* Posts by asdf

6570 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2007

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

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Re: Ridiculous

I thought they were fairly confident on the how much. The why from what I understand have some leads but yeah no smoking gun yet (for sure Nobel for solving that lol).

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

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Re: "We are good at winning over the tech people; they are good at the C-suite."

>He’s generally a smart guy, but he’s a sucker for a sales pitch.

That does not seem like a desirable trait in a senior director regardless how smart he is.

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

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Re: Donald Jenius Trump

>Even if what I said was incorrect, it doesn't make me responsible for their doing something extremely dangerous.

As Joe Shmoe poster a few dozen people see mayble. When you are the POTUS and your words are potentially seen by billions (translated anyway) there is a very high bar for using words carefully. He never should have said anything about those drugs period unless he was dead sure they are a game changer. His political fortunes should be pretty far down the list of his priorities at the moment, much as he wants this to disappear tomorrow like us all.

RIP Freeman Dyson: The super-boffin who applied his mathematical brain to nuclear magic, quantum physics, space travel, and more

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>There is more to science than physics, though nobody dares tell the physicists that.

And what Darwin did was very important for sure but he only finally published because someone else had already figured out his big idea. Some discoveries are huge for sure but often would have been found by peer scientists in short order anyway. Even in biology things like protein folding are based on physics.

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Yeah I am not preferring one era over another to be honest. Great thinkers in all of them was my point. Some just had better PR :P .

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Also giving short shrift to the mid and 2nd half of the 20th century as well. Antibiotics, plastics and transistors were just as much game changers in history of our species as anything early 20th century or indeed all of human history.

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Maybe its implied but half that stuff listed above for the advancements in the 19th century was directly due to Maxwell's work. Dude rarely gets his dues.

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Maxwell was the greatest scientist of the 19th century and its not even close. An strong argument can could be made he was just as important as Einstein to the history of science overall.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

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Re: This pre-dates Trump

Its worse than that now. In some states they can take any money you have in an account if there is no activity for three years and then you have to jump through hoops to say no I am not dead so no its not yours by default.

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Re: > signing a waiver reneging any claim against the US government for damages

> I suspect you can't sign away constitutional rights in the US either

No but there is few things the judicial branch in the US likes to do more than punting based on standing or jurisdiction. Worse case US government has pretty deep pockets (being able to write trillion dollar IOUs helps with that) so I wouldn't count on collecting any time soon either.

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Re: US Homeland Security

By the way don't blame everyone in the US for this. Funny thing about our government is usually the powers that be put two rich people up for us to choose from and regardless which one we pick this stuff happens.

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Re: What the fuck does prostitution have to do with so-called "homeland security"?

G.W had a lot of help and pressure from the 9/11 survivors group to get that done. Asking for down votes if I say anything more so yeah.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

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Re: Stop the Press

High ups in Enron went to jail but that was one of the last hoorays before late capitalism freaked and said never again. Hell of it is I bet a good number of people on here arguing about the status of corporations are the ones who defend the current system and thinks its awesome (ie the house slave syndrome, has it much better after all).

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Unhappy

Re: Stop the Press

Sadly not even covering for the monumental fraud that was Enron (and World Com and Sunbeam, and and etc) is enough. Just knew they were going to find the technicality so corporations could go back to being above the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen_LLP_v._United_States

Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it

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Mushroom

flame on

Let me say up front this gentleman has given the industry and indeed the world more than I ever will and RIP but man that CV after 2000 is painful to read. Wanted to get paid I suppose.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

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Re: Knowing our luck

Yeah just remember hearing something about the NASA boffins in charge of asteroid strike statistics eventually becoming more worried about Yellowstone than asteroids. Has been 600k years since last occurrence but yeah odds still very low but when it goes it goes big as in VEI 8. USGS does measure the crap out of the area (one of their main focuses) so my guess is would get some warning at least even if. As for political leadership well um Boomers won't be here forever is what I tell myself for hope. Next generation (mine) will probably be just as bad but bit smaller and outnumbered.

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Re: Even if the AI is right...

Our satellites now can not only tell what is a missile launch but they can even catch meteor airbursts unnoticed on the ground as well. - https://www.space.com/bering-sea-fireball-satellite-photos.html . When this dude wrote this we were probably still catching actual physical film with aircraft from the satellites.

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Re: A Neural Network ?

None of us are as dumb as all of us.

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Re: Knowing our luck

Just to add the optimism both Mt. Rainier erupting and the Cascadia fault causing a 9.0+ earthquake in the pacific northwest of the US are very likely in our lifetimes. Either would almost certainly cause if not a world recession at least one in the US as it will devastate Seattle, Tacoma and possibly Vancouver, Portland and Northern California. Finally if the Yellowstone hotspot flips its lid like it has done 3 times in the last two million years and covers most of North America in a foot of ash as it has also done multiple times in the past that for sure will crash the world economy. All are probably more likely to occur in our lifetimes than a big meteor strike (though Yellowstone probably on par as very unlikely).

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

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Re: Jeez

I agree if you care about portability but you get lazy devs you have only ever developed on Linux and might just assume bash is always available regardless of default shell script. There many better examples but just pointing out plenty of existing *nix systems have virtually no GNU binaries on their file system. Granted probably won't be installing much FOSS on those either though but should be easier to do without having to import in half an OS of binaries and libraries virtually unrelated to software interested in. Guess just saying Linux in many ways has become the defacto POSIX now.

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Re: Jeez

GNU/Linux and especially Red Hat going out of their way to take a dump on POSIX means even if projects care about portability it is no longer trivial to do so in many contexts. Used to come nearly for free. For example sorry not every *nix has /bin/sh/ -> /usr/bin/bash (or dash) which seems to be assumed all too often.

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Re: Where are you?

Very few people outside of Red Hat are defending SystemD. But since Red Hat writes way more lines of code than just about anyone else (few other mega corps aside) those are all that matter. Money talks even in FOSS and systemd is Red Hat monetizing FOSS.

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Re: Jeez

The udev dependency was the big turning point. I called it out at the time but funny thing when you are writing the most lines of code in FOSS you often get to dictate. Red Hat wants as much FOSS dependent on Linux only and by extension Red Hat as possible.

Facebook coughs up $550m to make AI photo tagging lawsuit vanish. How ever will it survive on that $17.9bn left over?

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Re: That mob

Move fast and break society.

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Re: What community?

>It certainly can't be FB users.

The product will get over it (if they are still on there these days they obviously don't mind the personal data enema). Sadly they still take pictures of us that do.

Google promises next week's cookie-crumbling Chrome 80 will only cause 'a very modest amount of breakage'

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how cute

Oh look Google is finally getting around to do an inferior job to what Privacy Badger has been doing for me for years now.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

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Re: I remember Travelex

>Crony capitalism, red in tooth and claw

FIFY.

Icahn and I will force a Xerox and HP wedding: Corporate raider urges HP shareholders to tell board to act 'NOW'

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agree but

>smaller companies can and do buy larger ones all the time.

True and plenty of examples where it worked I am sure but whenever I hear of the minnow swallowing bigger and bigger fish I think of WorldCom and yeah that didn't turn out so well in the end.

From humble Unix sysadmin to brutal separatist suppressor to president of Sri Lanka

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There but for the grace not so much

Whenever I hear how important it is to be a Great Man I remember yeah maybe I lead a pretty pedestrian life really, but kind of nice to not have war crimes on the resume. I am good with comfortable mediocrity thank you.

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Re: kill -9 2019

init must die.

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

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Re: A saturn V was needed...

When the previous gig for a lot of at least the early guys (test pilot) had a 1 in 4 fatality rate at the time might as well go all out and get to see space or even better the moon if going to pull the Gs and play russian roulette every time you go up.

(edit: yep all 3 were Navy test pilots lol).

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

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Re: More guns = safer for everyone

Virtually no other suicide method is as effective the first time as firearms and other methods generally give more warning for intervention. Will agree getting rid of guns won't get rid of suicides. Still seems like everyone is a good guy with a gun until them or a family member aren't or are dead. Grew up hunting in a very rural area so I have seen both sides on the issue so not big on taking people's guns or rights. That said I know first hand how a gun can make life disappear in an instant so zero desire to own one since I became parent here in a large city. Actually should get off my butt and get my 8yo to take a gun safety class just in case. Hunting with my dad was the source of some very positive memories but those days are gone (wildlife on the decline) and not a risk I would take with my own son. Live in a different world.

asdf

Re: More guns = safer for everyone

In the developed world assuming you are not a peace officer or soldier, if having a gun makes you statistically safer you my friend have made some bad life choices along the way. If people want guns for other reasons fine (hunting, enjoy shooting, etc) but but safety should not be one else you lying to yourself and covering for irrational fear or a tiny pecker.

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Re: More guns = safer for everyone

2/3 of gun deaths are suicides and even higher percentage if include accidents. A large portion of the gun homicides are committed by people who live in the same house (significant others, etc). I am not a fan of gun control in general but this lie that keeping a gun in the house makes you safer is total horse shit. Best way to make sure you will never die of a gunshot wound is wait for it don't own a gun. Less into to telling others they can't own one but all for when they f**k up with one, them spending a large portion of the rest of their lives in jail.

Boeing comes clean on parachute borkage as the ISS crew is set to shrink

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Look if the F35 and Little Crappy Ships proved anything its that at least if we blow the money on the Russians we mostly get people into space and back. Else like the Boeing virtual border fence if we do it ourselves with so many heads in the trough we spend the vast sums of money and still haven't left the ground. Honestly with the Boomers in charge now not sure if the US could successfully go to the moon for any amount of money these days. I gots to get mine first.

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

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Re: This is inevitable

The best is how old TVs would collapse into a dot when you turned them off. I even remember people having the odd black and white TVs in back bedrooms etc. HDMI lol how about attaching the wiggy Atari switch that would inevitably fail to the two screws for the antennae.

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

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Re: "Open BSD was right, he said."

Badly off topic now granted by for kicks installed i386 version instead and voila no lock up. Woot at least until they kill off the architecture but hopefully by then whatever is fubar (guessing an X video driver extension or something) in amd64 will be resolved. If I was a good netizen I would track it down, report it and give back and all that but meh I suck. Works for now will do for now.

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Re: "Open BSD was right, he said."

Patriot XT so yeah your probably right. Honestly I think it might be because of the docking station hardware support not being so robust.

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Re: "Open BSD was right, he said."

Now if Firefox on X Windows could run for more than few minutes before freezing the display (even alt control F2 etc doesn't work) under OpenBSD on my banking USB stick on my work Thinkpad. Secure by default yes but decent hardware support not so much.

Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second

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Re: This is truely impressive

And this time it didn't take the immediate threat of German invasion and the Brits basically handing over the tech directly as a semi hail mary.

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

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Re: Watch your back

F-Droid AFAIK (haven't paid attention in last couple of years though) has never had malware sneak through which obviously isn't the case with the Play store which more than likely has hundreds if not thousands of malware available as I write this.

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Watch your back

Not long now until Moxie Marlinspike becomes an official enemy of the state and winds up in Supermax.

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

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Re: If you replace the haft and the blade is it the same axe?

Deskstar 75GXP bad eh? Yikes one landmine glad I avoided I guess.

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Re: Fools and their money...

This damn game was what I remember. I remember how much my 8yo self hated loading it and I remember how frustrated I was until I figured out you have to press the joystick button (as you know only one back then) when ball gets to your guy to catch (Madden was almost still coaching then forget in a game which came much later so sure foreign to kids today). Loved the game even though was laggy IIRC. Luckily not too long after my dad bought a floppy drive and joined some local shareware type club (read pirate disks to each other) and that era was quickly over.

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-starbowl-football_5021.html

(edit: Turns out it was hard to time button press to catch the ball anyway so sure that is why burned in my memory decades later).

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Re: Fools and their money...

Lets see its venture capital risk without the possible venture capital upside. Sounds brilliant.

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Re: Fools and their money...

I hope they don't plan on emulating loading games off cassette tape like I used to on my Atari 800XL. You only take 15 minutes to load a game because you have to not for fun.

Google to bury indicator for Extended Validation certs in Chrome because users barely took notice

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Re: This is hilarious.

People are stupid, lazy, selfish and greedy. Older I get the more painfully clear it is.

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Re: This is hilarious.

>Roll forward...and it's all shit again. And it will always be shit. The technology works, the process doesn't.

>That's because the process includes the end users. As always, humans are the weak link.

Sure I am committing some type of logical fallacy but ergo humans are shit. No really I can buy that conclusion.