Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Anecdotal evidence is that a basketball with a bloody handprint on it will unlock the majority of "face recognition" locked devices.
I suggests the 5-0 try a selection of Mr Potato Heads, teddy bears and the mug shots of the suspects themselves in front of the phones in question.
Somewhere there's an Ursula K Le Guin wastebasket with The Word for Crap That Doesn't Work is Biometrics typed on a screwed-up wad of paper.
" Pretty much every firm in existence is running a small blacklist of sites end users shouldn't be accessing."
Mine has blocked IBM and Oracle's main libraries of downloadable manuals. This pretty much encompasses all the products we use and support.
Which is why I have my own internet hotspot and laptop on my desk.
I reckon that qualifies as shooting oneself in both feet myself, but no doubt I have missed the point.
It's what you get when no-one in the film unit knows the proper pronunciation of "giga" or is willing to interrupt the "artist" to correct them. In this case it got retconned in under 12 parsecs by the director and fanbase, just like the Kessel Run flub was.
For an even more annoying one to the UK ear, listen to DeNiro mangling "Hereford" in Ronin. If I had been Seen Been I would have mugged when asked "What colour are the boathouse doors in here-ford" and replied "Dunno. But in herr-i-ford they are green."
You aren't allowed to correct The Talent when they are fucking it up, apparently.
My gov't-issued NT4 workstation had a 520 MB hard drive in 1999, but everyone in a position to do so was going larger than that if they could. Can't remember what was "du jour" standard in sane workplaces, but I'd guess at a gig on account of it being twice what I had.
I remember having to admit this to a nice lady at Sams publishing when she asked why I didn't solve a problem with a "book on CD*" by copying it to my hard drive.
*Unix Unleashed, System Administrators Edition. Life and career saving book. Can't praise highly enough.
Hmmm. Idea. Get one of those laminating kits ...
Funnier idea. Ask person to hold up fake ID to door camera* (both sides please) and have automated routine print up a card with your own photo/name on it once picture and name zones are identified. Ask for a minute so you can get dressed (you were in the shower) and laminate up the result. Answer door wearing same ID bearing supervisor job title. Act puzzled, then angry.
*properly isolated from the Internet of Tat of course.
Well this *isn't* an SF forum.
But I think you might be surprised to learn how many know of Larry Niven, got the reference but didn't feel the need to point out how to understand it. He was widely published by Sphere, if memory serves, in the UK. Sphere were a major quality paperback SF outlet during Niven's early career.
Reasons why music on vinyl was more satisfying than what came after.
a) The whole rigmarole of equipment set-up and music deployment was a skill (to judge by the lamentable state of your records, not one to which you gave much attention) that made the payoff loads better.
2) The equipment was dead steampunky. Goldring Lenco had all sorts of fishing rods and weights hung over corkscrews to get the magic working. A piece of sculpture that played music! No amount of servo-assisted tray opening and closing can compete for cool visuals.
$) Zerostat pistols. Great for stunning spiders, tasing friends and resetting smug gits' digital watches to January 1st, 1900.
@) Artwork on a square foot, or if you were lucky two square feet of canvas. 25 or 50 square inches does not compare.
:) Lyric sheets you could read without electron microscope eyeballs
Vinyl was a multimedia experience and the racks in HMV, Boots and Virgin were an art gallery everyone could and did enjoy every Saturday.
But I agree, the fucking scratches and surface noise were annoying. EMI* and their lousy dirt/handling protocols. I remember eagerly hanging by the radio for the very first airing of The Wall only to turn it off in disgust when the recording was badly scratched. EMI strikes again. The job *could* be done right (witness Deutsche Grammophon's expensive offerings) but as usual, EMI couldn't be arsed to try.
* - they owned the busiest pressing factories in the UK.
Back in '96 I bought a nice new Windows 95 computer with a voiceview modem and fax software. The first weekend we had it the phone rang at some ungodly hour and began to squeal at me, so I went downstairs, made some tea while the PC booted up and I started the fax software. Sure enough, some pages of lab work from a doctor's office oozed out of the printer, along with the cover containing the source c/w land line phone number.
I phoned them and dropped down the rabbit hole.
"I think you just misdialed your fax machine."
"Impossible!"
"Please check"
"No need! We don't make mistakes!"
"Okay. Let's think about that. I say that you've misdialed your fax machine. You say that coincidentally, some joker has randomly called you up to accuse you of sending him a fax by mistake at the exact same time that you are sending a fax containing the lab results of Mrs Notatallwell's blood work. Which situation sounds more likely?"
"I'll check the dialing then"
"And I'll destroy the paperwork you sent, shall I?"
"Er...yes please"
Hah! In the bad old days our phone number was almost the same as a local wood yard. The last two digits were reversed on a five digit number.
My dad would answer and say "You have the wrong number."
My dad was a bit "sudden", and people would often respond "What number is that" to which he would say "You must know, you dialed it".
Some people got very angry when he told them they had the wrong number, and insisted they had the right one. He would then say that Mr Woodyard had decided he didn't need their business after all, and if they didn't like it they should come round in person to discuss matters.
Not one for de-escalation, my dad. I miss the old bugger.
Oh man, I never realized how common my First name, Middle Initial and Last name were until my place of work linked a bajillion small email empires in one humongous ldappery.
Wrongly directed emails from people became endemic, and some contained very sensitive info. I ended up writing a mailbot to deal with persistent offenders, though after a particularly annoying exchange with the other me, in which I attempted to enlist his help avoiding the problem in the first place and he belligerently and persistently refused to understand the problem, I removed the logic that forwarded the mis-directed mail to him and replaced it with a boilerplate "your mail was sent to the wrong person and has been deleted unread" return-to-sender message.
Half the problem was the exchange mafia who didn't put very much info in the exchange "address card" and refused to allow people update permissions on their own info. Their solution, when asked to add one line to my card pointing out my location in a different city to the other me, was to offer to change my email name. They densely refused to understand that this would solve nothing and add a further complication that now no-one who knew me and needed to mail me would know what my address was. It was maddening.
One persistent mis-mailing person was in charge of a small staff, each of whom - for whatever reason - felt inclined to respond to any email from her just to show they were paying attention. She would send out a mailing to "all" (including the wrong me) and include a metric clucktonne of attachments (all eyes-only, sensitive stuff). Said staff would then reply to all, including original attachments.
I went home one Friday evening, and at eight o'clock my teenytiny mailbox crashed with the overload from one of her missives and it's echoes. I came back on Monday to find eleventy thousand mails from the exchange boyos yelling that my mailbox was full (though how they thought spamming me every five minutes with their mails over a weekend was "helpful" I don't know).
So I wrote a special bot for her and her cabal. Each email I got from someone on her "reply to all" list got their email and attachments back at them, with a copy sent to the original offender.
"Alice" would send me a mistaken mail with four or five phone book sized attachments. My bot would send it and its payload right back with a "Wrong Stevie again, Alice" cover letter, and delete my copy. Then a veritable hail of incoming mail c/w 4-5 phone books would begin as each of her staff members would say something like "Me too" or "I agree" or some other totally worthless observation. I would bounce each one back to the sender along with its payload, and send a copy to "Alice" - with payload. There were about ten people on her staff, so each time she initiated hostilities she would end up with eleven distinct sets of phone books, all the same, which would collapse her mailbox and cause eleventy thousand emails from the exchange quango to swamp her mailbox over the weekend.
It still took three salvos of tripe before she started being careful about which Stevie she claimed as a subordinate.
Any time someone says "I know where you live" in a threatening manner, I respond "I bet you don't" and let them harass random not-mes they found using Google searches. This does not work with police officers standing in the rain while holding my driver's license I've discovered.
Then there was the time I got a call at home from a lawyer wanting to sue me over my driving an ambulance I do not own into a vehicle I had never seen in a city I had (at that time) never visited en route to a hospital I had never heard of. It took another lawyer to explain that lazy database searches on name alone were not the basis for a sound lawsuit, even in New York, nor a reasonable basis for slanderous accusations of criminal liability.
But that's a tale for a different thread.
Only if you allow them to get away with it.
If I'm sitting in the classroom or presentation, it will get called "arzive" - with a sibbilant "z" to make it sound like "arse-ive".
If challenged I'll just point out that it's a "Zylophone" not a "Chilophone" and OPOTUS is a "Zenophobe", not a "Chenophobe", and tell them to get a proper typographer to design them a better logo that lets people say their name the way they want them to.
Bunch of arxoles.
Anyone coining a name for anything techy in which the spelling doesn't help pronounce the name of whatever it is should get 12 months for a start, double that if you go to court and make the judge say it "wrong".
Yes I'm looking at you, inventors of LaTex. Your time will come.
And anyone starting an argument about "gif" should have to pay Unisys a small stipend every time they say it in whichever daft pronunciation they've come up with, since they invented the algorithm stolen by the opinionated pronouncer hisself to make the format work.
Bah humbug!
Filling Station? Bah! None of these so-called "filling stations" have any sort of auto-pump-gubbins that enforces a full tank on the would be fuel buyer.
At best these are petrol stations, just like they were in me grandad's day.
"Filling Station" indeed. So much for engineers and their fancy educations.
It is interesting to me that so many here instinctively grasp that Facebook information is never secure because of "shadow profile" concerns, yet so few understand that no matter how good a parent one is, one's children are for a large part of their day, under the influence and "data input policies" of others.
Every time I see a DINK or SINK argument about "I blame the parents" I grit my teeth and recall the stuff I got up to that my parents had no knowledge of, even though they were vigilant and quite conservative in their views on what their kids should be seeing of the world. As Bernard said in one episode of Yes Minister: "CBE - can't be everywhere".
The models of each situation seems congruent to me.
I've never had a Facebook profile, but am under no illusions that my every move is transparent to them on account of all the relatives I have that do. As for lying, I think that it has been well demonstrated by examples from history that no industry can be self-regulating from the viewpoint of the public, who get screwed over and then get presented with the bills when Things Go Wrong. The computer/social networking industry is no different to the auto industry or the legal industry, and its participants will move to protect themselves and increase their rewards at the expense of everyone else until forced to stop (or put in the position of asking for public monies to stave off disaster).
And yes, I believe that having a colossal liar in the White House is an enabling factor, raising the bar of what is acceptable until even a tall man on stilts could walk under it with no problem. No-one attempts to jump the bar any more, so the metaphor has been subverted and inverted almost without anyone noticing.
This is how world wars start. When you can say anything without needing to back up what you are saying, you can invent all sorts of outrages that must be stopped - by "reluctant" military intervention if necessary. All it takes is for the people in control of large economies to start thinking like third world warlords and its kit up for the third innings time.
There is an upside, you know. Consider that if the police should ever subpoena your Alexa records in order to bring you to justice (you swine) your shyster of a lawyer might get you off after they've been played, by claiming to a believing jury of credulous loons that in fact you aren't you - at least when it comes to Alexa.
"So inspector Organs, it is your contention that my client murdered six people in that house, and that the recordings taken from my client's Alexa device clearly indicate advance planning, including ordering axes, tomahawks, knives and so forth, is this not so?"
"It is."
"Then would you please explain to the jury why my client, who has spoken throughout in his native Midlands nasal whine, elects to order his weapons of choice in a deep Scots burl? And that the slow performance of the Amazon website that day has him swearing in what our expert witness has identified as Lowland Scots Gaelic? A language with which my client has demonstrated no affinity whatsoever? Indeed, his secondary school French teacher has given testimony under oath that her experience was that my client had little enough grasp of his native English and in four years of enforced language education demonstrated no capacity whatsoever for learning another! How do you reconcile these disparate facts inspector?"
"Er"
"In fact Inspector, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I plan to show evidence this day that my client has never in his life so much as travelled North of Sheffield! That he has no Scotsmen in his family tree! That this murderous, growling Celtic voice we have heard is in fact one Angus McGillycuddy, a retired dockworker from Fife who currently resides at 'Nae Mare Rovin' Like', 43 Bonnie Prince Charlie Lane, Glasgow, where he is current mace-bearer and treasurer of the Only Gude Sassenach Is A Deed Sassenach Club."
(Chaos in the public gallery, cries of Order! Order! from Mr Justice Wonce, banging of the gavel, shouts of "Thaas tellin' him Jimmeh!" from the dock etc)
I wonder how much blame accrues to the recent migration of DB technology?
My Amazon profile is completely trashed since about 4 weeks ago, when I was told I had contravened the community guidelines. My reviews were deleted. No appeal allowed.
I have no idea what I had done (Amazon keeping that to themselves) other than what I had been doing for ten years as far as writing reviews goes. Then they told me that I was back in their good books but most of the profile was gone and the rest had bizarre settings - a review of a Paula Poundstone book was flagged as "hidden" with no way to unhide it for example).
Requests for more info go unanswered, so now I have a mail filter to bin the begging-for-reviews letters from Amazon and their sellers and those "can you answer" spams.
I'd be angry about what is tantamount to cyber bullying (I was quite proud of my "Caged Women" review and the comments people made were hugely entertaining) except that Amazon making me live the Piranha bros sketch for real, me playing Stig O'Tracy to their Dinsdale Piranha, has me laughing hysterically.
"We understand Amazon nailed your head to the floor (figuratively)"
"Nahnahnahnahnah! They wouldn't do that!"
"But we have film of them doing so."
"Oh. Well, they did that, yeah. But they 'ad to. I 'ad broken the unwritten law."
"What had you done?"
"Well, they didn't tell me that, but they gave me their word it was the case and that's good enough for me."
In WWII during Hitler's assault on our green and pleasant land, lone Spitfre pilots would bring down buzz-bombs by flying wing to wing with them and flipping them over!
We didn't take any nonsense form the hun in those days, and we shouldn't take any nonsense from drones today!
Slipping standards, wouldn't have happened under Winston, fought two wars, fought on the beaches, Dunkirk, Mafeking etc etc.
Major Brainache (Mrs).
Oooh! Arrrrgh! Gnnnargh!
Hang on, this whole "break Youtube" idea is nuts. Google is monetized by the ads served up through Youtube. There is absolutely nil incentive to "break" browsers.
Also, on mobile platforms don't most people view Youtube content on the Youtube app?
Aren't we being a tad paranoid, suggesting that Google shoot their business model in the foot to push a browser choice?
Well said, AC, well said.
For any piece of equipment in any field of endeavour, I can absolutely guarantee that if someone recommends it, someone else will immediately pipe up with "no serious etc etc etc" and end with a recommendation for a different piece of kit, usually one priced much higher than the one under discussion.
I once said something nice about a watch with a compass, barometer and altimeter function, and was immediately excoriated by someone who told me I was taking my life in my hands and - coincidentally - would be much better off using a Suunto unit.
The following facts had not permeated his brain:
a) The Suunto unit was four times the already high cost of the watch I was being nice about.
2) I said that the compass was good enough for casual hill-walking and figuring out if you were turned around in a confusing American grid-based city but would be best not used to navigate around the world in a bathtub
#) I also said that the barometer was good for telling if you needed a raincoat but needed an appreciation of how such devices work
*) I also said the altimeter was OK for anything where the speed of change was limited by walking pace and therefore unsuitable for skydiving or landing that 747 when the pilot is dead and the instruments smashed by a collision with a comet
Musicians are the worst at this. A request for an affordable "starter" guitar recommendation on a forum will garner replies opining that nothing but a top of the line (insert guitar manufacturer choice) will suffice. If you want a giggle, find a concertina forum and look at the "suggestions" for beginners that talk about buying at auction and having an expert reconstruction job done on Victorian-era antiques.
All this talk of dive computers killing people. As I say to those who insist that they cannot turn off their work cellphone: Makes you wonder how we did it before that device was invented, dunnit?
If it were done in Cobol you could define the subroutine as "EXPECTS", the expected value(s) could be defined in either an 05 level or an array named "A-SPANISH-INQUISITION" and tag the exception case as a 77 level named "NOBODY" and get to display an absolutely genuine diagnostic of epic legendarity. I got into a lot of trouble once for doing this sort of thing. Totally worth it.
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