Posts by Philo T Farnsworth

Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers

Re: Bring back the original term: glassholes

Always slow on the uptake, it took me a second to catch the joke. Nice one to whomever concocted that.

While I'm here, a certain irony is perhaps worthy of note. From the second paragraph of the story,

"Like many hospitality companies, Wetherspoon has CCTV cameras for security reasons, but their use is strictly controlled by data legislation," a spokesperson said.

So, not that I wish to defend perv glasses or the people who misused them, but snooping for me but not for thee?

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Re: zeroth law

I'll keep that in mind the next time I encounter a Big Bad Wolf.

Re: zeroth law

It's always useful to remember that in a story or novel you can write anything you want but that doesn't make it real, it just needs to advance the plot.

Sadly, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are just as fictional as hyperdrives, fun to read about and imagine, but they have little to no bearing on reality

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Ah, the tax man

Been there, done that.

Multiple hours waiting in a tent outside the ER (A&E for you Brits) before even seeing the triage nurse.

Multiple hours waiting in a chair in the hallway, waiting for a physician.

And that's with excellent insurance and an excellent hospital system (I'm a bit biased there, since I used to be employed by the university's School of Medicine, which runs it).

On the other hand, having been hauled into the ER in an ambulance in a pretty serious cardiac incident, I had swift and competent care. Yay EMTs and yay nurses and yay cardiologists.

On the third hand, I have an acquaintence who, while American, spends a fair bit of time in London and tells me that the emergency service he had was both quick and excellent. And they looked at him like he had a parrot cage on his other head when he asked how he should pay.

Yeah, in general, getting sick or injured is a pretty rotten experience, especially on a Friday or Saturday night when the drunks do stupid things to themselves and others, a classic casse of too many idiots and not enough doctors. And don't even get me started on the underpaid, overworked residents.

Oh, and dental? That's an entirely different insurance package that basically covers (most of) a couple of cleanings. Implant? Better have your credit card handy and hope it's got a high limit.

Re: Ah, the tax man

I am not a tax expert (which is why I have an accountant) and certainly not one on the UK's system but as I understand marginal tax rates¹, as you move your way through the brackets, the "marginal tax rates only apply to the portion of income within each bracket, not your entire income," so your actual take-home after taxes when you escalate through the brackets never goes down but you get to keep less of it per bracket.

I guess if you're at the top of a bracket and the extra income barely puts you into the next bracket you might feel that the return on your work is not worth the time but I suspect that's more of a corner case.

But even so, you folks get national healthcare, while we just get more complicated rules about insurance, so there are definite tradeoffs.

I'll shut up now.

___________________

¹ Investopedia: Marginal Tax Rate

Re: Ah, the tax man

Now that's a though process I've never understood -- not wanting money because you'll be taxed on it.

Personally, I'm semi-retired and if someone wants to give me money for doing work, I'll gladly take it, even if I have to choke up a chunk of it come the 15th of April ("Tax Day" here in the States). I just make sure not to spend it all before then.

Having some money always strikes me as better than having no money.

Now we can probably argue all day about where that money goes, whether or not it's a good use, and where we'd rather have it go but that's a discussion for some other forum.

I had a minor argument with my stock broker¹ about selling some shares in a for-the-moment high flying company. He kept arguing we shouldn't sell because we'd be paying huge capital gains taxes since we got in early and the difference between the cost basis and the sale price was substantial.²

I made the point that I'd rather "share" 20 percent with the IRS, et al, than share negative percent when the bottom finally falls out of this idiotic bubble market. Even if, nay, when, the price drops only 20 percent, I'm still out that 20 percent plus the 20 percent on the remaining 80 percent.

Would I rather have 100 percent of the money? Sure, but that's just the way it works.³

Rejecting money just because of the tax seems a bit silly.

If it's the paperwork, hire a good accountant and let them worry about it.

It's cheaper than therapy.

___________________

¹ Stock broker and my are words that for the longest time I thought I'd never utter in the same sentence.

² Living proof that like the very wealthy, even the moderately well off are often more lucky than smart.

³ And don't give me a bunch of Ayn Rand guff or, as Ed Zitron puts it, I'll pile drive you.

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

Sales

The article sez "Amazon's is fully-loaded infrastructure rental. This is a hotel comparing its revenue to a mattress company's."

A hotel gets to "sell" the mattress every night while paying for it only once.

`Zon gets to "sell" its chip over and over, perhaps even several times a day.

If you think about it, the software business has been this way essentially since its inception. Develop once and sell or, even better, license as many times as the traffic will bear.

Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom would be wondering "Why didn't I think of that?"

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Re: Great training

> Basically the kids are all bad actors. . .

I wish people would stop saying that.

I've heard that William Shatner is actually a pretty nice person when you get to know him.

Re: Yeah, folks

Precisely.

In fact, I think in this story, as journalists put it, they've buried the lede in the last graf, to wit, “Make the safe thing the easy thing,” Walker said. “Give staff password managers. Use multi-factor authentication. Review accounts properly. Test backups. Remove shared admin logins. Keep systems updated. . . ."

As I said in the comments in another of this series, "Getting work done interprets security as damage and works around it."

I remember working on a multi-campus project with a couple of other universities that as part of what it was fashionable at the time to call a collaboratory, implemented among other things a shared file system across campuses.

Security was so unimaginably onerous that it literally took an all day seminar to learn all the ins and outs of credentials and authentication and keys to just use the blasted thing. And when I say literally, i mean literally, as in an entire wasted day.

As an applications programmer who just needed to work with it, I found myself completely bewildered, and I had a few decades of experience working in the business. Most of the actual scientists who just wanted to share and access data were left glassy-eyed in confusion.

And these were not stupid people (okay, with one possible, nay, definite, exception, me), they had advanced degrees in subjects that make my head hurt and a facility with mathematics that just leaves me gasping like a guppy out of water.

The safe thing was not the easy thing and I suspect that's one major reason why the project slowly slipped into obscurity and disuse.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Noise cancelling headphones

Not to mention breathing air.

In first class you get oxygen as well as nitrogen.

Myself, I've not been on an airplane since 2008 and I'm a happier person for it.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Re: Land of the dollar

True.

But having sharp lawyers and dealing in New York real estate will get you one.

Daddy's money also helps.

But bear in mind that most authoritarianism is authoritarianism for authoritarianism's sake.

It's what the shrinks call "compensation" -- most cops don't make a ton of money, even the chiefs, and most bribery, when it happens, is pretty penny ante. Authority and "command" is where it's at. While the "Stanford Prison Experiment"¹ has largely been shown to be bogus, there's a kernel of truth embedded in the myth.

I don't know of many cops with yachts.

__________

¹ Wikipedia: Stanford prison experiment

Re: Who is the law

When clapping is outlawed only outlaws will be clappers?

Re: Land of the dollar

It's more a simple case of "I have a badge and a gun and you must to obey me."

Authoritarianism needs no incentive.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: Oops

Speaking of early speech recognition, as it were, is anyone here old enough to have attended the Seattle World's Fair (which brought us that now-ubiqutious modern wonder of transportation, the monorail) in 1962?

I remember being fascinated by seeing and (I think) getting to use the IBM Shoebox, a gizmo, according to Wikipedia, "able to perform mathematical functions and provide speech recognition. It was capable of recognizing 16 spoken words, including the digits from 0 through 9. "

For small values of capable, obviously.

That and seeing an IBM 709 computer (I think -- might've been a 7094), which produced reading lists based upon input from a questionaire, probably put me on the trajectory to doing whatever the heck I've been doing for the past few decades.

Re: Have you let a user wreak havoc on your machine?

Oh, do I have a story to tell but it'll have to wait until the Statute of Limitations runs out.

Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

moral turpentine

Meanwhile on the boards of World LIberty Financial, Kalshi, and Polymarket and in the Gold (formerly Oval) Office. . .

If you get knocked on the head and get all your devices stolen and have amnesia, Google will let you back in with a selfie

> Google believe otherwise.

Google hallucinating like a chatbot.

> Hence requiring you to move your head from side to side to prevent trickery with a deep fake.

Apparently they've never heard of this thing called "computer animation."

But circling back to TFA, "Tired of worrying about how you might recover all the precious data stored in your Google account. . ."

No, I'm not. I don't keep any "precious data" stored on a Google account because I don't store anything beyond what my phone absolutely requires to function.

Anything of importance is stored on a system that I and I alone control (data about me is, of course, beyond the control of anyone other than the "data broker" leeches but I attempt to "share"¹ as little as necessary with them).

Anything that's critical gets written down on a piace of paper and locked in my fire safe. If that goes, I've probably got a lot more to worry about than the passkey to my phone.

Yes, it's probably inconvenient but privacy always is and probably always has been.

_____________

¹ By the way, when did "share" become a synonym for "extort?"

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

Remember, the bots don't need to achieve sentience to kill everyone.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Oracle faces $100M annual bill to back Wisconsin datacenter power promises

Powr bill.

At first, I was a bit confused when I began to see data center "capacity" measured in gigawatts. I assumed I was missing something and that wattage somehow was related to useful computation ability.

But, no, we're denominating these things in the amount of power they consume, essentially a proxy score for how much environmental damage they're doing (and don't give me "solar" blah blah "solar" blah blah because the preponderance of them are anything but carbon neutral.

It's the tech equivalent to rolling coal.

Watching the world burn as all the money flows into a multitrillion-dollar Magic 8 Ball

Re: Mortgaging our kids' future for the quick buck

That's more or less what I was getting at, if a bit elliptically.

Stocks, of course, are only tangentially money and subject to the whim of the market. Probably Elon's even more so, since any substantial selling on his part would likely precipitate a rapid and precipitous downtick as other holders (as in "bag") unload their shares in a panic and expensive shareholder lawsuits will no doubt ensue because that's the way we do things these days.

Elon's putative "wealth" is really just numbers multipled by other numbers and only negotiable in the sense that people for some reason take him seriously, boith in public forums and at the bank.

Leveraging against stocks (i.e., borrowing using stock as collateral) only works while the stock maintains its value. Once the share price drops, more shares have to be sequestered in order to maintain the collateral "value" (Scare quotes because as I keep saying stock "value" is almost entirely notional). In steep declines, the borrower may be forced to actually sell, which, in the case of a large holder like Elon, would cause the price to drop as panic ensues and a vicious cycle emerges.

Noted AI-hater Ed Zitron has a recent post on this subject at his newsletter/blog using Oracle's Larry Ellison as an object lesson and cautionary tale. Search for "Oracle, And Larry Ellison's Fortune" -- his wonky punctuation and capitalization -- for the mechanics but, honestly, read the whole thing for some really world class ranting.

Re: Mortgaging our kids' future for the quick buck

Oddly, that was about what I originally intended to comment but got myself sidetracked into a rant about economics (or something -- in retrospect, it's hard to tell).

According to reading I did for a previous post, there probably is some sauropod content in modern day petroleum¹ but most of it was formed some 300 million years ago, plus or minus, in the carboniferous era, which precedes the dinosaur era by some 50 million years, again plus or minus, since when you're talking about evolution the hard demarcations are few and far between.²

Anybody who says otherwise is a saur loser.

_______________

¹ "Skeletons of prehistoric reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (neither of which count as dinosaurs) have been found in the same geological layers as oil and they may have contaminated the oil deposit." BBC Science Focus

² No, I'm not going to provide references. Wikipedia is your friend.

Re: Mortgaging our kids' future for the quick buck

I'm not sure we'll have to wait too long before these data centers become white elephants.

OpenAI and Anthropic have no sustainable business model -- the traffic simply will not bear the true cost of LLM-based "AI" and the Vulture Capitalists will eventually run out of money (and other people's money) to pour into these cash furnaces.

The circular dealing between the data centers and Nvidia will evenually collapse because there's no such thing as perpetual motion, even in finance. The first and second laws of thermodynamics apply and you can't continually (if ever) get something for nothing.

The bills will eventually inescapably come due, OpenAI will get absorbed into Microsoft, and eventually written off. Elon may be able to keep it up for a while if he decides to pour his personal fortune down the SpaceXAI rathole but even that is finite -- you can only leverage stock for so long before the margin calls become a crescendo and the whole mess falls of its own sodden weight.

What happens to Anthropic is anyone's guess.

Unfortunately for the rest us, we're all just passengers on the B Ark, destined to crash to Earth, and this time there will be no Vogons to clean up the mess.

Six months to a year, plus or minus.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

I've found when inserting print statements causes the bug to suddenly vanish or morph into some other manifestation that there is probably some sort of memory management error lurking and not necessarily nearby.

That's happened to me more than once.

When I was a student, back in the middle to late 1960s, I had an assignment in a (Dijkstra forgive me) FORTRAN class where a FORMAT statement would not compile for some reason.

Now this was back in the days of keypunches and tab cards (no fancy screen editors), where programming involved writing the code out on a coding sheet¹, trotting down to the keypunch room, and transcribing the written text onto cards (and, in my case, producing vast number of mispunched cards since there was no way to correct a typo other than starting over again).

I looked at the card and could see no error -- one of the first things I looked for was typing F0RMAT -- I even read the Hollerith code to make sure (one of those now useless skills I picked up on the punchcard era²) -- but no dice.

I had others, including the professor, look at both the card and the printout to no avail.

I finally repunched the card -- using the duplicate function of the keypunch -- resubmitted the deck and the thing ran perfectly.

It was a trick to which I had to resort on a couple of occasions early on in my mainframe days.

The ways of IBM big iron were sometimes mysterious.

_______________

¹ To some extent, I miss those days, since you really had to think about what you were coding in detail and I suspect it made me a better programmer as a result. I quickly learned to leave a few blank lines between statement on the coding sheet so I could insert things I'd forgottenrather than having to rewrite the whole darned page.

² I also used to be able to read five level Baudot and eight level ASCII paper tape from my days at a COMSAT earth station but that's a tale for another time.

Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius

Re: For "people", read "kids".

Even though I've long since outgrown the stuff¹ I don't discount it.

Far too many AI and crypto bros seem to think it's some sort of blueprint for the future, especially if you extend the reach of the genre into sword and sorcery fantasy.

Witness all the ventures named after Lord of the Rings characters and talismans. I suspect Tolkein would be simultaneously amused and horrified that his little experiment in philology wrapped in an Aurthurian-adjacent² fairy tale has spawned such unremitting awfulness (I'm talkin' to you, Peter Thiel).

________________

¹ As someone said, the golden age of science fiction is between 12 and 15.

² Where do you think Gandalf came from?

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

Re: Not quite

I thought Love is the Drug

If so, I Want a New Drug.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

Agreed. Mostly.

I'm not saying not [do] it properly. I'm saying do it better.

Let me make a very rough analogy.

Perhaps you've had the experience of being in a supermarket check out line and the checker inadvertently makes an overring. In a lot of stores, especially the larger ones that have accreted layers of "policy," the checker has to call a supervisor to come, log in, and validate the reversal.

It's bad enough when it's you getting checked out but if you're backed up five deep in shopping carts, it's downright annoying.

To some extent I understand the reasoning -- there's a need to prevent theft -- but if you treat your end user, the customer, as if their time is valueless, the person who wants to pay you money, you've failed.

We're clever people. Let's use that cleverness to make the work lives (and just plain lives) of people whom we ultimately serve easier not more difficult.

Now I'll shut up.

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

There's truth there, to a point and in certain circumstances.

If you're designing a system for an enterprise with which hundreds or even thousands of employees need to interact or deals with ultrasensitive classified information like for the Colonel's 11 Secret Herbs and Spices or the formula for New Coke, sure, security is going to be paramount.

If you're dealing with a law office that has two partners, five paralegals, and a couple of secretaries, you might consider not making security so onerous that nobody can get their work done without explicit blessing from the BOFH.

Good security should be transparent or, at the very least, translucent, and not promulgate workarounds and hacks. If you create such a strict regime that no one can get their job done, I submit you have failed because those workarounds and hacks are going to proliferate, subverting the very goal which you're trying to accomplish.

Contrary to the somewhat patronizing mindset that seems to prevail, people, for the most part, aren't stupid or lazy and actually want to accomplish the tasks for which they are hired.

It's our job to help them.

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

To paraphrase John Gilmore, "Getting work done interprets security as damage and works around it."

I'm not an expert in the field, even though at one time or another in my career I've had to play one, but perhaps it might be useful to ask ourselves if a "one size fits all" authoritarian security model is the best of all possible worlds.

While I clearly understand the necessity of keeping confidential information confidential, impeding workers from getting their work done seems to me as much of a risk to security as a simple shared admin password.

If the workers need to resort of bad security as a part of their jobs, perhaps it's the design or implementation of the application that is at fault, not the workers.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Oh but just you wait

I can only speak about the commuter rail train I rode daily and a couple of Amtrak trips up the California coast but from my observation the toilets work more or less like airline toilets, i.e., they're smelly and kind of gross, but otherwise retain their contents for more hygienic disposal.

There is no prohibition from using the toilet while in the station.

Re: Oh but just you wait

I find it a clever idea and certainly worth trying. Even if it fails, we probably learn something. We certainly spend money on worse endeavors.

The two issues of consequence I see are the potential for vandalism (humans are just an awful species that way) and for theft (see previous parenthetical).

I'm not sure how well such a scheme would work here in the US where most rail traffic is freight rather than passenger (no idea what the ratios are in Europe and the UK) and, of course, our engines run on good old American diesel.

I rode a "heavy rail" commuter train to work for a number of years and if the tracks along the platform were any indication, the spaces between the rails were pretty grody with tar, oil drippings, and who knows what else, so keeping panels clean would be a bit of a challenge here.

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

Re: Can anyone tell me why X11 needs to be abandoned?

I have multiple screens and I use workspaces, as well. I hope you don't think I'm a bad person for doing so.

I find having multiple workspaces useful for separating different ongoing projects or even for separating different parts of the same project since often I'll have several windows open and spread across those multiple screens and it gets confusing if things get buried in multiple layers.

Perhaps this is a mental and cognitive failure on my part but I'll ahve you know that I "aced my last three cognitive tests."¹

Personally, I've never been an "early adopter" of anything, including windowing systems, I eschew "eye candy," my background screen is xphoon,² and I still think that tvtwm³ was in general the epitome of window managers, so there you have it.

I'm not a bad person, am I?

________________

¹ If that reference is meaningless to you, then, congratulations, you don't live in the US.

² Ask your grandparents.

³ Ask your great grandparents.

X marks the spot?

As a certified (or is that certifiable?) Old Timer, I recall when X was on the receiving end of much derision.

At SIGGRAPH `89 in Boston, someone was handing out fliers to the effect of

X windows:

Accept any substitute.

If it's broke, don't fix it.

If it ain't broke, fix it.

Form follows malfunction.

The Cutting Edge of Obsolescence.

[...]

One thousand monkeys. One thousand MicroVAXes. One thousand years.

X windows.^1,2

From the MicroVAX reference you can see how far back this goes.

I suspect that the source of the fliers were exponents of the late and unlamented (at least by me) Display PostScript, which was on the Steve Jobs's hobby horses back during his ill-fated NeXT sidetrip.

I personally have no opinion regarding X11 vs Waylaid . . . er Wayland.³

If it works, it works.

If it doesn't, please keep it off my computer, thank you very much.

_________________

¹ Elided because The Register's comment system insists upon inserting double linefeeds and it makes the post too long and ugly.

² Found in /usr/share/games/fortunes/computers on your favorite Linux box with fortune installed.

³ I must confess a certain fondness for the name, since my partner is from Wayland, Massachusetts, but that's neither here nor there (mostly there).

Orbital datacenter gold rush needs an environmental review, FCC told

Mr Musk. . .

. . . there's a guy named Kessler on line one.

He wants to talk about a syndrome or something.

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Did no one watch 2001?

In fact, we could just record it on a sound stage with appropriate special effects¹ and have done with the whole silly project. Too bad OJ Simpson is no longer with us.

I'd much rather see a Mars sample return mission than yet another "boots on the regolith" stunt.

In fact, "Bots Over Boots" shall be my new slogan as I revel in your downvotes.

_______________

¹ I'm sure Adam Savage would jump at the chance.

NHS told to show its working on Palantir platform benefits

The Australian Broadcasting Company has what I find to be an interesting and incisive podcast called "If You're Listening,"^1,2 which I highly recommend.

In this Monday's/Tuesday's³ episode they talk about, among other things, the CIA front Crypto AG and the Trojan horse "secure phone" ΛNØM, run by the FBI and Australian police to intercept "private" communications on a wholesale basis, with which I suspect most reading this have at least a passing familiarity.⁴

Both of these operations had their victims thinking everything was absolutely hunky dory while all their communications were being siphoned off to eager watching eyes and listening ears.⁵

The point?

Spoiler alert: Given Palantir's close association with agencies of US Government, the host, Matt Bevan, wonders aloud whether perhaps a certain amount of caution might be in order for non-US business, governments, and non-governmental organizations when choosing a data partner.

Of course, those self-same agencies of the US Government might want to give some similar thought about heavily relying on a single data partner, as well.

______________

¹ Audio Podcast. There's also a YouTube version that does not include the Monday/Tuesday interstitial audio shows.

² It started and got its name in 2016 from the remark then-candidate Donald Trump made in the campaign about Hillary Clinton's emails, "Russia, if you're listening."

³ The International Dateline is confusing.

⁴ If not, Wikipedia is your friend.

⁵ Criminals, if you're listening

Microsoft says the world is changing faster than it can keep up as it guts commercial, Xbox teams

Who needs a bot?

The article asks How long until a bot can do an HR executive’s job, we wonder.

Who needs a bot? I could do it with a cron job and a shell script that randomly fires people every quarter.

Behold the RIFomatic^®.

Insert token to continue, says AI. Yeah, about that...

Re: "Elon Musk is a big Adams fan."

I suspect that if he was around now, Harlan Ellison would eat Elon Musk for lunch and then have Peter Thiel for dessert.

If you don't believe me, find a copy of The Glass Teat. It may be more than a half century old but virtually every word remains relevant.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Now if. . .

. . . there was only some way of identifying serial price gougers that take advantage of temporary shortages in, say, eggs, to ratchet up prices (and profits) permanently.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

Re: As a non boffin (here under threat of expulsion if I say something stupid)....

I'm somewhat ambivalent about work from home vs work in the office and I suspect the advantages and disadvantages may be a bit more nuanced than some seem to think.

A few years ago, while working at a university job, I had to move my office from the main lab of our research group over to a building a few hundred yards (meters) away that had only a few people working in it, with none of whom I had any interaction. I'd only rarely see or speak to any of my colleagues or the head of the lab.

While the quiet was certainly conducive to my getting things done, I soon found myself missing out on new and interesting projects, simply because I wasn't around to get involved in the discussion.

Out of sight, out of mind.

On the other hand, now that I'm retired from that job, I still consult on interesting projects with a different group there, while working almost exclusively from home, even though I still retain a "courtesy office" on campus.

I suppose it depends on the job and the amount and sort of engagement it requires.

South Korea’s hot new sensation is 3S+1F – a quadrillion-Won AI plan, not a band

3S+1F?

Probably should've spent a while longer in the acronym phase of the project, 3S+1F doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Oh, well, maybe it's better in Korean.

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Consider it took 300 some years to get from Newton to Einstein and who knows how many centuries to get from Euclid to Gauss, Schweikart, et al, I'm not surprised.

Genius of that calibre (and the good fortune to be able to express it) doesn't come along all that often.

The rest of us plod along, trodding on the toes of giants.

Telling internet platforms where to stick public service media will serve nobody. Turn it on its head

Re: PSM is state media

Because perfection is required?

There are plenty of examples in the private sector involving similar depredations, all you need to do is look.

Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby in entertainment, uncountable priests and preachers in organized (and otherwise) religion, and, of course, the Big Kahuna, Jeffrey Epstein of private island fame. Sleaze and abuse is pretty much equal opportunity.

They all have or had their enablers, those who kept the open secrets, shielded and deflected investigation, and otherwise aided and abetted.

Jimmy Savile was a sleazebag to be sure and his own enablers should be held to account but, well, baby, meet bathwater, bathwater, meet baby.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Similar story

I have a similar story but a slightly different twist.

Our lab took delivery of a new "pizza box" Sun (a SPARC5 if memory serves) which was put on a shelf in the "server room" (really, just a closet with aggressive air conditioning and sliding glass doors) pending installation.

For some reason, which for the life of me I cannot recall, probably for reasons of abject humiliation, I found it "necessary" to pull the memory sticks out of the machine and, bonehead that I am, I used a pair of needlenose pliers to do so.

Circuit boards and delicate components obviously do not take well to such manhandling and I broke one of the sticks.

I quickly got on the phone with a memory vendor I knew and ordered replacements and paid for them out of my own pocket. It was at the time a considerable sum, at least for me on my rather modest university salary.

Fortunately, the machine wasn't scheduled to be brought on line for a week or so, the sticks arrived in time, and nobody was the wiser.

Nobody, except me, that is, since I gained much valuable wisdom about programmers and electrician's tools.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Re: Worth the wait?

A minority view, perhaps, but I see this as yet another reason to continue to explore Mars (or anywhere else beyond and perhaps including Low Earth Orbit) with robots and let the humans stay within range of a well-equipped ER (or, as the Brits put it, A&E).

I'll be bummed when the Perseverance finally returns its last pixel but, on the other hand, there won't be any anguished loved ones.

Re: Natura Medica

I'm a doctor, not a. . .

Over a century later, while testing the ill-fated M-5 multitronic unit aboard the USS Enterprise, Spock lamented to Dr. Leonard McCoy that, "the most unfortunate lack in current computer programming is that there is nothing available to immediately replace the starship surgeon." McCoy retorted that, "if it could, they wouldn't have to replace me. I'd resign because everybody else aboard would be nothing but circuits and memory banks."¹

___________

¹ Emergency Medical Holographic program

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: CYA

Just for the record, "ass" is allowed, at least on radio in the US.

I'm not sure about teevee since I don't watch any.

It's all part of a coarsening of the dialog since the whole Clinton Impeachment/Monica Lewinski imbroglio when it became permissible to utter the word "penis" on the evening news.¹

I've heard things on AM drive time radio that I would have found myself quickly out on the street for had I even thought them when during my radio jock days.

As a side note, one acquaintence of mine got fired from a major Los Angeles FM station for using the word "penis" on the air back in the 1980s, so times and standards have definitely changed.

Another got canned in Houston for using the word "bucket" because the managment merely thought he said something that rhymes with the word.

Go figure.

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¹ Thanks, Kenneth Starr. I hope your punishment requires you to weat a stained blue dress for all eternity.

FOSS dev builds a BASIC compiler using LLVM

Re: Tardy for the party

Yes, but is it agentic?

Loop engineering, latest AI buzzword, still needs humans in the loop

... Considered Harmful.

Where is Edsger Dijkstra now that we need him?