Posts by Long John Brass 808 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Apr 2007
I had a similar experience with a home brew EPROM burner; The first clue that the circuit I had built was faulty was the silicon under the little window in the package was do a rather good impersonation of an LED.
The thing that surprised be was the damned thing worked after... Erase, re-program to whole 9 yards.
Never trusted it enough to use in an actual machine; but kept it around as a scratch EPROM and good luck charm :)
I say let's start pushing blind hiring practices. Applications without names, races or sex
This has been tried and then hastily scrapped as it only made the perceived imbalance worse. The claim then became the blind hiring practices were themselves discriminatory
We might just be the first Intelligent life in our local cluster...
Ponder that for a second; That means if we fuck this up there might not be anybody along for quite a while to try again! The universe is give ot take ~13B years old and we are only about ~0.1% of the projected star forming period. Earth formed ~4B years ago and yet "intelligent" life has only been around ~1M years.
Maybe life is common as pond scum, but if there were ancient civilisations banging around we would have seen signs of their interstellar civilisations by now; Just from the waste heat.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
I too have seen this behaviour in London; Only it wasn't a lone pigeon but a sizeable number. ~12 or so sauntered into the carriage, some parked themselves, some had a sniff about for food scraps; The whole flock stayed on for a couple of stops and waited by the door & exited at "their" station. It was the weirdest most surreal thing I have seen.
There are people out there, right now, splicing up CRISPR sequences and stabbing themselves with it. I can only imagine how CRISPR's inventor feels looking at these idiots.
Hey I glow in the dark now and have gills! You are going to be laughing out the other side of your face real soon now (tm) ... Literally :)
Once I figure out how to add Photosynthesis; I will rule the world *Bwahahaha*
I was applying for $Something and had to give the counter lady all my PII in order to open the account. She asked for my...
How and why is this even a thing? I had the unpleasant experience on when during the last round of applying for a new job, they asked for a look though all my social media accounts. I asked if they were serious (Yes they were). If it wasn't for the fact I was desperate for a gig I would told them to go fuck themselves.
There needs to be a law...
Now get the hell off my damned lawn.
women are just as capable as men (not more capable, but as capable) only gathered around 50 down votes
What was the context? I would guess that very few commentards here would argue that their fellow female pointy heads were any more or less (in)competent that any other.
But; There has been a rash of won't someone think of the women oppression Olympics style articles that quite rightly gets on peoples nerves.
Two stories...
1: Overkill
Working in a machine room with a PDP11 and a MV8000. The dog had 2 x 250MB top load style removable packs and a 500MB? Winchester for the OS (AOS/VS?). The removable packs were user data. One fine spring day a strong smell not unlike burning insulation pervades the machine room and the dogs console barfing up errors; Disk errors. Shut down the machine and call an engineer. Turns out one of the packs had head-crashed. Engineers dismantles the entire thing including the very large permanent magnet now sitting on the machine room floor. Then starts on the second drive. apparently the dust is so fine that there was a good chance that the other drive would have sucked some up.
Now he placed the two head magnet assemblies at either end of the machine room stopped by a tile lifter each. I thought this was overkill until a little while later there was a very odd noise from the machine room. A low pitched scraping noise that very quickly rose in pitch followed by a very large ***WANG***
One of the tile lifters had come unstuck and the two magnets were now fused together permanently.
2: ROTM
Got a ticket from the hell desk. A secretary had complained that her PC was trying to kill her. A bunch of us decided to visit said homicidal PC. We asked the secretary to demonstrate the fault. She refused, handed us a cdrom disk and fled the room. The PC was one of those mid tower machines sitting on her desk. Head height for her and about neck height for me.
Upon loading said disk into the drive. running though some quick checks all seemed well; Until I ejected the cdrom. The tray opened and at first I didn't notice anything wrong. It was at that point the disk, still pinning at a high rate of knots did a very neat VTOL takeoff from the now open tray, wobbled a bit, nicked the PC case and promptly zipped off past my neck I felt the draft as it passed. It then ricochet around the cubical a few times (still at neck height) until it came to rest.
Replaced the drive, but the secretary in question never quite trusted that machine gain. Next time I saw that machine the cdrom drive was facing away from her, towards a nearby wall :)
"It's about revenge."
Well, SOCIETY's revenge, yeah. But what's MORE important is DETERRENCE.
There is an interesting argument to be made here. Once upon a time when we were roving bands of hunters and gatherers, "justice" would have been met out internally by the family/tribe. Inter tribe this would have meant killing off the other guys. eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
The ability for us as a species to form larger social units meant that at some stage we needed a way to break the inter-personal revenge cycle by saying "No you won't take personal revenge for X. We will do that on your behalf". Later we added a process to make sure that the person(s) accused were actually guilty.
This is why justice systems have this idea of justice must me seen to be done and justice being blind to everything other than the facts of the case.
It's this that has allowed us to build bigger and bigger cities and nations. In short making civilisation civil. So revenge definitely was part of the equation. The public safety and rehabilitation stuff came later. The burn the witch trial by media we see today is a regression.
it means that if you don't want to be spied on, you have to go to extreme efforts to avoid it
No if you do that then you stand out in the data-sets! Do not ever be the outlier. You want an data profile that says; Utterly normal, nothing to see here.
Otherwise you get a knock on the d0383,.cxn &*^&^0908
+++
***NO CARRIER***
By saying users are stupid, you perpetuate a stereotype that people are the problem, according to Dr Jessica Barker.
I suspect a few weeks at the coalface in the hell desk (Or any actual IT role for that matter) would help disabuse her of the notion that users are not stupid. Or even human for that matter.
@Hans 1
Imho, the people who buy guns need to be locked up, never mind big or small
Lots of farmers in prison in your perfect world? I'm not suggesting that some sane form of firearm control that limits the number of nut jobs with automatic firearms is a bad thing; But! Firearms are a valid and useful tool in the hands of someone with the requisite number of genes and a little training.
Knee jerk reactions like ban em all is just as bad
Don't understand why Universities and research labs don't get together and build out something like arXiv for a wider range of topics. You could build in a peer review workflow to boot. While we are at it a linking mechanism to referenced papers that would allow things like if a paper is discredited then any linked papers would also get "down voted"
If everything on such a site is creative commons style licence; Then the dead tree journals would have to pay to reproduce. This way the "arXiv" style site could get some funds to keep the platform running and maybe a few pennies to the authors and reviewers?
Do we need state of the art warfighting ships to deter a group of Somali's armed with a couple of AK47's?
The UK govt could always ask the NZ govt for some help. We don't have much of a navy but have some pretty awesome rowboats. Maybe in exchange you guys could buy some of our lamb, butter etc?
Userland should never ever ever cause the kernel to panic.
Sure kill a badly behaved process. But the rest of the system should keep trucking on.
There was an interesting discussion years ago as to the correct failure mode of web-browsers.
The argument went it's better to render something broken than nothing at all or worse, kill the browser. OS kernel failure modes need to be thought of in the same manner; Unless something is really broken, clean up & carry on.
@Steve Knox
While I think that's true of the extremes, my experience with mainstream liberals...
Not really a fair comparison though is it...
Ken Ham = RW Lunatic
Bill Nye = Liberal moderate( I think? )
There are just as many shouty wing-nuts on the left. Compare and contrast for example
Ken Ham .vs Andrea Dworkin
Listen and believe for example is hardly fact based. It pure ideology.
It's high time the moderates from all camps told the ideologues to shut the hell up and sit the hell down. We desperately need to start talking and *LISTENING* to other thoughts and reasoning from other groups. Jordan Peterson for example has some very interesting things to say on free speech, dialogue and why it all matters.
@Steve Knox
That's because within the conservative community, evidence is secondary to ideology
To be fair the left is just as bad. Both sides of the political debate are doing the exact same thing.
If you are a fact loving sceptic these days, both sides will try to burn you at the stake as a heretic.
This idiotic tribalism will drag us all back to the stone ages. Which I assume is the actual goal of both the left AND right wing. The only thing THEY disagree on is which of them will be in charge.
I have to agree here, until I'm shown concrete evidence that an Alexa device is acting as surveillance, I will ignore the cries of privacy invasion.
I think the thing is; That us older techies have spent a lot more time working for various evil overlords and we know what kinda crap they get up to. We've seen em do it, over and over and over again.
After a while you get a tad... Cynical
Do you yourself currently work in "curing all diseases, climate change or energy crisis"?
Don't be silly. It's way easier to piss and moan from the sidelines. It's always easier to point out the flaws in a plan than come up with a workable alternative. It's always easier to tell other people they are working on the wrong thing and wasting their lives than do any of the heavy lifting yourself.
/coat = I want off this mud ball.
The registrar for my domain has a paid for service whereby they load the whois info with details on how to contact the registrar. My name and details are never exposed in the public whois database
I take it that if I'm a very naughty boy the powers that be would serve a warrant on said domain registrar to get that information. Now that might only be as complicated as a govt TLA going to the first floor bogs, ripping off a national security letter from the roll, wiping their arses with it and presenting that to said registrar. but hey; better than nothing right?
What I don't understand is, is that still falling foul of the GDPR? Or does that fall foul of the ICANN rules?
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