white as they think it is, or whether it could be that they have been fed some divisive and superficially appealing disinformation in order to better control them. "Divide and conquer" is a very old idiom, after all.
Yes, indeed you can adjust the definition of the insults you hurl at people to make them "fit". It doesn't do anything to make your arguments valid beyond demonstrating that you are focused on trying to make clever word games, rather than acknowledging that other people might have different opinions to yourself.
My point was this, and I'll state it again, because you seem to have missed it:
A lack of empathy, and understanding of state of mind in others is not a virtue. Attempting to ridicule those who do exhibit empathy through name-calling is damaging to society because it normalises divisive and selfish behaviours, and discourages cooperation.
A functioning society is based on cooperation and an understanding of the concept of common good. This is why we have laws against violence, theft, murder, etc. because whilst those behaviours are beneficial to the individual, they are harmful to society as a whole.
If we elect people who lack that understanding, or, on a more fundamental level, lack the ability to have that understanding, then they will act only in their own best interests, and against those of society as a whole. As a member of society as a whole, and not being a fan of the fascist ideal of "strongest takes all", I'd rather this didn't happen.
As for the difference between understanding why someone with a personality disorder does something, and thinking it is excusable as a result; well, I don't think I ever claimed as much. Violent crimes (and I include stalking in this, as psychological violence is very real) are not excused by the argument of "I was not well when I did it". A lack of capability of understanding the difference between right and wrong, coupled with an inability to "play within the rules of society" should earn someone a permanent stay in a psychiatric institution. Such people are a danger to others.
"A statistician" said that, did they? Oh wow, I'm convinced by your completely anecdotal and unverified evidence. "Unavoidable conclusion," was it? Of a hypothetical and untested claim? I think you might need to revisit your dictionary and look up the words "unavoidable" and "conclusion". Plenty of countries outside the US (*gasp* actually most of them) don't have the death penalty (because it's basically state legalised murder, and a bit ethically iffy as such), and for some reason, seem not to suffer such a high murder rate, which kind of calls into question the safeness of this unnamed "statistician's" conclusion. I expect you are now going to claim that the free availability of guns in the US also prevents people being murdered because "good guys with guns," despite the overwhelming evidence?
But hey, that one "statistician", AMIRITE?
...and yes, the movie is also a parody of fascism; the ironic part is that Verhoeven didn't realise the book was, partly because he didn't read most of it, and partly because his parody was a lot blunter. To be fair, it had to be, for the average cinema audience to get it, and I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of people out there who still didn't and just think it's a cool action film. Those people can vote.
I think that if you're going to have the death penalty, then it should also apply to judges that wrongly convict and pronounce that sentence. We'll see how quickly the judiciary collapses.
Apart from the fundamental human rights issue with execution, the problem of unsafe convictions, and the difficulty of issuing a reprieve after someone has been killed has yet to be solved...
And remember, human rights are everyone's rights. The moment you start saying "everyone, except that person," is the moment someone takes those rights away from you, as well.
The DSM used to list homosexuality as a disease, so I wouldn't take its contents as gospel.
My point is that there is a category difference between illnesses that are a result of a physical cause, and those which are a result of personality. Think of it as a difference between hardware and software. If there is something physically wrong in the brain, it can be treated as such, much as faulty RAM in a computer can be replaced. If someone fundamentally is unable to experience compassion or empathy, it's pretty much impossible to instil it into them against their will. You can't install a new operating system into their brain, like replacing Windows with Linux, because the analogy breaks down a bit at that point.
This does raise an interesting question about the effectiveness of rehabilitation and of psychological therapies on people with personality disorders, because it's functionally impossible to tell the difference between effective therapy, and someone playing along. For example, Ed Kemper has behaved in an exemplary manner whilst in prison, but I wouldn't consider for a minute releasing him. Would you?
Well, yes, but the words of Dubois are not the words of Heinlein, just as if I were to write a book about a rollerblading giraffe, written in the first person, it wouldn't make me a camelid. He managed to fit a lot of nuance into his books, and one of the important bits, which we would do very well to pay attention to in the current world political climate, is that fascism very often appears to be superficially reasonable. The consequences come several steps down the line.
From the downvotes, I can see that 3 out of ten people here are either hopelessly naïve, wilfully ignorant, or domestic violence perpetrators themselves. (Stalking, especially of an ex-housemate falls under the definition of DV).
For those who don't believe me about how common domestic violence is, should take a look at crime statistics. If you've ever wondered why the police aren't doing anything about the antisocial behaviour in your neighbourhood, it's because they are responding to a domestic incident somewhere else, and protecting the life of an abuse victim is more important than the graffiti on that bus shelter, sorry.
Yeah, you do know that book is a parody of fascism, and that particular piece of dialogue is written from the point of view of a defender of that fascist state, don't you? Just checking.
The whole book is a critique of the military-industrial complex, and the fallacy of "might is right". The film kind of misses this point, since Paul Verhoeven reputedly only bothered to read the first chapter, didn't realise it was a parody, and proceeded to make his own version of parody (that wasn't as cleverly done, yet still entertaining) from it. For example, in the book, the war against the "bugs" is started by Humanity, and propaganda is used to paint them as lesser beings (sound familiar?) despite it transpiring that they are a sophisticated species amongst a peaceful alliance of many. If I remember rightly (and it's probably a quarter of a century since I read it), the book opens with a narrative from a "mechanised infantry" trooper wearing a power armour suit, fighting against one of those other species, the "skinnies". Maybe the parallels between the mechanised infantry and Nazi stormtroopers were a bit more obvious at the time the book was written, than they are now, since it would have been fresher in people's memories, but the parody is still effective. I should probably read it again, if I can find where it is in the bookhoard, and fish it out, it's not a very thick book.
Mental illness needs treatment, sure, but a personality disorder is not a mental illness and cannot be treated. There's no organic cause such as brain injury, disease, or a chemical imbalance in the brain that can cause things like schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, et al, people like this are simply made wrong. If someone lacks empathy, is narcissistic to the extent that they disregard the needs of all others, and is prepared to act in a way that harms others, those are the hallmarks of a psychopath, and they are a danger to society, and should be excluded from it.
Incidentally, the fact that certain world leaders exhibit these same characteristics, and that such components of human mentality as empathy are considered weaknesses and derided with all sorts of pathetic name-calling (woke, SJW, leftie, "political correctness" and so on) only tells you that there are plenty of people around who would like to live within the civilised society of collective endeavour, whilst exploiting it for their own gains, and the expense of others. People would do well to not elect those who serve their own interests over those of the electorate.
Do you want to know the scary thing? There are lots of men out there who have behaviours like this, to some degree or another.
Women typically suffer this behaviour in silence, for fear of ridicule or escalation, so other men don't know it goes on.
It is almost always women who are the victims, and men who are the perpetrators, but not always (such as the Baby Reindeer case), and you only generally hear about it if the case is unusual, or particularly severe. Just ask any woman in your life about such abusive behaviour they have experienced or seen others suffer, and be ready to be shocked and saddened.
It is worth remembering, though, that the research outcomes are rarely those predicted either. This is the nature of research. In reality, the outcomes are likely to be much more varied and useful than just "power from fusion in x years", including advances and new techniques in material science, engineering, construction, and a whole raft of other areas, which will all benefit mankind as a whole.
Evolution is a directionless process, and certainly has no "design" element to it.
The basic answer, though, is "we don't know". We can observe consciousness in humans, but not have a good definition for it. We can see it exhibited to some degree or other by most complex animals. We can observe that it appears to have arisen spontaneously, and possibly gradually, through the process of evolution, but the complexity of biological systems far outstrips any machine we can currently make, or can conceive of making in the foreseeable future.
The mistake people make with "AI" is one people have always made concerning systems which are not easily understood: inferring agency where there is none. In past times, humans would attribute freak weather, earthquakes, volcanoes and disease epidemics to supernatural agency. This is exactly the same thought process, just with complex computational systems in place of plate tectonics and chaotic weather systems.
