Posts by Pascal Monett 19101 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Given that a "simple" paternity test costs €74, the fact that a DNA history test costs less is, to me, rather laughable, but let us pass on that detail.
What is hilarious (from the outside), is police including a swab-packing working in a list of suspects.
Well, it must have been a lot less fun for her the day the cops showed up convinced that she was a serial killer.
Somebody should make a TV film out of that.
"the tactics used by USA prosecutors/FBI/NSA are largely considered illegal"
Citation please ?
I know a few people who, brainwashed by the contant stream of police/FBI series pumped into their TVs on a weekly basis, actually believe that they cannot be arrested unless they have heard their rights read to them.
Precision : I live in France. I'm not aware that the French police have that requirement.
Another point : the number of people who I have discussions with who genuinely believe that they have the right to one phone call during the interrogation process.
What I mean to say is that the entire world (well, in places where people have the luxury of television and the time to watch it) are likely quite attuned to the US criminal process. Of course, the people I talk to are generally not people who have been arrested, so the sample size is not entirely representative of the global population.
Finally, this guy was extradited to the US. I do believe that the tactics used will be perfectly fine in a US court.
Good luck with that. Thanks to the belligerence of the Trump presidency, China has been forced to up its game on the IT side of things.
Things are going to go either of two ways, in my mind. If the current standards bodies play nice and treat China as an equal (and why not ? It's not proprietary, hidden stuff, it's all out in the open), then China will likely play nice and all standards will actually be standard in the world.
The other option is for China to manage its own standards and only use our Western standards when selling products to us. That will fracture the market, although I have no idea what the consequences would be.
Well they can't. If I'm paying upwards of €15000 for a vehicle, that vehicle is mine and mine for life.
If you think I'll be paying monthly for the right to drive my property I've got a bridge to sell you.
It has an additional per-usage fee as well.
Indeed it is. And it has been for the past ten years at least. And a majority of companies still have nothing in place.
Frankly, I'd be surprised to know that a majority of companies have a proper data backup system (that has been tested).
It should be a given that large companies with a dedicated IT department should indeed be prepared, but malware doesn't pay attention to the size of the network it is attacking, it just attacks anything it can. So small and medium-sized companies are equally at risk - but they don't put the same effort into their IT budget because they're putting all their efforts into gaining market share and satisfying the customer.
Like hospitals, who put all their effort into taking care of people (thankfully). They come down hard when hit by some despicable miscreant, but they don't have the resources to implement proper protection.
I'm starting to think that the only solution for hospitals is to mandate an impenetrable air gap between hospital computers and the Internet, but I have no idea how feasible that is in reality.
But if BitCoin's valuation fluctuates by 40% from one day to the next, that is no problem.
There is a fourth argument about funny money : it can be stolen just like real money. And I don't mean by thieves pilfering your account, I mean by the very "institutions" you put your wallet in to be managed. There is an already non-negligeable list of exchanges that have mysteriously folded, taking all coins with them, or management has fled, taking all coins with them, or coins have been lost due to insufficient security (or somebody took the coins with them).
For my part, thank you but I prefer proper management by a fully-chartered bank that has the legal obligation of managing my account properly and executing the transactions I demand faithfully.
And I prefer not to have to pay €20 in transaction fees when I buy a €14 pizza.
However, given that we don't have an open-source Vehicle AI, it means that every company currently developing a vehicle AI (and there are quite a few) is doing so on its own, in the dark, and not sharing information (because valuable IP).
That necessarily means that they are all the test-until-it-works bandwagon, and some faults are not easy to detect immediately.
Which means that recalls are inevitable.
So good on Pony.ai for doing the right thing, whatever the PR cost.
In my book, they're more serious than Tesla.
Say I'm using Firefox with NoScript.
Problem solved.
Or say that I'm blocking info.tracker's IP address at the firewall.
Problem solved again.
But I'm happy that there are people who are thinking about the deep mechanics of ad tracking. The more ways we have to block that, the better.
Yes, and then they can be hit over the head with the bill at the end of the month, bill that goes twice or ten times over their budget, but it's to late to plead at that point.
It has already been said by people far more intelligent than me : you do not save money by going to the cloud. It follow that you save even less by switching cloud.
It's snake oil, nothing more, nothing less.
And the abomination has started. Soon, the more mentally fragile among us will be talking to their deceased loved ones on a screen, and shutting out the rest of the world to assuage their pain instead of learning to deal with it.
This company should be banned and shut down along with any other company that tries to do the same.
The psychological damage this will do will be uncalculable.
Make no mistake. Xi can throw as many undesireables he wants into "reeducation" camps, the sheer market potential will ensure that ginormous tech giants will always be at the door, begging to get a slice.
Russia has less than 150 million people, and they are spread over many time zones. Claiming to support Ukraine is the current fad, and the tech giants will come back later whatever happens saying "now it is time to heal the wounds". They will say that whether Ukraine still exists or not.
China is a totalitarian dictatorship much like Russia.
You cannot claim to support freedom and rush to invest into a billion-sized market that is under near-total surveillance.
Your cupidity belies your words.
When Windows 95 came out, it was all the rage. I got the Vader "but you are not a Jedi yet" wav and set I don't remember what Windows sound to it.
I am still a rabid Star Wars fan, but that wav lasted all of two days before I banned all Windows sounds from all my computers forever more.
I just can't stand useless noise, and a computer's only right to make noise is when I'm playing a game.
Was nothing but a glint in Vint Cerf's mind.
Debugging by phone still happens. Not all your family members have TeamViewer installed (even today, not everyone in your family is using Zoom), and as for asking them to configure a Windows Remote Connection, forget about it.
And it's always urgent, isn't it ?
Illegal, yes, undoubtedly.
Illogical ? Not so much. Putin has already made clear his distaste with NATO, and Ukraine is a nice buffer zone to keep NATO troops further from his borders. It is no secret that Putin has always refused a NATO-subscribed Ukraine.
Inexplicable ? Even less. If I'm not mistaken, Ukraine has been making moves towards becoming a member of the European Community, as stated in the wiki : "The EU and Ukraine are seeking an increasingly close relationship with each other, going beyond co-operation, to gradual economic integration and deepening of political co-operation ".
Ukraine part of the EU means Ukraine part of NATO, and that is a big no-no in Putin's book.
So not inexplicable at all.
Sure. Because you have all the required variables to determine the cost of a headache.
Although I am apparently immune to that scourge, I can see the effect a headache has on my wife, and I have a friend who is subject to migranes. Everyone knows that a powerful migrane means locking oneself up in a dark, silent room and suffering until it goes away.
That's not fun in any book.
But assigning a cost to a headache ? Come on, did you just tally the number of days taken sick and call it a day ?
What about people who have headaches but keep on working and don't say anything about it ? Some headaches are minor inconveniences, and I'm sure that, in a culture like the Japanese have, they won't let a minor inconvenience get in the way of doing their job. So, no cost there then ? They are still inconvenienced, they might work more slowly, or have to check twice. That's time lost, ergo cost, but you have no way of counting that.
$22.5 million a year is a large number, but I have a tendancy to file it with declarations of the "this virus cost that many billions to the industry" sort.
In the round filing cabinet.
So, if I understand that correctly, there is no publicly elected official that found any problem with said plan, it was up to private companies to put the kibosh on another Big Brother tentacle.
That says volumes on just how twisted Democracy can be.
Sometimes, I think that a Benevolent Dictator just might be a better solution.
People are being killed in an unjustified agression and these clowns think they are contributing to "the war effort".
Conti states that it will retaliate against any agression of Russian IT. WTF do you think Russia has been doing for the past decade ?
You started this shit. It's a bit late to get all high and mighty about it.
If Canberra has less high rise towers than Sydney, that might justify trialling the drones in Canberra. Towers inevitably create wind currents that can be finicky, and I don't think we have the coding chops to ensure that drones navigate through turbulence safely.
But apart from that, Canberra also has plenty of sunshine if I'm not mistaken. The drones can almost certainly be recharged by solar power, which would mean that they only cost maintenance, not energy.
I have no idea if this is fact, but it is plausible.
I'll have a tin of caviar and a bottle of champagne for delivery . . .
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