Posts by Mike VandeVelde 351 posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
I drive around Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada every workday and I am almost never out of sight of at least one Tesla. Sometimes 2 or 3 at a time. And parades of Amazon vans coming out of several massive warehouses. I am not at all pessimistic about seeing them all driverless this decade. If civilization survives climate change etc for that long.
Interac is banking in Canada. It was a global pioneer. It is a beacon unto the world. It is truly unique, more important than universal healthcare. Today it is an albatross piling onto a global pandemic recovery and supply chain issues and rising interest rates and rampant corporate profiteering in energy and pharmaceuticals and etc. How did Interac end up with all of it's eggs in the Rogers corporate basket? Corporate basket case:
https://www.zeifmans.ca/blog/what-the-rogers-family-drama-can-teach-us-about-succession-planning/
How in the fuck did Canada's national inter-banking system end up in the incompetent hands of these clowns??? Write us a story on that please. How does one single telecoms company having "issues" bring down payment infrastructure across an entire nation? For dozens of hours???? Nobody could use a bank machine today, nobody could buy a transit fare to get to work, nobody could pay their bills, nobody could buy groceries. WTF? Please dig in deep and fill us all in on all the gory details. Vultures - sic balls!!
We were told 30 years ago that we needed to immediately start reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every single year since then we have increased emissions. There is no existing plan that will see global emissions stop increasing for at least the next 10 years. And even those plans will be trampled over by industry and economic needs, just like the dozens and dozens of plans that came before them. The single remaining solution is mother nature destroying a larger and larger percentage of civilization every year until mother nature overwhelms our ability to rebuild. A war of attrition that we will lose. And then biodiversity collapse worse than the end of the dinosaurs that is already well under way, and then multiple runaway tipping point scenarios, and then humans only living on earth in space suits but with no capacity left to build and maintain space suits. Cheers!
I wonder if the alphabet will end up like cursive writing or roman numerals. Anyone can video chat with anyone at any time so why ever write anything down. Text to speech and speech to text and automatic translation, knowing how to read will be as useful as knowing how to fletch an arrow or drive a stick shift internal combustion engine vehicle.
Happens all the time but you won't hear about it
life is common in the universe, intelligence not so much. there's fungus... and that's pretty much it. fungus colonized the earth with meteors billions of years ago and is the main biomass on the planet today. our ancestors walked the mushroom dotted plains of africa hundreds of thousands of years ago and first ate the fruit(fungus) of knowledge which gave us some basic abilities in "imagine something novel and make it real". ever since weve been building/becoming a "better hammer" than random (?) meteors for further colonization. we are basically one of their recent experiments in monkey breeding. i hope they are happy with us so far and decide to keep us. *>D
a toll road you own where ford pays you a chunk of money to change the hov lane into a ford only lane to make their cars more attractive. then comes the gm lane and so on until all the regular traffic is using the shoulder and then the ditch. where the car companies are the googles/facebooks/netflixen of the internet. people already pay "by the axle" for internet connectivity.
Believe it or not...this is the transcript of an actual radio conversation between a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995. The Radio conversation was released by the Chief of Naval Operations on Oct. 10, 1995.
US Ship: Please divert your course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course.
CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course!
US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA*, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!!
CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
Here in Canada we have the Interac system for debit cards, it's a non-profit association of financial institutions, and cash lost the war like back in the 1900s. Every corner store / thrift shop takes them, every pizza delivery guy carries a mobile reader. Cash is still accepted everywhere, but Interac debit cards are ubiquitous and dominant. I don't think credit cards are used the in same way here because of the fact that Interac exists which is just all around better. I think Interac rivals universal health care for importance and I'm surprised I don't hear more about it. We just take it for granted and nobody else really cares what Canada is up to. If you want to see what a cashless society could look like then look into Canada.
"How can law enforcement and national security agencies reduce the effectiveness of encryption for individuals and organizations involved in crime or threats to the security of Canada, yet not limit the beneficial uses of encryption by those not involved in illegal activities?"
My answer:
That's impossible. Anyone who would ask such a stupid question should not have anything to do with this.
8D
Broken website. How does it compare to this:
Here in the backwoods of Canada in my small town there are about as many charging stations as there are gas stations, and the electricity is something like 90% hydro. Plus a few lots empty for decades that used to be gas stations while they wait for the soil to become habitable again. So, this is happening, and it's a good thing. I feel for the rest of you out there in the barren waste lands.
Please someone write an article comparing and contrasting all of this kerfuffle to CALEA which has been on the books for 20+ years. Private communication? Never heard of them, are they new? If you could hum one of their songs for me maybe I will recognize it but I kind of doubt it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
It's a bit of a tradition around here:
It was on Canada's radar. We didn't want it either. Which colonialists pulled the wool over our eyes?
It will be a choice between life being like an endless ride on The Axiom in Wall-E where AI takes care of everything for us and AI decides what is best for us, or life being like in Idiocracy where AI takes care of everything for us and we decide what is best for us. The singularity will come, anything will be possible, and I despair we won't make anything worthwhile out of it.
All infrastructure should be public.
Nobody is going to build their own 2nd or 3rd road network, where you have 3 driveways in your yard attached to 3 separate road networks and you pick which one you want to pay for access too. So government owns the roads because there is no chance of competition, and a level playing field is provided. Private enterprise stays where it's useful, running taxis and buses and delivery vans and tow trucks and dump trucks etc.
Should be the same with internet. Government owns all the wires and provides a level playing field. Private enterprise can use those wires to offer internet service, software, servers, websites, etc.
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/translink-considering-driver-free-buses-for-metro-vancouver-1.1409838
"browser histories out of the hands of eavesdroppers" - How does that work then? I was under the impression that https secures the content, but the requests still have to fly around for everyone to see do they not?
Plus anyone could always have created their own certificates for free any time they wanted to, the news here is that these ones are trusted by default by browsers. Hands up who actually feels secure when your browser automatically trusts a certificate? Tumbleweeds... We've all heard how these certificate authority operations more or less function. Now handing out "trustworthy" certificates to anyone with an email address helps the "web of trust" how exactly???
I want to be happy about this because of the names involved but... Maybe they are just poking fun at a ridiculous situation?
"There's an almost an instantaneously favorable gut response from people when you explain that they can revoke a company's charter, distribute their assets and put them out of business,"
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02oct-nov/oct-nov02corp1.html
I always thought they should have done a currency split - issue new money: old $5 is worth new $1, old dollar is worth new 20c, old nickel is worth 1 new penny, old penny is useful for cheap flooring.
http://adetailedhouse.com/2012/07/28/cents-and-sensibility-how-to-make-a-penny-floor/
40 years of research sure, but almost exclusively flailing around desperately hunting for any serious harm and coming up basically empty.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/why-its-so-hard-scientists-study-pot
The sun is shining on my head just fine, and my brain is comfortably soiled :)
You can share code however you like. But the converse of that is that you can take code that has been shared however the person sharing it likes. If you don't like the way that someone shares their code, then you are right back where you started without that code, no harm no foul. If you then use your second chance to instead of just reinventing the wheel like you ought to, instead you decide to attack that person who is sharing their code, then you sir can go fuck yourself with the rustiest tool you can get your hands on. The person sharing their code did not do anything to harm you, they only offered to help you. If you don't want to accept the offer then go get on yer bike. Why on earth would you put up up a giant blinking neon "-> raging asshole right here ->" sign to the left of you and lash out against that person?
If money could just fall into my pocket without that "you need to work for it" restriction I would sure love that too, but that doesn't mean I go around town raving at employers about if they do hourly wage or salary or commision. Give your head a shake.
What exactly is your problem? You don't want to share your code? You think sharing code is an evil communist plot? That's perfectly fine (and retarded), you have a right to your opinion.
Sharing your code is an awful burden nobody should force on you, OK. But you feel you have some kind of right to use code that other people have shared in any way you see fit? GPL places some restrictions on you, and you can't stand it? You place much more severe restrictions on people who use your code, and that's fine, but if someone puts any restrictions on you using their code then that's some kind of harsh human rights abuse? I really can't see your point through the forest of hypocrisy.
You don't like sharing code, fine go crawl back under your rock and reinvent wheels all day. What do you think gives you the right to demand anything from people who do like sharing code? GPL code isn't going anywhere, all the code that is GPL now will always be GPL, and there is more and more of it every day, leaving people free to solve new problems instead of wasting time working around moldy old proprietary software patents and restrictive copyright, making life better for everyone. There are lots of people who get paid to write, modify, maintain, and support it. More of them very day. I'm thankful for all of them, and even more thankful for the even greater number of people who freely volunteer the fruits of their labour for the greater good. You should show a bit of class instead of trying to twist their altruism into some kind of blasphemy.
Ranting and raving against the way some people choose to share their code with you would be much more valid if you weren't so vehemently against sharing any of your code at all in the first place.
"Next you'll be saying they have insecure sign in pages, 3rd party tracking cookies, missing Alt tags from images, not using https to protect privacy......"
Using Flash on a website does not make that website insecure.
Flash insecurity goes from nasty guys using nasty flash on their nasty websites to you and your browser. Flash insecurity does not go up from those nasty guys to regular otherwise properly secured websites that happen to be using flash. If you're not surfing random porn or torrent tracker or conspiracy sites built by who knows who then you are 99% OK. Besides bad actors on advertising networks you are completely fine with Flash enabled on BBC or CBC or government websites or our very own El Reg. Flash can be a tool for hijacking browsers, not for compromising web servers.
That said Flash is stupid and should die a slow painful death like it is doing, but keep it in perspective people.
Using https on a public website of static pages does not make that website private, nor does it help in any way whatsoever to hide the fact if you visit that website.
Insecure login pages are a major problem for banking websites, but who the fuck cares for a simple discussion forum 8+ characters including upper and lower case and a number and a special character and no dictionary words is simply infuriating.
3rd party tracking cookies are pure evil. Easily blocked, tell all your friends.
Missing image alt tags are quite annoying to the sight impaired, but I can see fine so I only notice them at all on xkcd.
That is all.
"That's not our fault, it's the fault of the combatants who chose where to fight from."
They "chose" to fight from their homelands when foreign military forces invaded. Yes it sure would be nice if all the people who didn't like their country being invaded would all just gather together en masse in the middle of the open desert with their ak47s and rpgs so they could all be entirely annihilated in moments by a few missiles from safely afar, but they savagely ignore the plight of our poor poor consciences and try to do what little damage they can while remaining contemptibly alive, near their homes and families, leaving no other option but to "save the village by destroying it". Evil cowards with no honour, apparently.
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