Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
For certain values of "instant", obviously.
With current technology, even if a missile reacts in milliseconds, when it is going at Mach 4 (1 361.16 m / s) it still covers 1.36m (0.1475 double-decker bus) every millisecond.
A missile will certainly turn faster than a human pilot can due to its far greater resistance to G-force, but current tech does not allow it to u-turn on a dime.
So this whole thing is to keep local money local, yet they're using a Norwegian company and French hardware to do it ?
My irony meter is approaching the red zone.
By the way, "you must use the Brixton Pound in Brixton" - I take that to mean that you cannot use Her Majesty's currency. Isn't that illegal ? I'm sure they can use the Brixton Pound alongside the national currency, but if they are actively refusing the national currency, how is it they aren't in jail yet ?
Is there any doubt that the NSA is behind it all ?
Goaded by MPAA, perhaps ?
Who doesn't really matter to me. Any state security organization has the authority to mandate chassis intrusion and intimidating ISPs into silence. And anything they find will, in the end, end up on NSA servers somewhere. The NSA is just the tip of the surveillance society iceberg we are now living in.
Good question. What about DuckDuckGo ?
It's Wiki page states :
"DuckDuckGo [..] generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and Yummly."
Digging further, it would appear that Yandex is Russian, Wolfram Alpha pretends to compute an answer "from externally sourced "curated data"" (no reference provided), and Yummly is a cooking recipe search engine. As for Yahoo!, if it was any good it would not be wallowing at less than 7% of the search market share. So the one source that has a snowball's proverbial is, once again, Bing, which has been available for a lot less longer than Yahoo! but is almost as important - and will become more important since it is backed by Microsoft resources (which are much more plentiful than Yahoo! coffers).
This question is, nontheless, interesting because it taught me that Baidu is a much more actual contender for Google (given the previous link) than Bing, being 2nd in order before Bing but after Google.
If Baidu was not censored by the Chinese government, I might just use it.
Bollocks.
There is one alternative available : Bing.
Whether you appreciate it is another matter entirely.
Everything else is either based on Google, or will never, ever return a meaningful result.
And concerning not using Google's services, bollocks to that as well. 99% of todays sites use Google libraries, so not using Google means staying on Microsoft.com or not using the Internet.
That's not a choice.
Of course you did, Jimbo.
And we plan to believe you just as sincerely as this declaration sounds.
Is there something about being in the spotlight that makes declaring untrue things hoping that we'll buy it a conditioned reflex ? Couldn't he just have bowed his head, said sorry and pledged to do right ?
Oh wait, it's Jimbo we're talking about. Right. Forget it then.
No, but because unless you really are a criminal/terrorist trying to protect your nefarious activities from Men In Black, it's a level of hassle to implement proper security that goes way beyond what Average Joe needs.
Not that I'm advocating doing nothing, far from it, but if I told all my friends they have to learn and implement PGP if they want to email me the latest joke or get my latest musings about where to go for dinner, I'm pretty sure my mailbox will be suddenly barren of anything but spam.
As for data encryption, well I don't see that my personal data is worth it. I have firewalls and AV that have protected it up to now, if The Man wants to see it, not much I'll do will keep him from it for long.
I don't like the idea that the NSA considers my communications free range for its harvesters, but I'm not about to act like a crime lord to keep them from it. I'd rather they stop doing it, but I'd also like to win the lottery. I think I have a better chance at the latter, even without playing.
Linking two individuals from electronic communication is something any agency can do (with a warrant) since ages. All any agency needs to do is call the telephone/ISP provider, show the warrant and request a list of all phone numbers/IP addresses that the suspect contacted/connected to. Telephone/ISP is legally bound to comply.
So you can put whatever encryption you want on your data, unless you only communicate face-to-face (without a smartphone on your person or in your car) there will be a government-available trace of your comms that can and will be mined if need be.
Given that the entire US power structure, from the White House down to the smallest court of justice, apparently deem that foreign-stored data is available to them by the equivalent of divine right, your proposal smacks of uselessness.
Legally speaking, the USA already has no right to access international data outside of existing protocols established in treaties that were written up and agreed upon decades ago. That is no barrier to the NSA as we now know.
Might as well change the name to NSA consulates for all the good that idea would do.
Dave, I agree with most of your points except the one about Obama securing the internet with his surveillance billions.
Sony is not an American company, so the NSA's billions on Internet security would have changed nothing in this case. Whoever is actually behind this hack, it's Sony's near-inexistant Internet security (and probably shabby internal security protocols as well) that is the heart of this issue.
If Sony had proper protocols and security in place, I might believe a nation-state could be behind this hack. As it is, it seems my neighbors kid could apparently be behind it.
But then I'm saying that North Korea could technically be behind it.
Except that the FBI said it is, so it isn't.
I remember a National Geographic thing on giant spiders (the seriously big dog-sized version, not the hand-sized Tarantula kind), purporting to report on said creatures in some South American jungle. Not a giant spider in sight, of course, but plenty of interviews with people swearing that they had seen one.
All the time I was watching it I was thinking "is this how far National Geographic has fallen ?".
Sorry, but it would appear you are not current on the news. Not only did America bow down, it also dropped its pants and bent over submissively.
That the US of A, most powerful military force in the world and first of all economic powers, would halt the projection of a mere film following empty threats from a motley bunch of keyboard warriors is shameful in the extreme.
NK is supposed to be behind this ? And we are to believe that Kim Jong has elite squads of highly-trained ninjas just waiting to bomb US cinemas ?
Excuse me if I find that eventuality's probability to be asymptotically reaching zero.
USA! USA! should have had the balls to release the film with a great big middle finger to all hackers everywhere.
Then everyone would have been able to judge just what a turd that film undoubtedly is.
The only (official) reason the US invaded Irak was the search for nuclear weapons. That was the smoking gun and the reason Irak was branded 3rd most powerful army of the world (hyurk, hyurk).
Time and time again Bush and croonies declared that Irak was working on/already had ICBMs and they were pointed toward US targets. The threat was supposed to be real and present.
Nobody ever mentioned chemical weapons. Nobody ever denied that Irak had them, because there was ample proof (from courageous journalists doing their job - those were the days) they did, but that was NOT the reason to go to war. Twice.
Well, specifically the evidence they say they have that proves that NK did it would be a good start.
If they can't show that for whatever reason of National Security (yeah, like we don't know now that they're tapping everyone, please), then at least demonstrate that there is a clear IP trail between the hacked Sony server and a NK computer.
Because if they can't demonstrate that publicly, then they have no credibility to state that NK did it.
And if they are indeed convinced that NK did it, I find it laughable to believe that they actually fear NK terrorists on US soil. NK is certainly a threat to South Korea, but NK does not have the muscle to be a threat any farther than that.
They didn't have enough money to implement proper security, but they sure as hell seem to have plenty when it comes to miserably failing to preserve what's left of their image.
They're the only ones who think there's anything left to preserve.
Most people have already forgotten the past. Only the nerds remember it.
And they should never forget it.
As far as corporations are concerned, my attitude is "Never Forget, Never Trust".
Sony is no different today than it was with the rootkit, if it could pull off another go, it would. Besides, what do you think HDMI is for, better data bandwidth ? An Ethernet cable can do that, but Sony does not control the Ethernet spec. Sony is still about control, and always will be.
Um, no.
I have an install disk of Office 2000 at home. I see no need to buy every new version for personal use. Word 2000 has largely enough functionality for me to write a letter to someone.
Even so, I've uninstalled Office completely. I use LibreOffice now, and it is compatible enough with Office that I don't care about the differences.
My business laptop has Office 2010, obviously. I hardly use it anyway. I have no intent of purchasing or using Office 2013, and certainly not Office 365. Small company, little utility, no point.
I'm sure it makes you feel good.
Meanwhile, in Real Life, every single reported instance of actual, widespread virus attack happens on the Windows platform.
Dying rapidly, yes, undoubtedly.
Vastly inferior ? Nope. In terms of stability, it is vastly superior. Neither is it subject to all the nastiness that Exchange can get hit with, especially if you put it on a Linux platform.
Yes, the full-fat client is fat and fugly, but the browser interface is not so far off anymore - you could easily have Notes for email and few would notice.
But it's still dying, thanks to IBM's total lack of commitment.
Yeah - like customers not liking the bloody things, seeing no benefit for them, and not accepting remote shutdown without recourse. The fact that £11 billion are needed to save a theoretical 2% of a £200 bill is a real deal clincher too.
Isn't politics a bag of laughs ?
Well, being no rocket scientist I don't know for sure, but it may have something to do with the fact that Earth's average atmospheric temperature is at least 288 kelvin, whereas in space it's only 3 (in the shade).
Given that liquid hydrogen is solid below 20 kelvin and gaseous otherwise, that might explain things.
Not only can quantum computing solve all solutions at once, but now we know that it can do so for more than one value at once.
Only one problem left : extracting the solution that corresponds to the value you were expecting.
Oh well, they'll have that sorted out in the next fifty years, no problem !
Um, how about Azure being unavailable for extended periods twice since last August ?
Not so impressive in my view. Neither is the fact that MS is apparently only promising 99.9% update time, so three nines and not five. MS knows that a truly resilient and robust system can offer the famed five nines of uptime availability, yet it doesn't even mention it. Not a good point for something that is supposed to allow companies to have their apps and data online.
Or is the five nines so last millenium now ?
If ever I get a suggestion like that, I think I'll actually accept it. I'll get rendez-vous details, where and when, and agree to be there.
Then I'll call the cops and tell them what I've just arranged and would they be interested in catching a scammer ?
I can't believe people fall for something as outlandish as that.
Tech can be miniaturized, the industry has been doing that for the past half century.
The problem is the batteries. Make them smaller and they carry less charge, there's no way around that.
So the consequence is that, when designing portable stuff, you basically have to define how big the battery can be, then design the hardware around that. And if your idea is really advanced, you just might have to wait until tech has been miniaturized to the point where the battery can run it.
But you can't shrink batteries and keep the same charge. That is just impossible.
Because historically speaking people have died that day to get a good price on some crap.
Of course now it has become a marketing event because no publicity is bad publicity, right ? And because, concerning History, Humans have memory abilities below that of gerbils.
Saying that because the technology exists to identify images of child abuse and therefor we should be able to identify posts containing text that is considered as terrorism is nuts.
However, what is indeed interesting is that this individual got himself banned a number of times for terrorism posts. That begs the question of how they identified those posts (were they flagged by a moderator ? Another user ? Complained about ?) and whether or not such a thing could be automated.
And, as AnonCow said above, once you've banned someone for terrorism a half-dozen times, it might be time to think about telling someone about it ? Don't tell me that Facebook didn't know it was the same person - FB is renowned for cross-referencing everything it can and getting as accurate an image of its users as it can. FB had to know it was the same guy.
Analyzing intent is not easy. just ask that guy who tweeted that he felt mad enough to go and bomb an airport. Stupid to say something in public like that these days, but I'd wager he won't try to pull that stunt again.
So no, automated analysis of "terrorism" posts ? I doubt we'll see that tomorrow.
Ah, the comfortable fallacy of real-world comparisons. Unfortunately, nothing in IT compares with the Real World. That is why Amazon can remove a book you paid for without your consent, and I don't give a monkey's that they reimburse you. If you had gone and bought the actual dead tree version, they'd need a warrant to come and take it from you, but because it's a digital version, they gave themselves eternal control over it.
And, for some obscure reason, we do not torch the place but meekly accept the fact that we no longer OWN what we PAID FOR.
The fact is : nothing in IT can be compared to the Real World, because in IT he who makes the code decides on the limits - and morals are a naught but a dictionary word any more.
So, storage arrays ? BECAUSE THEY CAN, that's why. Vendor lock-in, predatory practices, protectionism, anything and everything including the kitchen sink if it helps bring in more suckers customers and keep them in the fold.
Oh, but they will chant USA! USA! if you want them to, while jerking the string of a senator if need be. So be happy, it's all Capitalism At Work (tm).
So, basically put : Microsoft is telling developers that they're holding it wrong ?
I seem to remember a video of Monkey Boy screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!".
Well, it seems like it really is the beginning of the end for MS.
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