Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

Dad of student slain in Paris terror massacre sues Google, Twitter, Facebook for their 'material support' of ISIS

Re: This is why...

The USA does have that, and has had it since the mid 19th century (Might have actually been earlier than that). In any civil case, the losing party pays all costs of the trial (both party's legal fees, plus some money to the court itself to pay for the used resources).

This is why companies are so keen on suing people; their legal teams are large enough and staffed with the best-of-the-best lawyers so that they are almost guaranteed to win and thus not have to pay the $1000+ per hour per lawyer that their law army charges.

Fly to Africa. Survive helicopter death flight to oil rig. Do no work for three weeks. Repeat

Re: Been there and done that, but in far nicer circumstances

I too had a similar experience., but this was for oceanographic research facility out on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. The equipment I was setting up came in two pieces about 45 pounds each. The company I worked for decided that to save money, rather than shipping the equipment, I would stow it in my check bags (I was carrying 2 checked bags, a stuffed-to-the-gills duffle bag for my own stuff, and my backpack for my electronics and toiletries). They paid for the extra bag fees and then a little extra.

The flight schedule was horrific, though: I was stationed in Hawaii at the time, and had to go to an island ~100 kms from Guam, yet the flew my the most indirect way possible (The direct Honolulu-Guam flights were fully booked). My flight ended up being HON-> LAX -> ICN -> GUM and then onto a small seaplane to take me to the research station. All-in-all, I figured that the round-trip was close to 4 times the distance as it would have been if I had a direct Hawaii to the station flight (got First Class seats the whole way, so that made up for the time in the air)...

Kill Flash now. Or patch these 36 vulnerabilities. Your choice

"HTF did Flash become so totally ubiquitous"

Like every new technology on the internet: porn. It was the first platform on which video could be streamed piecemeal, and on a wide variety of platforms. It rose in popularity during the format wars of the 90's when watching a video online meant that you might need Real Player, Quicktime, or one of the dozens of other proprietary video codecs.

"as well as Cold Fusion"

Cold Fusion is still around?! What a blast from the past...

Smut shaming: Anonymous fights Islamic State... with porn

Re: " I think Twitter's T&C allow for punting someone"

And given that Twitter is an American company, its likely that they'll be booted far faster. Because here in America, you show a nipple and you're banned from everything; show a picture of someone being disemboweled, and no one cares.

Re: "72 Virgins"

I recently read an academic article about the whole "72 virgins" thing. The paper supposes that since that passage uses a completely different word for virgin than everywhere else, that that section is a translation error. The word used there is very close to the word used for the date fruit rather than women and that the section may well be a metaphor meaning "You will always have a lot of food" rather than "You will have 72 women that are terrible at sex for all eternity".

Crims set up fake companies to hoard and sell IPv4 addresses

Take back some of the /8 blocks some organizations are sitting on

The US DoD has many ( 6.*, 11.*, 26.*, 29.*, 30.*, 214.*, 215.*, and others, none of which they actually have connected to the public internet...). HP has 2 (15.*, 16.*), GE has 3.*, Bell Has 2 (47.*, 12.*), IBM 9.*, Xerox 13.*, Apple 17.*, MIT 18.*, Ford 19.*, Haliburton 34*, Merit 35.*, DuPont 52.*, USPS 54.*, Boeing 55.*, Eli Lily 40.*, Prudential 48.*, the list just goes on and on. None of those organizations need that many IPs, and most of them them waste them on internal networks that aren't even connected to the public internet.

There are probably 40 or so /8's that can be reclaimed and the registrants be given much smaller blocks. That is 671,088,640 IP addresses to free up. Even if those orgs still needed a /16 worth of address, that'd still be 668 million free ones added to the pool.

When DIY is not enough: Web-snack firm Graze has an offline awakening

They do need a place to congregate, afterall

I have yet to find someone who 'eats healthy' that doesn't just blab about it as much as possible, almost like they get their actual nutrition from being smug rather than the lawn clippings that they normally eat.

Just the other day, I sat down with some coworkers when I got in for the day. I announced that I was feeling quite tired (database server updates the night before) and they just started on this huge conversation about how they never felt tired after they cut caffeine out of their diets, then on about how much better they feel once they started cutting out trans-fats and instead ate kale or some other "superfood" fad of the week.

I never mentioned food or diets, or even chemicals or anything, they just started going on and on about that crap. Although it did give me a chance to go grab a doughnut form the break-room while they were gabbing on about useless vegan crap.

Oh snap! Facebook zaps crap yap gap in web chat, natter app flap

One of the reasons why I avoid shortened URLs

I wonder how many times a group chat has been altered to modify a shortened URL without anyone noticing...

US military tests massive GPS jamming weapon over California

Why California?

Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to do something like this over an area that isn't populated by ~120 Million humans? The US DoD still own Wake Island, or they could park a carrier out in the middle of the South pacific and test from there.

What if it turns out that the test also screws up the radios on ambulances and fire trucks? Or aircraft avoidance systems? Wouldn't it be better to test where there is a lot smaller chance of accidentally killing a bunch of civilians?

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

65 kg

I assume that the figure includes both the tablet and the overly-expensive, yet worthless, bag of hot air and bullshit that carries the tablet around (I believe that most places call them 'project managers').

Cisco axes unloved M-Series modular servers two years after launch

The M-series aren't blades

The M stands for "modular". The B_Series (which according to the story is what customer are asking for) are their blade offerings. The C-series are their stand-alone rack boxes.

This all makes sense to me since the M-series were a weird hybrid of both, but lacked the features that made the others desirable. The M-series only put 8 wimpy servers into a 2U machine, yet required the XFP connectors that the B-series chassis used. It was a weird middle-child product that didn't really fit into a specific role. They might've been able to save the line if they used common parts as the C- and B- series (EG, a 1- or 2-slot blade chassis that used standard network interfaces)

Software snafu let EU citizens get referendum vote, says Electoral Commission

AH politics, there can only be two sides... Seems idiotic that in something as important as this, there isn't a third option of "stay in the EU, but only if these specific issues are fixed". The EU is broken, but not irreparable and both the options of just leaving, or staying without charge are both terrible options.

Swiss effectively disappear Alps: World's largest tunnel opens

"but what's a "pastor"? Does it involve spaghetti?"

Nah, just another name of the guy that gets paid to yell at you once a week to make you feel guilty for being alive.

Jaxa's litany of errors spun Hitomi to pieces

"questioning people with time seniority in the company is frowned upon in Japan"

There isn't much difference between time seniority in a company and age. Children are expected to work for the same company as their parents upon graduating school. The path everyone is expected to follow is to start training for their father's job at age 16, finish high school, go to the same college as your father, and then get hired at that same company, you then work at that same company until retirement / death. Resigning is considered extremely shameful, so no one ever leaves, but will try to push the company into a new product; this is how you get a conglomeration like Hitachi that makes everything from sex-toys to nuclear reactors. It is also how you get people that are practically killing themselves in a dead-end job for crap pay and incompetent management that tries to do things the exact same way it was done 50 years ago.

You don't need no STEEENKING GPU, says Intel

Re: Bloody 'Ell

I'd think that they are targeting the folk that are on the server end of video streaming. As for business, 4K of resolution = 4x 1080p monitors. So that's at least 4 thin clients supported per chip without having to fork over $10,000+ to nVidia for one of their VDI-centric video cards (And avoid the ridiculous charge from the server manufacturer for a system that supports a PCIe x16 slot).

Re: Intel has always tried to pull that one

I have a laptop with an i7-4650U in it and using the built-in GPU (HD 5000). I was able to play Bioshock 1 and 2, Fallout 3 / New Vegas without any issues (1080p at 30-40 FPS). It can't compare to one of the big dedicated cards, but its not bad enough to just write it off as useless.

Deloitte coughs up $11m to end claims it ripped off US govt with IT work

How dare they over-charge the taxpayers!

That's the politicians' job, thank you very much.

Re: Gouging the government??

From what I heard, the problem was that when bills were calculated and sent out for the financial years, the government's bill was finalized and sent before some of the private sector customers got their discounts and bills sent to them. So when the bill was calculated the US Gov got the cheapest when they were billed, but then other customers ended up with discounts that made them cheaper.

I can't really blame them as the government is a pain in the ass to deal with, especially when getting bills approved and paid. With some departments, you pretty much have to bill them 2 years in advance so you can make it through all the auditing stages and have the bill accepted on time...

I swear, everyone at the GSA is just those old people in the grocery store checkout line that will argue for hours until the cashier accepts an expired coupon (from a different store) to reduce the bill by 3 cents.

Prospect of fertilisation really blows bees' hair back

I figure that the electromagnetic signals the flowers emit would be filtered reflection of the EM waves that hit the plant. Specifically, the chloroplasts that are responsible for absorbing most of the visible spectrum also work on the frequencies that the bees use. Would explain why bees aren't attracted to flowers before they fully bloom or ones that have started to go a it brown...

Illinois senator proposes gutting BIPA

Re: Honestly....

Or anyone who starts a sentence with "I'm not racist, but..." is about to say something exceedingly racist...

Ireland handed another $100m by Silicon Valley for startups' handout

Investment or bribe?

This sounds more like its a bribe to keep allowing Silicon Valley to launder money through Ireland and pay less than 1% tax in the countries they actually operate.

Brexit campaign group fined £50k for sending half a million spam texts

What about fining them for that stupid word

Every time I hear the 'word' "Brexit, I wan to smash my head against the wall until I forget the English language. It sounds like something some mouth-breathing Fox News anchor came up with after a weekend of binge drinking air conditioner water and self-administered lobotomies.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

They control the hardware

So how is it possible to screw up software that badly? Every aspect of the craft is controlled by a single company, and there are only three variants. Operating System developers somehow manage to get their code to run on an uncountable number of permutations of hardware and environments, so how is that very highly paid developers that have access to full documentation fuck up so badly...

Re: We really shouldn't have decommissioned the Harrier and Ark Royal

Or the fact that the helmet is so heavy that if the pilot ever attempted to eject, it'd snap their neck like a piece of dry pasta...

"Well, unless China stole the plans for it, too"

Stole, I wouldn't be surprised if all the parts for the damned things -came from- China but got "Made in USA" stamp put on it when got over here.

Re: This is how the US is preserving its air superiority

"should be folded back in the Army where it belongs"

If you're folding anything, then everything should be shuffled so there is a Navy, an Army, and an Air force. It it moves on Air, it goes to the Air Force; if it moves on water, Navy; if it moves on dirt, Army. There is no reason why every service needs planes, especially since all the services have their own weird planes that aren't compatible with those of any other service. All of the services also have special forces divisions for some reason. And there is also the redundancy between the Army and the Marine Corps.

Really, everything should be shuffled so that we end up with 4 services: Air Force, Army, Navy, and Special Operations (SpecOPs divisions, cyber warfare, space, etc)

Legal fight against USA Today's news app info-flogging OK'd by court

We do, but admitting so will brand you as some a terrorist, pedophile, or both. The media has made us so suspicious about everyone else that we assume the worst.

"The act was passed in 1988 after ... Robert Bork ... leak his rental history."

So some politician got his privacy invaded and they passed a law to prevent it from happening again. Yet, the privacy of every citizen gets violated on a regular basis, even by the government, and they do nothing. I so hate the hypocrisy.

Engineer uses binary on voting bumpf to flag up Cali election flaws

"past the $5,000 threshold set by the FEC for candidates that do not accept campaign donations"

So its either be beholden to a private interest or not run. Wow, California, you suck...

The concept of 'preventing it from becoming a space for corporate interests' is fallacious since I would assume running for office would require proof that you are an actual human being that lives in the area and meets the requirements to run (age, length of citizenship, not on the run from Johnny Law, etc). And if the concern is that corporations would control said candidate, they already do. Major campaign contributors already strong-arm candidates into doing what they want, especially after they get into office.

Requiring candidates to pay for things like this forces them into whoring themselves to whomever is willing to trade money for political influence.

Nvidia, Samsung pump brakes in car-crash GPU patent rip-off race

I wonder how many of those patents either cover something so obvious it borders on idiocy (Such as 'rounded corners' ) or covers some proprietary interface where there is only a single way to inter-operate.

Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

Re: Curious Results

Not like it was doing anything useful before...

Japan's Hitomi space 'scope bricked, declared lost after software bug

If only

If only there were some kind of space craft with a large servicing bay, grabber arms and could carry 5 or more well-trained astronauts. Maybe a craft that has already been proven to be able to perform complex repairs on a massive telescope...

In all seriousness, why did we have to abandon the Space shuttle? Wouldn't have been cheaper to just build a fresh one every 5 years? Build it so that it would share most parts with the previous iteration but also integrate improvements in propulsion technologies, automated systems, or just smoothing rough edges found in previous models. A development and build cycle like that would've been far cheaper than to keep the old dinosaurs around and much, much cheaper than scrapping it, relying on the Russians while working a replacement that is no better than the old Saturn V / Apollo stack...

Imagine how much cheaper it would be to launch a shuttle that was equipped with re-usable boosters, modern composites, and optimized aerodynamic profile, advanced computers, and cutting-edge engines. Sure as hell would be cheaper than paying the Russians, sinking billions in the Antares stack, or even paying private companies.

Win XP, Flash, Java... healthcare makes easy pickings for hackers

Why are these machines even conencted to the internet?

Why aren't hospital networks air-gapped and connected only to their internal networks with a proxy server for the application that need to connect to things outside of said network and only allows for the application to connect to those specific endpoints.

Edward Snowden sues Norway to prevent extradition

Re: Huh???

I've always wondered why he didn't take the path of sending the leaked data to journalists in an encrypted package, then sent them the password once he was safely settled at his destination. Or sent the password by way of a delayed email so that even if he was detained, no one could stop the documents from leaking.

When is making $20bn in three months not enough? When your name is Google

$20 Billion in added revenue

Yet, they still seem to have a hard time paying their proper share of taxes...

FBI's PRISM slurping is 'unconstitutional' – and America's secret spy court is OK with that

Those of us in other countries may laugh now

Well, unless you happen to live in China, France, UK, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Haiti, and so on, and so on.... Far too many governments out there have similar, if not worse, courts / governments. By no means am I condoning the US's actions, just pointing out that blatant violations of our human rights is much more wide-spread.

Intel literally decimates workforce: 12,000 will be axed, CFO shifts to sales

Re: Wonder what this kind of news means for AMD

I just wish they'd cut some of the extraneous code from their graphics drivers...

Flaw-finding Ruby on Rails bot steams past humans

People still use Ruby On Rails?

I hear a lot about it a few years ago, then nothing, so I'd assumed that it was another of those passing fads that was eventually dethroned by the likes of node.js, just as Ruby replaced PHP and ASP, whihc they themselves replaced other languages, and so on until the birth of the internet.

South Korea to upgrade national stereo defence system for US$16m

Only spending $16m on military hardware? I'd say that that's pretty sensible. The US military probably spent more than that on a single 1-meter XLR cable for their audio system (They do have to ensure that it have outstanding performance when playing patriotic tunes and painted olive green)...

URL shorteners reveal your trip to strip club, dash to disease clinic – research

I fully agree with your sentiment, and use their as much as I can, but 'their' is a plural pronoun, but a singular pronoun is needed, so using 'her' is the correct syntax, but English is missing a gender-neutral singular pronoun so writers must use 'his','her', 'his/her', or risk sounding like a serial killer and use 'its'.

Anonymised search engine page found on 'kid-friendly' search site

Protecting kids

The only way to protect kids from the internet is by separating them from it. Consider Wikipedia, one of the sites that is pretty much guaranteed to be on a whitelist of websites for children, yet it is chock full of porn. In fact, an entire copy of "Debbie Does Dallas" is hosted on the Wikimedia servers, not to mention the images that show up on the articles for sex acts.

Even fixing those issues, children will still find porn on the internet and kiddie fiddlers will still be able to contact them. Nothing in the universe can stop a 13 year old boy from getting access to porn. Leave a boy alone for a couple hours with even a completely disassembled machines with no networking, modems, or even any other connection and in no time, that machine will be up and running and connected to several porn sites. As for the predators, the law and society has pushed them so far underground that by-passing filters and exploiting weak points in child-protection software is second nature to them.

Aluminum-wrapped robbers fail to foil bank

I wonder if you could fool cameras by strapping a large digital display over the head which shows the area around the wearer. An ever-changing version of the hat that mugger wore in The Fifth Element. I suppose it would take some work to figure out were the cameras were and what they expect to see...

Read America's insane draft crypto-borking law that no one's willing to admit they wrote

Re: Um, doesn't this blow a hole

I would think Iceland or Norway. Both have outstanding rights records when it comes to privacy, not part of the EU, and both have a surplus of electrical generating capacity. Norway currently needs a bit of an economic boost now that a large sector of their economy (oil production) has gone down the drain, so I'd figure that they could give out some pretty healthy tax breaks.

Panama Papers hack: Unpatched WordPress, Drupal bugs to blame?

If you care about security

For those that care about security, like Mossack should've, the first step to make WordPress secure would be to use "rm -rf /" and then use a much simpler and easier to secure method of publishing their website.

To me, WordPress is pretty much Macromedia ColdFusion / Microsoft Frontpage for Web 2.0. Something that should only be used by groups so small that they can't afford someone to write a webpage for them. A company with the funds of MF should have a full-time web development team that manually updates their website rather than using a CMS...

Of course, that ignores the fact that they were complete idiots and put multiple services on a single box like that, servers aren't that expensive, especially for a law firm pulling in millions a year on legal fees.

Bavarian town rescinds Hitler's honorary citizenship

Re: It's a start

That'll probably come around the time the UK government finally pardons Alan Turing...

That what I was assuming. It seems like those weird laws that some countries still have on the books, but forgot about them since they haven't been relevant for hundreds of years. Such as some city's laws about properly tying up horses on the road.

Florida weed suspect cuffed after hoverboard pursuit

Re: Weed

In Washington State, there is a tax (depending on municipal taxes, some places are as high as 40-45%) on recreational marijuana but no taxes if you have a medical card (as it is considered medication under state law).

Kik opens bot shop, promises world+dog access to teen market

"chat bots that “have the potential to revolutionize the way we connect with people..."

My calendar must be off, it says its 2016, but news like this makes me think its really 1980... I remember chat bots on IRC, ICQ, and Usenet. I wasted hours of my youth with a chat bot that was nothing but ELIZA on the back end (sure as hell was a better use of my time, and served the same purpose, than writing angst teen poetry like everyone else)