Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
To be fair, whilst the vector for this is Windows, the flaw that is being exploited is in UEFI, and Microsoft are only one twelfth of the UEFI Forum board, so they can't really be assigned all the blame. In this case, the likes of Apple, Dell, and HP are all equally culpable.
I don't recall ever reading about the bit where raiders from the Iberian peninsular attacked India (the nearest place making Steel at the time), captured large bits of territory and stole their technologies. At least not until relatively modern times, when the Portuguese colonised parts of the Indian West coast.
If steel arrived as trade goods, it would have almost certainly have been via itinerant traders, who themselves would not have known the secrets of its production (a trader is not a smelter). Bear in mind that steel is produced using blast furnaces, a considerable step up from simple smelting; it requires high temperatures, a source of high-purity carbon, limestone, and the technologies to pump air through the furnace to get it hot enough. The technology to do this today is not all that different from when it was discovered. An early iron-age trader isn't going to have one of those on the back of his coracle.
The isotopic composition of the carbon would also be different. Biological processes on earth deplete carbon-13 due to the primary kinetic isotope effect, the upshot of which is that extraterrestrial carbon sources are relatively enriched in 13C compared to terrestrial sources (such as coal or charcoal) and this stands out like a sore thumb.
I think we can be pretty sure that even if the goods were traded, the skills to produce them would not have been given away. No trader is going to give away the secret to producing their trade goods to their customers.
Did you read the bit in the article that said there was evidence that the steel tools were produced locally, in the Iberian Peninsular?
Whilst there's a possibility that people who already had the skills to produce steel may have moved about a bit, the sort of infrastructure needed to produce such alloys is unlikely to have moved with them, and I doubt steel-makers from China or India would have been travelling with traders to go and live in Portugal.
Where I live, the sun is exactly* overhead at about 12:12 GMT
*I'm pretty sure it's only so on certain days of the year, as well, due to the fact the Earth is slouching in space, and won't sit up straight and stop wobbling, and I don't live on the equator.
It's a bit like that, but after "buying" the house, you are free to strip all the fixtures and fittings, flog them off, then strip it down to the building materials, flog them off too, pay yourself handsome dividends for the "profits" you are making selling everything off by counting it as "income", then write off the debt that is owned by the area of thin-air where the house used to be. Also known as asset-stripping.
You will have bought the house using the bank's money, sold it off bit by bit, keeping that money, then walked away with the cash, while the bank is in the red, essentially legalised bank robbery.
In practice, the only time you hear the word is when someone is complaining that they have been called out on their own behaviour, or they find themselves uncomfortable that other people are disadvantaged compared to them, and it is being pointed out, and their only defence is "woke". Sometimes it is uncomfortable to realise that your life is relatively comfortable compared to that of others who, for example, might be in a group that runs the risk of getting beaten up by thugs just for walking down the street.
For the right-wing nutters, "woke" is just their modern equivalent of "political correctness gone mad", another meaningless shibboleth used simply to "other" people they see as different. A good example of this is a recent case with the Daily Telegraph where they described something or other as "woke" for including disabled people and then quickly back-pedalled when people rightly pointed out that their headline-writers were being class-A thundercunts.
That's not "woke", those are just dickheads. The world, unfortunately, is full of them, at all points on the political spectrum. Just because someone else is being a dickhead, doesn't mean you have to follow suit, in an equal-and-opposite-dickhead kind of way. Newton's laws of motion don't apply to dickheadery...
That might be what it means to you, but if you take that meaning then that really marks you out as someone who thinks that and is using it as jusitfication.
The origin of the word (which isn't really in use in the UK except as an insult thrown around by RWNJs) is to be awake to social injustice. Presumably, you're fine with social injustice then?
Perhaps you need to get out of whatever echo chamber it is you're in where they're throwing it about, because it sounds decidedly unhealthy.
Here is another example:
If you were to wind back ten years and survey people to ask whether they would agree with the phrase "all lives matter", you'd probably find most people agreeing, apart from maybe a small minority of white supremacists. Of course they would, it would be a metaphor for "equality for all".
However, if you were to do that same survey today, with the context that the phrase has been used as a "counter" to "black lives matter" and as a shorthand for "I don't care that you've been systemically discriminated against", you'd almost certainly find a much higher number of people disagreeing with the phrase, and they would not be the same people. Context is everything. It is now a metaphor for the status-quo, which is not "equality for all".
Boiling a complex issue down to a yes or no answer also loses all subtlety from the question and robs it of context.
FWIW, yes, all lives do matter, but also black people have been, and continue to be, discriminated against, largely by white people, and much more progress needs to be made towards equality both of treatment, and opportunity for people of all races, especially in the US. That's not a "yes or no" answer, though, is it, and demanding such answers to seemingly-simple but actually complex questions is deeply misleading. Scott Adams must know that, he's not stupid, but he does appear to be a racist ass-hat.
It might be a cliché, but an awful lot of rich white South-Africans got that way through colonialism, and the apartheid system. This, of course, doesn't mean that colonialism, greed, and racism are uniquely white-people attributes.
That's also not to say that rich people elsewhere didn't get to be that way through similarly nefarious means. Money tends to gravitate towards the ill-intentioned.
For reference, so nobody ever needs to read Dilbert again, those five jokes are:
1) Dilbert's boss (the PHB) is stupid
2) Dilbert's co-worker, Alice, is female, doesn't tolerate stupidity, and is angry as a result
3) Dogbert's cat, Catbert, can talk, and is evil
4) Dilbert's other co-worker, Wally, doesn't do any work, and knows how to get away with it.
5) Dilbert's other other co-worker, Asok is an intern, and doesn't realise he's being exploited.
There are a few other themes that aren't the main jokes, where Adams comes up with something vaguely original once a year or so, such as:
6) Generic racist / xenophobic jokes about "Elbonians"
7) Bin men secretly know everything
8) Dilbert has no social skills
9) Something nasty happens to a generic co-worker / generic co-worker is stupid
10) Loud Alan
I think that just about covers it. Oh, sometimes there's a rat (Ratbert) or a dinosaur (can't remember his name, it's probably several years since Adams has used that character)
He hasn't been "cancelled" because of what his Dilbert strip contains (which are the same five jokes it has always contained, reworded), it has happened because of what he has said in a personal capacity. The Dilbert strip could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point and nobody would notice anyway (except it wouldn't necessarily contain jokes about ChatGPT)
FWIW, it's pretty obvious why some of the respondents in that poll respond the way they did.
It is perfectly understandable for black people to not feel comfortable with a phrase that is used by white supremacists as an idiom for their racist behaviour.
If you can't understand this, then you are either deliberately not understanding it, or are absolutely part of the problem.
No, I read a verbatim quote of what he said on a (reasonably) reliable well known news web-site.
I don't need to listen to someone ranting if I can read a transcript, and be assured that the transcript is correct.
Is the transcript incorrect? I'm willing to be money that it is not.
Well, let's go with the first paragraph of that article, under the first sub-heading:
In a video on YouTube, Scott Adams, who is white, said black Americans were part of a "hate group" and that white people should "get the hell away" from them.
Do you find that acceptable? Because to me, it sounds an awful lot like plain ol' white supremacist racism, which, for the record, I do not find acceptable. I don't think my assessment there is especially controversial either. See also Cyanide and Happiness's take on it.
Now, I've not listened to the rant myself and I doubt I have to, to get the gist of it; Scott Adams was already well-known as a bit of a RWNJ, and this is only in character. The BBC (which is where the link above directs you) are not known especially for taking quotes out of context, and would certainly get picked up on it if they did, even if their political neutrality is suspect (with political appointees basically in charge), if anything, they would be expected to be biased towards not reporting that.
The stuff I used to have to work with, which controlled high-speed roll-fed industrial printers, ran on Win NT via a proprietary board (probably the same, SCSI over ISA), and also wouldn't run unless there was a physical dongle on the serial port to provide the license key. This was back in the mid '00s and there was no sign of it being upgraded any time soon (the desktop machines we did the print layout on were all XP IIRC). That may well have necessitated replacing the printer itself, which was about 6 ft tall, 4 ft wide, not including the 1+ tonne roll of paper feeding into and out of it, and ran on 3-phase 440V.
You never know, replacement costs for kit might even have been what finished off that business (it apparently folded about a year after I left). I suspect it was the horrendous mismanagement, though.
It supports I2C, if you need to emulate an old-fashioned parallel or serial port through that I believe it's doable. It also has plenty of GPIOs if you can't use I2C for some reason.
Granted, if you need high data-throughput that needs to go faster than the Pico's clock, then a pico might not be the solution for that...
I've only heard of it anecdotally, but I guess it would have something to do with the laser focus being slightly off, and thus the spots of dye that get sublimated (or however rewritable drives work) are in a slightly different position; I guess this may drift across the width of the disc as well, due to variations in stepper motors. If that "track" is imprinted by formatting the disc (not sure if this is how the DVD-RAM discs worked?) then you'd want to do it on the same drive to be sure.
edit - Having looked up how these things work, they are more like an optical hard disk than a DVD. They have "sector markers" imprinted on in the factory that provide start/stop marks, but the sectors themselves are written by formatting them, and the data is held by melting the surface and recrystallising it in one of two phases with different reflectivity. Unlike other writable / re-writeable optical media, they have concentric tracks, not one spiral track, which presumably would be more sensitive to things like laser alignment and stepper motor variation. They also use dual lasers with different power levels to write the two different phases, so focus and alignment would be important, especially if it varies between drives.
The risky bit here, as far as I can tell, would be to format those discs in another drive. If my memory serves me correctly, some of the DVD writers were a bit temperamental, and I don't think it's unheard of to have discs that, once written on one drive, could only be read by that same drive. Errors could creep in and not be readily picked up, for example reading first or last sectors, unless doing a full verify after writing. If that corner has been cut too (and it probably was because it would be the most time-consuming part, often done at 1x speed), then you could end up with a stack of coasters and not know it until you needed the data on them.
CD / DVD writers that used caddies are pretty ancient tech. This might have been around 2006, but that doesn't mean the "server" (and I use the term advisedly) dates from 2006. In "factory environments", those machines probably have some sort of custom control board in them and will be kept running for as long as humanly possible, because replacing the machine might be cheap, but replacing the control board within them almost certainly is not. And you probably are talking "replace" not "move" because that control board will probably use an ISA interface, or something equally horrible, which modern MOBOs (at the time) didn't support. So - get new board from manufacturer - probably a couple of grand. Plus a new license. "What?" I hear you say, "a new license?" Yeah, a new licence, because the old board had a licence key specific to it, and the new board needs a different one. That'll be £150 K please, or some similarly ridiculously high number. Suddenly the old machine in the skip is starting to sound more appealing, if we can fix it...
This is the reality of how a lot of businesses operate, especially ones that operate custom or bespoke factory processes with their equally exotic control systems.
These days, of course, the whole lot can probably run on one Raspberry Pi Pico.
Linguistically speaking, the bits of English that came from French did so in the 11th century; quite a while before the Americas were even discovered, let alone linguistically separated from England (and also quite a while before England even existed in its current form).
Whilst there was a trend for pretentious middle-class Victorians to pinch words from French to try to make themselves sound more educated than the hoi-polloi, most of the French loan words came into the language long before there was such a thing as American or British English. It's also worth remembering that, at the time of its inception, the nascent US was a lot more closely allied with France, and would have had a lot more French speakers, than the UK.
A lot of the linguistic differences arise from the ethnic make-up of the population. For example, US English is much more likely to use Italian names for vegetables than UK English, so what we call a courgette, you call a zucchini, what we call coriander, you call cilantro, and so on. Yet, oddly, the US pronunciation of the word "herb" pretentiously drops the "h" as if it were a French word (yet doesn't correctly stick the extra "e" on the end).
I guess what I am saying is that languages diverge for a number of reasons, and a big one of those reasons is people in the past being pretentious wankers, and sticking in extra letters, taking loan words to sound more educated, and developing an unhealthy obsession with the letter "z". Most of the time, sensible people refrain from piss-taking, but sometimes it is necessary, when, for example, Americans try to make out that they single-handedly won WW2 (I think Russia might have something to say about that) and so on...
I'll just add a quick anecdote to illustrate why some people find it necessary to take the piss.
When my mother was a child (this would have been in the late '50s / early '60s), her father worked as a paediatrician and briefly did so in the US for a couple of years. This meant that she had some schooling there as they moved around. At one school, another girl came up to her and said the immortal words, "So you're from England? Gee you sure learned our language fast".
Well, since "utilize", the very American spelling comes from the French verb utiliser, I might suggest that it is our trans-pondian cousins who are using the "French variation"; the only people I hear using this word here in the UK are people spouting bullshit business jargon, which itself very much originates from the US. It's not used in common speech, and certainly not utilised...
The difference between "the plaintiff was taken away and hanged," and "the side of beef was taken away and hung".
Yes, I know it's an archaic term, and we don't have hangings any more (for jolly good reasons, despite what the likes of 30p Lee might think), but it really grates on me when you get historians and criminologists on TV programmes talking about people being "hung". Once you start noticing it, it stands out more and more...
Yes, I know language, and its use changes, but since we don't have hangings any more, perhaps we don't need to change the word we use to refer to the process...
...feel free to keep down-voting me...
What this really comes down to is whether a phone number, in the context of a software application, is store, and treated, as a string, or as a piece of strictly formatted data.
That, in turn, depends entirely on the problem domain the software is designed to work in, and often, in real life, those domains change, and cross over.
You can shout until you are blue in the face that phone numbers should be normalised and strictly formatted, but if you are taking data from one system, where they have been user entered, and then normalising and transforming that data with no user interaction, you'd damn well make sure that it handles all of the following, completely and unambiguously:
07123456789
+447123456789
447123456789
00447123456789
0447123456789 (in countries where the international dialling prefix is 0)
01144123456789 (in countries like the US where you first dial an exit code)
3456789 (where the prefix is implied by the software domain)
07123 456 789
0 71 23 45 67 89
71 23 45 67 89
44 71 23 45 67 89
(07123) 456 789
(0712) 3456 789
(unknown)
djfhgdsjhfgds (where the user has just typed junk into a mandatory but not validated field)
...and many, many more.
Aside from all of this, the fundamental idea of using an unvalidated, possibly spoofable, possibly changeable number as a unique identifier is broken by design.
No company I have ever dealt with has, when I have called them, said "I'm just pulling up your details" from the phone number alone. They'll pretty universally ask for your name, postcode and first line of your address, and if it's something like a bank or utility provider, they'll then ask some security questions.
Yes, you format it for storage. Every time a user enters a number, and every time you store that in the database, and every time you want to search, or bulk import data.
This means validating and coercing the data into this format every time it is entered. In one way this is very little different to any other UI validation (for example NHS numbers with or without spaces), but it is common enough for numbers to be supplied in all one format, or all another, or in a mixture, that code to address the situation seems to crop up time and again.
For example, we have one system that lets users enter a mobile number, in the 07... format, and some of this data is then fed into another system that generates and sends SMS messages, via a third-party provider, which wants it in the +44 format. I can't recall whether they want the + on the front or not, I have it in the back of my head what they actually require is 447...
This stems from the fact that there is a "formal representation" of the number, and there is the colloquial use. In the UK, if we were calling someone, we wouldn't type +447... into our phones, we'd dial 07...
We'd also quite often insert spaces, certainly when reading a number. For example, my own number starts with 07733, and when reading it to someone I would quote it as 07733 nnn nnn.
In France, however, they read numbers in pairs, and would read my example above as 0 71 23 45 67 89, "zéro, cinquante-onze, vingt-trois, quarante-cinq, soixante-sept, quatre-vingt-huit" and would be likely to write it down, and enter it into any computer system that allows it as such. In the US, they like to insert dashes into numbers, and so-on.
If you're storing the number in a database and then not actually using it for anything beyond retrieval, then you're unlikely to go to the trouble of normalising it (got a user story for that?), but if you are searching for it, you probably do want to normalise it, and also try to normalise your search terms. But what if you wanted to search for numbers that have "23 45 67" in the (including the spaces in those positions)? The seemingly simpleness of the situation belies a fair amount of complexity.
My point is quite clear. You should not tolerate hate speech. Offering "tolerance" to it is tantamount to accepting it, and thus endorsing it.
At risk of invoking Godwin, it's like saying, "we should let that nice Mr Hitler have his say about the Jews, it's down to them to refute it". We all know how that ended up. The correct response is to say, "Fuck off Nazis, I'm not giving you the air-time, go and peddle your hate elsewhere".
There is no grey area, no deflection, and it isn't "censoring opinions that differ from my own". Refusing to publish something isn't censorship, any more than hate speech is "just opinions". By casting such things in this sort of light you are arguing for hatred to be given an equal footing with other speech. Hatred doesn't deserve equivocation. It should not be on an equal footing with speech that is not hateful, and it's not just a "theoretical discussion", in the same way as punching someone in the face is not on an equal footing with not punching them in the face.
Hate speech demonstrably causes harm, in some cases extreme harm, and even death. It should not be tolerated. Especially not on the grounds of "you're censoring me if you don't allow me to spew hatred". If you can't see why, you should fuck right off.
so... Karl Popper was an "extremist" was he?
I'm inclined to place more weight on what he had to say than some random on the internet.
What I am saying is quite clear: if you allow all speech, including hate speech, without removing things which spread violent and discriminatory attitudes, then you are essentially endorsing it. To paraphrase, possibly badly, "The only thing evil needs to succeed is for good men to stand by".
Yes, what constitutes "hate speech" may have any number of definitions, just as many things do. It's a false argument to say that doesn't mean we can say what things should not be tolerated.
For example, I'll start the list here. We should not tolerate speech which promotes:
Any of those you disagree with? Hopefully not.
In essence, if you are "othering" a group of people, and then discriminating against them based on that "othering", you are doing something that should not be tolerated. We need to regulate it, because, unfortunately, it is part of human nature to do so due to our evolutionary origins.
*Note - there is a clear line between religious belief, and actions taken using religion as a justification. People should be free to believe anything they want, but it is no exemption for doing things that would otherwise be illegal, such as, to take an extreme example, human sacrifice.
In this context, "hate" is shorthand for "hate speech", which in turn is shorthand for speech which is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., abusive and systematically belittling. The sort of speech that was used against Jewish people and used to stoke up the hatred that led to Kristallnacht and the atrocities that followed (and the same sort of speech that was incidentally common throughout Europe for centuries beforehand, and should not have been tolerated then, either).
I think it's quite proper to stamp out that sort of speech, rather than allowing it to go unchallenged. It's Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" - the argument is that if you're tolerant then you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech and intolerance, so you should therefore not tolerate intolerance.
Personally, I'm all for the alternative, which is punch a Nazi.
Yes, I went and had a look at the actual product link as well. They seem to admit, without actually admitting it, that this is essentially just a pico with a different shaped carrier board, connectors pre-soldered, and debugger firmware pre-flashed.
It's great that the RP2040 is such a versatile chip that this sort of thing is easy to make with it, but to me, it seems like one of its big selling points is its versatility, and that versatility is better exposed on a Pico, with all the pin-outs. For someone who is looking to use one of these as a debug probe, I'd also expect them to be working away with a soldering iron coming up with all sorts of uses for the thing they are debugging with it, so it's a bit of a no-brainer to also be able to turn a pico into a debugger easily, given that it's really part of the same skill-set. And it is literally very simple to do, five minutes of soldering (adding four headers which are all next to each other) and flashing from a PC via USB.
I suppose for someone who is trying to hack a pico to work with specific hardware, being able to attach a ready-made debugger to that to dig into what exactly it is doing would be handy, but I'd also be surprised that there is a massive market for this group that doesn't overlap significantly with the former group, because as far as I can see, this is just a pico on a different shaped carrier board.
I'm sure there is something I am missing here. I'm not a massive embedded electronics kind of guy, and only really play with the couple of Picos I have, so really I'm just hoping someone can enlighten me.
The article is unclear what advantage this has over using a pico as a probe. Yes, it does require some setting up - soldering four pins onto it to attach jumpers, and flashing the debug firmware from a PC (or a full-fat Pi) via a USB cable, but it's not exactly rocket science. I have one sat next to me (covered in a layer of dust, to be fair), and even with my meagre soldering skills, it didn't take much effort to set it up.
So, does this come with some advantage over the Pico + five minutes with a soldering iron, or is it pure convenience?
I think this would be observable as a change in the speed of light over time, which I believe has been measured to sufficient accuracy and over a long enough period of time to make any such effect either noticeable or extremely small. I think such a change would also interfere with the magnitude of red-shifts over time and would provide a measurable effect.
I can't remember where it is I saw it, but there was a video describing the possibility of early stars being so massive that their interiors contained massive black holes, and their mass was great enough to stop the stars being blown apart by their formation. A possible explanation for the existence of supermassive black holes, which IIRC is problematic due to the masses involved and the times taken to accrete them under other theories of formation.
Edit - one of these bad boys.
This is, indeed true, so I suspect that in plenty of places, retailers are indeed not allowed to refer to "oat-based drink" and "almond-based drink" as "oat milk" or "almond milk". I'm sure I've seen them in the supermarket labelled that way though, in the cabinet I swiftly walk past.
FWIW, I have a dietary intolerance to the proteins in "soya milk" (it has a similar unpleasant effect to the one lactose has on some people) and soya protein in general. Even if that wasn't the case, I find the texture of such stuff in tea or coffee to be wrong compared to actual milk. I have to confess I've not tried "almond milk" or "oat milk" which are apparently popular these days, but my experience with soya has put me right off!
