Posts by Pascal Monett 18916 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
If the Moon was Earth's twin formed by accretion, you would expect the Moon to be made of pretty much the same stuff as Earth and in the same ratios.
That is not the case. The Moon's composition has different proportions of nickel, iron and other significant things, ergo it cannot be our twin.
As far as planetary physics are concerned, I think we have passed the point where anything game-changing can occur.
Like you, I was living under the impression that the sister planet theory was pretty much the most valid theory for a while now. This paper is just another proof that that is the case.
Good to have, and good to know, but indeed, not anywhere near game-changing.
During your ride home, you get an angry call from the girl you just dumped who is furious about the chocolates she just received and assures you in no uncertain terms that there isn't a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get her back.
After that call, you get a notification from your landlord about a problem in your kitchen that made him call for security and a repairman. The smart cat feeder had a blockage which caused a freak current feedback that sparked your smart coffee maker which just happened to overload and cause a loopback to your smart cupboard which went haywire and filled its order queue for cat food, billing it automatically to your account. You now have a year's worth of cat food to be delivered tomorrow, order non-rescindable due to contract clause about encryption keys and digital signatures perfectly in order. You also have a $7500 bill for the repairs, payable by next Monday.
Also, there is cat food all over the kitchen floor.
You get home to find a patrol car waiting for you. The investigation will demonstrate that it is the electrical surcharge from your smart coffee maker and the subsequent order activity from your smart cupboard that triggered an obscure unpatched bug in your social profile's agenda organizer which caused an inordinate amount of meeting emails to be resent with today's date. In all, seven of your previous girlfriends, and some of your mates, have received invitations and messages from your stored message archive - some of which have salacious content that was, at the time, perfectly understood. Five of your exes have filed a complaint for harassment and are pressing charges.
The policeman tiredly listens to your explanations for a minute, then cuts it short with a curt "You'll tell us that at the station, sir" before moving you to the rear of the patrol car.
Finally, you realize that the cat will gorge itself during the night, meaning that when you get back there will not only be the remaining cat food to clean up, but probably also an unknown amount of cat vomit and maybe worse.
IoT - what's not to like?
I would agree with you but for one thing : if management has no clue, then the "solution" employed doesn't matter ; whatever it is, it'll get screwed up.
So forget the clueless management, they're doomed anyway. We're talking about backup solutions that work, which implies management know how it works and, more importantly, why.
And for those cases, cloud simply does not cut it.
However, I fully expect future disasters to be laid squarely at the feet of incompetent management, so saving the bacon of cloud providers despite the fact that they cannot possibly deliver on the bandwidth and availability they promise because they do not control what happens between their cloudy servers and the client's door.
Typical confusion there. You think the "users" are the people.
That definition is now obsolete and has been superseded by "the entities who give us money", i.e. the advertisers.
The people are no longer users, they are targets to be hunted down as efficiently as possible for the good of the users (i.e. their bank account).
Please update your dictionary accordingly.
McAffee is not saying the contrary. The specific phrase I believe you are referring to states :
"To use Bitlocker without adding additional authentication, you need an enabled, owned TPM1.2+ hardware chip"
That clearly indicates that BitLocker CAN function without a TPM 1.2+ chip, but if you do that, you need additional authentication.
As for Smartcards, could you source your affirmation ?
If it wasn't, we'd be able to forecast it properly, instead of only being able to sometimes find a reason after the fact.
I find this article quite interesting, but I can't help having a bit of an issue with the premise of billions not guaranteeing a return.
Amazon, Google and others have thrown billions into making data centers and the result is showing : Amazon is apparently better off than Microsoft when it comes to cloud services.
Cloud services are not summarized by the services you offer to your customers. You can have the greatest list of features on the market, if your cloud is down regularly, people will go for alternatives that may offer less features, but are more stable.
Stability is what costs billions. The backend requirements for ensuring proper response times and failover is something that is quite beyond me, but I'm quite sure that, in terms of hardware, bandwidth and server monitoring, it must absolutely mind-boggling. Experience in this domain is capitalized upon, and cannot be just bought.
So I do not see newcomers having the slightest chance at upsetting the establishment. Very, very deep pockets are required to enter this market, and when you're in, you still have to learn how to make it work the hard way - meaning losing customers every time you fail to maintain stability.
There are three big names in the enterprise cloud space at this time : Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. I'm pretty sure we won't be adding many more to that list.
Honestly, you might want to replace those totals into their time frames for a proper comparison.
Hitler (as Führer) : 1934 - 1945, or 11 years
Stalin : 1925 - 1953, or 28 years
Mao : 1949 - 1976, or 27 years
So Hitler reigned the least, and his "genocide impact" is reduced further when you consider that his Final Solution was not actually implemented before 1942. Beyond that, his Final Solution did not only concern Jews (something that way too many people do not know). You must therefor include up to 1.5 million Romani people, nearly 2 million Poles and up to 3 million assorted other victims (Soviet prisoners of war, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jehova's witnesses and other undesirables). Not counting the almost 20 million people who did indirectly because of his politics of deliberate starvation of "undesirable races".
So Hitler's direct "genocide total" is actually much closer to 12.5 than 6, and that in a time span of, at most, 4 years.
If Stalin had had that kind of behavior, he would have killed 116.6 million people instead of your quoted 62, and Mao would have killed 112.5.
Mao may appear to have done a bit less, but one must not forget that the population of China has always dwarfed the population of the Soviet block by a ration of around 10 to 1. In that light, Mao was positively benign.
In the end, let us not forget that all of these numbers represent the lives of millions upon millions of innocent people sacrificed on the alter of ignorance.
Which will delight the evil scum who will rush to take them over and screw basic users out of their hardware with the promise to stop the malware or give a decrypt code in exchange for money.
The "enterprise features" have already been hijacked by malware to block a user from accessing his desktop and doing anything but restarting his machine.
I'm glad to know that Microsoft is giving yet more tools for evil hackers to push more misery on unsuspecting users. When the hardware is locked down without any means of loading an anti-virus from USB or digital media - not to mention the Internet itself, what is Microsoft going to do ? Refund ?
Don't think so.
And don't try to explain that this is "Pro" stuff and will not be sold to end users. I know plenty of people with Win 7 Professional on their home PCs.
My disk, my player, my time and none of anybody's business.
I will not ask for permission to enjoy something I have paid for. I certainly don't want some corporation to get a heads-up on the fact that I started watching some film.
I call that an invasion of my privacy. Your "license" stops at my door. After that, you have no legal right to know anything about me or what I'm doing.
Um, sorry but what example do you have of a European court having jurisdiction over a US company, or even pretending it did ?
Has there been a judge in Europe deciding that Microsoft had to hand over all emails on its servers because it has a subsidiary in the judges country ?
I'm curious, please enlighten me.
Sorry, but it pretty much is.
With physical access I can take out the hard disk, put it on an external USB reader and have my way with anything that is not encrypted. And anything that is I can copy and do what I want with later while the user finds his disk back in his PC and is none the wiser.
Anyone who actually uses Steam knows that all you have to do to regain your library is reinstall Steam and logon with your password.
Steam is reliable. Steam does not care about your hard disk, your graphics card or your CPU. You can log on to your own account from any computer or tablet that can run Steam - as long as you have your password, you have access to all your games.
You can upgrade your PC, you can install Steam on a brand-new HDD, you can even copy your existing Steam directory on a different PC - the only thing that counts is that you log on with your ID and password.
If Steam is the only problem for someone, then it is no problem. Reformat your disk, reinstall the OS, install Steam and log on. Fuck those scumbags.
Um, we're talking about Microsoft, not Google.
Microsoft has demonstrated that it is stupidly evil. Microsoft has failed in practically everything it has tried outside of Windows and Office, but it has not been capable of gathering a micro percent of what Google has got on everyone while pretending to "Do No Evil".
So, as far as evil is concerned, Microsoft urgently needs to participate in Google seminars on "How To Become An Evil Genius", because one thing is certain : Microsoft has lost the crown in that area.
Announce a broad, all-encompassing law, and then immediately start poking holes in it to take into account everything and the kitchen sink.
Instead of analyzing the issue thoroughly before providing a review of possibilities to be approved at national level in order to proceed with caution and not leave open the possibility of saddling a solution with a cargo of exceptions.
But I believe the latter requires actual work, whereas the former only needs lobbying.
It does not encourage the raising of pigs. You can raise cows or chickens just as easily. There is no in-game bonus for raising pigs.
And, if you think about it, cows give meat and skins, chickens give meat and feathers, whereas pigs only give meat.
So, on a per-effort basis, there is no encouragement to raise pigs, it's quite the opposite.
But hey, they're in the game, that's for sure.
Safeguards are in place, but total surveillance just runs roughshod over them.
But hey, as long as you can get your toaster back, everything's all right, right ?
Wrong.
What you don't understand is that dictatorships always thrive on surveillance. Fidel Castro held Cuba in his hands because every other citizen was an informer. Imagine what a newly-minted dictator would get with a country under 24/7 observation.
Creating the means to detect any dissent is logically followed by the desire to quell that dissent. And you know what they say about absolute power . . .
But it looks like you're going to just have to find out the hard way.
The fucking problem is not that state surveillance could keep criminals in check. London is the most watched city in the world and I don't recall reading that crime has vanished.
The problem is that, in a surveillance society, it is the watchers who decide what is a crime. It is their interpretation of events that counts. The problem is that what you think is legal, honest citizen behavior today could well be criminalized tomorrow and you'll only learn about it when the police lorry stops next to you and you're whisked off, never to reappear.
The right to privacy is what is keeping our society from becoming a civilization of oppressed individuals. It is your conviction that the police have to prove your wrongdoing before convicting you that gives you your peace of mind and ability to function as a valuable part of society.
With state surveillance, everyone becomes closed in, anyone who is taken is by default judged guilty, and people who think otherwise shut up for fear of being taken themselves.
Is that really the society you are defending ? If so, why are you not working for the NSA ? Maybe you are.
Every time I have read about Linus addressing mails to someone before, it was for his absolutely unacceptable attitude as far as professional communication is concerned.
It would appear that some of his fans here do not accept that, but it remains that he seriously needs to change his ways when addressing people who might have made mistakes or done something he considers as a mistake. If this publication is a step in that direction, then good for everyone, but nobody can deny that a step needs to be taken.
Begging your pardon, but I do not where the withering attack on his intelligence is. Nor do I see any overt contempt of coding skills. Finally, there is no invitation to become a pizza deliverer.
I agree that it is something that Linus acknowledges an error, but he does so with a lot less flame and brimstone than he gives others, which tells me that if he had taken that approach to criticizing other people's contributions, we wouldn't even be reading this article.
Good show Linus, you've proven that you know how to behave civilly. Now do that with other people and you're golden.
Really ?
Care to source that ?
Personally, I would very much prefer that a prominent politician spend his time on his job rather than on Twitter.
Unfortunately, I do acknowledge that it would seem that, for many politicians today, they believe that maintaining their image is their job.
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