Posts by Pascal Monett 19187 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
How can you be open and honest if you're using secret laws ?
The only reason we know about the NSA and its egregious abuse of privacy is because of the sacrifice Snowden made.
There is nothing open, much less honest, about how the NSA has grafted itself into everything "Made in USA" (and abroad).
If anyone thinks that The Board at Borkzilla gives a flying fart about gamers I have a bridge to sell them.
You don't spend $66 billion to improve gamers' lives. You do that to increase revenue and do "your duty" to the shareholders.
I don't think that Borkzilla is going to slowly push all those franchises towards the XBox descendants (although I can't see any reason why it wouldn't), but I fail to see what benefit it will do to me.
Competition is supposed to be good, or so I've been told, and this move severely reduces competition.
So, somebody please give me reason to think positive about this (not holding my breath).
I have to say that I've been waiting for this to happen for a long while.
I'm sure there will still be pundits hyping Whatevercoin and blockchain for the foreseeable future ; it's hard to cook the goose when the feathers are so soft - or something like that.
But the fact is that everyone with half a brain can now sit back and run down the checklist of everyone they know who's been singing blockchain praises and wait for the "oh shit" face.
Get the popcorn and start taking notes. This is a time-limited event and you don't want to miss out !
Icon for my "told you so" face -->
Well, it looks like there's room for Oracle (or SAS) to hoover up a cool £50 million over five years, assorted with all the usual promises and below-par delivery.
Oh wait, I was confused with IBM.
Oracle delivers, it's only after delivery that it bleeds you dry in licencing costs.
What is the world coming to ?
It is a well-known fact that, if you as a Westerner wish to create a company in China, you'd better have a nice stack of brown envelopes at the ready, otherwise official approval is curiously going to take much, much longer to be obtained. As in, until you get a clue and start greasing the wheels.
This, however, is the first I've ever heard of a Chinese national railing against such an entrenched habit. Maybe some good will come of it, who knows ?
"when using standard accounting practices"
When you're not using "standard" accounting practices, you're using "non-standard" practices, also known as "cooking the books", a practice which should and will land you in jail if you proceed long enough, so what's the point of that part of the sentence ?
It's just another proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect in full swing.
When you're too stupid to know that you're stupid, you end up on the wrong end of the plank.
They can thank their lucky stars that they weren't dealing with Russian Mafia. That would have put a serious limit on their life expectancy.
In my experience, it's a piece of kit with vastly overblown resources that is being repurposed for things it was never initially supposed to take care of but, because it has all this CPU and RAM, it now can.
I find it curious that, now that fiberoptic connections are almost everywhere in the business arena, stuff with more resources that they ever should have are also popping up everwhere.
It would have been vastly more efficient to have those "edge" resources back when a 1Mbps line was considered the height of tech, but here we are.
With a friend like that handling corporate communications, who needs enemies ?
Oh, you're aware that Rackspace has lost the trust of its customers ? No kidding. I'll wager that Rackspace lost a lot more trust when you openly stated that it's "just 1%" of your customers that have been impacted.
And I'm thrilled that you're committing to a full disclosure - when the time is right. When you're ready to. In the fullness of time, as Sir Humphry would say. Except that that is not how it's done when you want to show that you're actually committed to transparency and want to demonstrate that you're doing everything you can to get everyone back on their feet.
Vague promises of "the vast majority" is just a load of hot air, and you're blowing very hard right now with nothing to show for it.
. . believe what Marketing told them : that The CloudTM was a magical place that took care of all their worries for next to nothing and they could Just Use It patent pending.
Of course, the monthly bills should have been a wake-up call, but people are like that. They prefer to believe the hype even when the ugly truth is staring them in the face.
I can think of a dozen things that would enrich my gaming experience, but ads are nowhere in that list.
And since when are ads the answer to "immersive, personalized content" ?
Just take the marketing department out behind the chemical shed and shoot the lot of them.
Yeah, but it's all about catching criminals.
You know, the guys who traffic women, drugs and weapons and, in order to do so, have to spend hours in airports buying multiple tickets in cash to try and muddy the waters.
Maybe a quicker way to catch them would be to track who is buying more than one ticket for different destinations on the same day and check on those people.
An honest person is not going to book a flight for Berlin and Rome on the same day in the same timeframe. A top-level marketdrone might need to go to Berlin in the morning and Rome in the afternoon, but that will likely be rare.
Why did this stuff need to be put in writing ? Didn't the two shysters know what they were doing, or was the lady giving an ABC to a newbie ?
It baffles me how criminals seem to universally love documenting their crimes to one another. Oh, look how smart we are, we're pulling this scam on stupid people with money. Ha Ha, life is fun, isn't it ?
Sure, real fun. Right up until the prosecution pulls out that email destroying your defense based on "not my fault, Your Honor, I didn't know this was going on".
In any case, the smart one obviously has the skirt in this case. Though I'm willing to bet she's blonde now.
To further your conclusion, I learned not long ago that France is dropping the TV tax that was in effect since forever.
For the French government to actually remove a tax is almost as groundbreaking as finding life on another planet.
And I am appalled by the continued insistance to conflate this issue with privacy and personal attention.
What part of "it's the plane that's being tracked" do you not understand ?
What part of "the information is publicly available" goes above your head ?
We're not talking about some guy with a camera and an absurdly expensive telephoto lens climbing on top of a hill to snap pics of someone beside a private pool, we're talking about using official public data to record the whereabouts of a piece of equipment.
Climb down from your soapbox already, you're off-subject.
Hey Google ! Are you paying attention ?
It's slightly astonishing how, in the USA, any measure destined to legally protect children online is immediately met with ferocious resistance by corporations who, on any other subject, immediately spout things about "thinking of the children".
Limitation of Free Speech ? Violation of the First Amendment ? Really ?
What I conclude from all of this is that US corporations are perfectly willing to think of the children, as long as it doesn't hit their bottom line.
And NASA has a great history of making things reusable.
The Shuttles were a fine example, if you call a $1.6 billion cost per launch "reuseable".
If you wait for it to be over the horizon to detect it, you've already lost.
To have any chance above zero of resisting a hypersonic strike, you need eyes in the sky that can bring your reaction time into a more comfortable range of 10 seconds at least.
And most of the stuff doing the reacting needs to be completely automated to avoid meatbag reaction time.
No, the layers are not too hard to clear. That is a lame excuse. Three minutes with a sledgehammer and I guarantee those layers will be gone, along with that part of the wall.
Then you can redo the wall, the connections and the red button, and you can even put a nice clear plexiglass guard to keep said button from getting inadvertantly pressed again.
Because just painting the layers in red in one spot is not going to solve the problem.
The article is about banning Tik Tok from government platforms, a move with which I totally agree.
No because Tik Tok is Chinese, but because I don't see why a government employee should have that on his government-issued smartphone or computing device.
All governments should have a blanket ban on anything not government-related when using government-oriented platforms, period.
