Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
If it is, you're a fool.
I don't care what excuses you have, allowing Internet access to your own treasure trove is asking for trouble. You are not an Infosec expert (on average) and you have no idea of what kind of nasties are floating around with the sole goal of finding your kit and ruining your day.
Convenience be damned, secure your data and cut that NAS from a world of hurt.
Yup. You're missing the fact that the banking industry is so crap in the US that they've had to go and invent PayPal to try and have something useful that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to transfer money (funny money actually fails on that point, with the transfer fees costing an astounding amount for just writing a few bits into the blockchain).
It's like the telephone industry of the US : so shit that calling someone in another state requires that you call an operator to handle it first. And woes be to you if the person you want to call isn't using the same telco as you. At least, that's how it was back when I last visited a decade ago. Who knows ? Maybe they've improved on that.
Meanwhile, in Europe, I can call anyone in the world without bothering with anything more than the country code before the actual phone number. I can use my banking portal to send almost any amount of money to any IBAN number. In short, I am free to talk to who I want and send money to who I want. You know, like a person should be in the 3rd millennium.
Everything the US can accuse Beijing of being capable of the US has already done, and is likely actively doing now.
Any company based in the US is subject to recieving a National Security letter commanding it to hand over data or grant access to US spooks so they can check whatever they want. If you get such a letter, it is forbidden by law to talk about it and you must obey its contents.
It is quite rich to see Uncle Sam blaming Chinese companies for being subject to Beijing when the US has enshrined its own total dominance in its judicial oversight.
I totally agree with you.
Except for that time (way back when) when I was working at a large tire maker's facilities in the northern half of Luxembourg. The entire IT department was in a vast open space - under ground.
Well, not quite underground, but without any windows, it just as well might have been (and it bloody well felt like it).
I spent two years in that troll cave. I would have appreciated having a weather app on the desktop (hey, no mobile phones back then) to tell me what I was to expect when emerging from the cave.
Now ? I've got a "smart"phone, thank you. I don't need Borkzilla to load yet another multi-megabyte thingy into my RAM to duplicate functionality I already have on my phone.
Given the amount of effort from Borkzilla (including things that were tantamount to bullying) to "incite" people to upgrade, the resulting uptake of Windows 1 0 was nothing to write home about.
So, for 11, they have twice o' nothing to write home about.
Carry on, Borkzilla, carry on.
Well they never suppressed any reviews - it was the 3rd-party software that did that.
Not their fault, see ?
But it's fine, really. Apparently Fashion Nova has an extensive judicial budget. $9 million last year for not being guilty of withholding reimbursements, $4 million this year for not being guilty of withholding bad reviews, it seems to me that this company is ponying up a lot of money for not being guilty of anything.
I wonder what they won't be guilty of next year, and how much they'll pay ?
Sure, Borkzilla screwed the pooch over the Windows Phone, but it's a habit at Redmond to bury projects (usually after a few years of use, though).
India is a different use case. As noted, they are "fiercely patriotic". They're also quite a lot of people. It is possible that a home-grown phone could stand a fighting chance.
I'd rather like to see them try. In the event that it does fail, then we'll truly be able to go back to our newspapers and mutter "well, it's Android and Iphone from now on".
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought there were still legitimate scientific issues that kept us from benefitting from endless energy generation.
So, "it's not the fusion.". Then, "it's the bureaurocracy", I gather ?
So let's take the bureaurocracy behind the chemical shed and waste them, and get ourselves ENDLESS FUSION ENERGY.
If a bunch of administrative busibodies is all that stands between me and endless energy, then I'm sorry, but there will be a few human sacrifices.
But they did get it right internally - they sucked the willpower out of you, thereby preventing you from claiming expenses !
Job well done !
Of course, that's only true as long as long as you DECLARE NOJUSTICE and DECLARE ACCEPTSLAVERY, but don't worry, Borkzila has set YES as defaults on those parameters.
"a signal to China and to the rest of the world that from now on our essential manufactured products in this country will be made in the United States of America"
So, clothes are not essential ?
It would be hilarious if Beijing answered : "Fine, make your sweatpants now" and closed down all the sweatshops that toil for next to nothing to provide us with our precious Gucci and GAP trinkets (that we pay hand over fist for).
Technology has always impacted society.
The discovery of fire allowed our ancestors to learn how to cook, thereby making eating easier (and more delicious), thereby making our teeth last longer. And now, we need less of them.
Agriculture allowed us to settle and start building civilization, instead of roaming around after the herds for our sustenance.
Steam ushered in the Industrial Age, which ultimately removed the obligation for 99.9% of humanity to be farmers. We could now devote more people to Science, Mathematics, discovery end experimentation, which ultimately gave us the computer, the Internet and, recently, social media. That last one might not be progress after all.
Technologies to look forward to ? Fusion, obviously, but also room-temperature supraconductivity, gravity modulation, true spaceships. Not all of that might happen, but whichever ones do, they will have an immense impact on our society.
Oh dear me, is there some level of Hell that is freezing over now ?
Oh wait, silly me, it's just that backstabbing is just as lively inside the Union as from the outside.
At least, this time, it's more logical since Ohio is actually next to available water.
Carry on . .
Well, there's also the niggling little detail that you just might go boom trying to get there.
And when I read that, before hauling up the gigantic tennis ball, they first have to add an entire new module to the ISS, well here's me saying nope, won't happen.
Not unless they have an entire multiverse planned and we are on track for getting a dozen films with genuine weightlessness - which will likely get boring right around the second film, or the third at best, if the first two were good.
Bullet-time was an incredible gimmick when The Matrix served it up for the first time. It has rarely been so well used since. I'm guessing zero-gee won't fare much better.
Finally, they need to do more than break even if they intend to make more than one film. If, before you've even started filming, you've already slashed $200 million from your budget, well you'd better pray that the public is going to flock to the cinemas in droves to see your film because otherwise, that space module will end up as additional storage space until the ISS is decommissioned and sent to burn up in the atmosphere.
Having an unregulated currency in Putinland was always something of a surprise to me. When China put the kibosh on funny money, it was a "duh" moment, because of course the PRC government was not going to accept people having anything out of its control.
I think that the only reason Putin has not yet actually put his foot down on this market is because of all the blackhats he has creating mischief and mayhem everywhere else. He might lop off a head here and there, when the Western nations come crying too loudly, but otherwise it's all good for him.
Now the central bank is saying nuh-uh. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
Okay, in the absolute, it isn't malware as such because it does not take over the computer and attempt anything else, fine.
It is still theft, though. It is using someone else's resources without their knowledge or consent.
So he should not get off scott-free.
Fuck that.
My bank transactions go into my bank history and there ain't no fucking Pod that has the right to hoard that data.
Sir Berners-Lee, with all due respect, stop trying to shoehorn every aspect of my private life into something Google, the NSA and every other skiddie with a keyboard can index.
It seems that that is the inevitable progression in the AV industry.
You start with a good product that is efficient and not resource-hogging. And it's free.
It gains momentum until such a point that it starts hobbling its free version and encouraging you, nicely at first, to fork over for the Premium version.
Then the MBAs take control, the product ends up going full Frankenstein and not only takes over your PC but also hassles you into paying ever more for additional "functionality" you don't give flying one about.
Then the next free version of something else pops up and you're on the next treadmill.
It's almost as if there was an AI behind all this . . .
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
