Posts by felixk

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Thanks for explaining about the documentary vs. reality. Regrettably, I still got my knowledge from books, and from survivors; born an Austrian in 1964, that worked for me. The documentary would have failed me anyway, as I don't even have an idiot box. Books FTW.

So I finally broke down, grabbed the transcript of Trump's one-hour speech (I blame you for making me inflict this on myself) and read it. No incitement to violence. No "fighting words". One or two sentences come close, but actual lawyers (not lawyers-turned-pols) say they fall short of the test applied by a court.

Trump's speech was a far cry from the statements that Harris, Pelosi and their friends offered when rioting mobs set fire to cities all over. If those words were below the incitement threshold, then, in equity, so were Trump's.

I have "no dog in this fight", the saying goes, I believe. But what your so-called media and the big tech companies have done in terms of partisanships will haunt you and your countrymen (assuming you are an American, sorry!).

More importantly, at least to me, is whether Biden and Harris will reinstate Obama's fawning stance towards Iran. I would hate to see Israel nuked, even if Obama wouldn't mind so much.

Cheers,

F.

Kindly restrict those comparisons to situations that are actually on the scale of National Socialism and genocide – say, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and their ilk.

First, if Trump were Hitler, then why are you not in a concentration camp already?

Second, and to me, this is more important than your whereabouts, you dilute and devalue the memory of what genocide truly means. You are not alone, not even close, in this, but it still must be called out.

Third, every Republican President since Reagan has been called "Hitler". Yes, every single one. How can you expect to be taken seriously now that your comparing Trump to Hitler is just yet another hyperbolic exaggeration?

Fourth, at least to my generation and our elders (I was born in 1964), such posturing looks ignorant, and that is the kindest of all possible interpretations.

So thanks for stopping this nonsense.

Re: Delay and you face another coup

How do you cope with the voices in your head? Or does your tinfoil hat really block them?

Windows kernel vulnerability disclosed by Google's Project Zero after bug exploited in the wild by hackers

Re: Really?

> The chances are that Google have a licence for access

> to the Windows source code, and probably even gave

> Microsoft a patch. It's Microsoft who aren't taking it seriously.

Have you ever shipped a large software product? One that runs on every weird configuration you can imagine, and then a few millions more? Seven days is not even enough to run the patch against the BVTs for all in-servicing builds, never mind the full test set or, G–d forbid, the appcompat test suites.

"But it's just a small patch to a single function in a single driver!" I hear you say. That is usually what goes wrong when Windows Update renders a hundred million devices unbootable.

No, AC, Google Zero is a collection of unwashed, smelly dicks. Competent they may be, but their behaviour reminds me of Red china ("Do not trust China. China is asshole.").

Hidden Windows Terminal goodies to check out: Retro mode that emulates blurry CRT display – and more

> PuTTY is the smoothest for SSH but the lack of tabs means it's too cumbersome for me when working with multiple sessions.

Use KiTTY, then. PuTTY with tabs and lots more sugar.

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Re: Give a child the information in the wrong order.

An now you people force me to defend Trump in public.

lglethal (two posts up) was kind enough to post Trump's words and then proceeded to read only the part that reinforced his preconceived notions. Ignoring the PR department's push to declare everything a joke or sarcasm, here is what Trump said:

> And is there a way we can do something like that […]

*SOMETHING LIKE THAT*. Not "literally that".

What I find amazing is that people who can't read (or refuse to do so) work so hard to prove that Trump is an idiot. You try ad-libbing; it's not easy. Trump's predecessor mumbled if the teleprompter fell over, and his current opponent Biden mumbles incomprehensibly even when the teleprompter is working. Why expect perfection from Trump? Anyway, that reminds me:

What's the difference between Trump and Biden?

When Trump speaks, you have to suspend your disbelief.

When Biden speaks, you have to suspend your incomprehension.

Cheers,

Felix.

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

Re: Cost of pharmaceuticals and cross-subsidization

My apologies, I had forgotten to subscribe to the thread. :(

> Are you claiming that Sanofi-Aventis sells its products in the EU (which universally tends to have drug prices closer to the Austrian than to the US levels) at a loss?

No, not at all. They are selling it for the marginal price. The actual cost of producing and selling a vial of insulin is below the $44 Austrian end-user price, as you say. what you are seeing is called price discrimination: different prices for different market segments. That only works as long as we have organisations like the FDA and it's Austrian equivalent AGES which prohibit and prevent "grey" imports.

If, say, the US congress were to legislate that medication prices in the US must equal the lowest price worldwide, India and Mexico etc. would no longer have those drugs. Oops.

Next level: Austrians get charged $310/vial, just like Americans. Fair, but then Austrians won't have those drugs either: Austria has a single-payer system, and if something is expensive, we don't get it. Just a different form of rationing.

Thank you for the pointers to the financials; one thing that is missing there is the write-down when several years' worth of R&D are flushed down the tubes because of a potential drug's side effects. That happens intermittently and eats up all those nice reserves that are accumulated in the better years. (Not that pharma companies are starving!)

Cheers,

Felix.

Re: History has proven that "light touch" regulation...

T1 diabetic here. Human insulin (Humulin, Novolog or Novorapid, …) still is extremely cheap (thank you, Dr Banting and Best). What has gone up immensely are the more recent long-acting insulins (i. glargine a/k/a Lantus, i. detemir a/k/a Levemir, i. degludec) and rapid-acting insulind ("pump insulins": i. lispro = Humalog, i. glulisine = Apidra, i. aspart = Novorapid) which for the most part are still under patent protection. A few notes:

1. Insulin lispro (Humalog) has come off patent protection in 2015. Lilly is marketing a generic at half the price of brand-name Humalog; personally, I cannot wait for Teva Pharma or some other generics giant to mix things up.

2. Pump users are perfectly able to maintain adequate BG control on human insulin (Humulin R, Actrapid); rapid-acting insulin makes some things a little easier, like having to plan a work-out only two hours in advance instead of four. Walk into any Walmart, buy a vial of "Relion" human insulin for $25. Oh, and what you get is original Novo Nordisk Novolin, nothing cooked up in some backyard lab.

3. Long-acting insulin (Lantus, Levemir) is easily replaced by three injections of NPH. Again, that is mostly a question of convenience.

4. The argument "But the fiends abroad only pay $40 per vial" doesn't wash. In Austria, the list price for a vial of Apidra (insulin glulisine, a rapid-acting insulin made by Sanofi-Aventis) is about $44 (EUR 38.50); in the US, the cash price is about $310. If you were to force the manufacturer to sell in its biggest market for the Austrian price, drug development would likely grind to a halt. Currently, insulin and other blockbuster drugs cross-subsidize development of new antibiotics necessitated by bacterial drug resistance.

5. The only people in the US who pay cash prices are the uninsured and badly-insured. (We have that, too; here, the saying is that insurance will pay "not enough to live, yet too much to die".) Just require that the cash price must equal the lowest price negotiated with any insurance (including Medicare) or pharm benefits manager, and the problem goes away.

6. (Unrelated to insulin) The same fix would apply to, say, surgery; my excellent hip repair in the US came with a six-digit bill; insurance paid about 25%, and that was that. No, quantity discounts cannot be responsible for insurance pricing; after all, BC/BS cannot guarantee that it will send N patients to Dr. Bruckner.

To summarize: There are options other than spending $1000/month.

Microsoft, GitHub staff tell Satya Nadella: It's time to ice ICE, baby. Rip up those tech contracts

Re: Everything under control

> […] but to avoid being a part of evil actions?

That, of course, begs the question – are the ICE actions actually "evil"? I submit to you that they are not, but you skipped that little discussion altogether.

Please find some less obvious rhethorical trick.

Uh-oh .io: Question mark hangs over trendy tech startup domains as UN condemns British empire hangover

Official UN documents:

Resolution A/RES/73/295 http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/73/295

Meeting Record (and vote tally): A/73/PV.83 http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/73/PV.83

Press Release: GA/12146 https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12146.doc.htm

"Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965"

At the time of this writing, only the press release was available.

The discussion mentions the islanders; it leaves out a few other salient facts; among them is that the BIOT never belonged to Mauritius in the first place. At the time (1965) Mauritius was not a self-contained entity but part of the United Kingdom, and administrative divisions are dissolved, reformed and changed all the time.

Mauritius' renewed interest might be enhanced not only by the plight of the Chagos Islanders but also by the prospect of 125.600 sq. mi. (~325.000 km²) of hitherto unexploited fishery and marine exploitation rights. Odd how that got no mention anywhere.

The vote tally for A/RES/73/295 has not been released (the UN is quicker off the bat with a UK-bashing press release), but it would seem that the Ayes came mainly from the usual suspects – those bulwarks of freedom that demand a voice in the affairs of the world but won't even allow their own people free and fair elections. In short, the usual collection of tinpot dictators, murdering communists and religious autocrats.

The ICJ's Advisory Opinion of 25 February 2019 (https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/169/169-20190225-01-00-EN.pdf) contains a rather amusing summary of how the tyrants and despoilers who rule a majority of UN member states kept telling the UK not to allow a base in that strategic location. Recommended reading! The opinion also presumes to tell the UK what it may or may not do to its administrative divisions. Here in Austria, we are lucky to have escaped the General Assembly's eagle-eyed watchers when a district ("Wien-Umgebung") was dissolved and its 118.634 (2015) inhabitants were, nolens volens, assigned to other districts.

As far as I am concerned, what the UN needs is a Lord Protector Cromwell:

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

(Speech to the Rump Parliament, 20 April 1653)

April Fool: FCC finally bothers with Puerto Rico as chairman visits

No, Mary, it's not Paij's fault

Amazing how stupid politics can make people. I am used to it from the article's author – his name notwithstanding, McCarthy regards everything to the right of Stalin as deeply suspect – but what's with the commnenters? The Reg usually attracts smarter readers, or so I thought:

For one, the FCC does not manage telecommunications on the island of PR. No, they have their own board ("Junta Reglementadora de Telecomunicaciones", Telecommunications Regulatory Board) controlled by the Gobierno de Puerto Rico. Said government is happy to explain this in its FCC filings:

"The Telecommunications Regulatory Board of Puerto Rico (TRB) is the Government agency created by virtue of Act 213 of September 12, 1996, known as the Telecommunications Act of Puerto Rico of 1996, to regulate the telecommunications and Cable TV markets. At present, it has jurisdiction over intra-island services provided by the telecommunications companies, and is the franchising entity for Cable TV companies doing business in Puerto Rico.

The TRB is also in charge of the administration of the Universal Service Fund of Puerto Rico (PRUSF) and the certification of eligibility to receive funds from both the U.S. and the PRUSF. […]"

Of course, they drove everthing associated with it into the ground, just like they did with the government-controlled electricity monopoly, the territory's finances and its entire economy. The only economic activity that seems in full bloom is corruption.

And finally, the "4.3 %" number is the amount of the island without cell phone service. Mr McCarthy neglected to tell us whether that was by area, by number of cell towerd, by population or perhaps using average summer temperatures as the proxy variable. I am willing to bet that the number is based on island area = 100%, and the 4.3% of the island have about five inhabitants.

Linus Torvalds on security: 'Do no harm, don't break users'

> I think Franklin would come down on the same side as Linus!!!

What with Franklin being on the Secret Committee and on the Committee for Secret Correspondence, he was tasked with breaking into British secured communications. Of course he would advocate for idiotic measures that perpetuate security holes -- they would make his work easier!

Torvalds essentially says that security holes need fixing only after they are exploited; until then, no rush. That is what Microsoft was accused of for the longest time, and now we learn that it was all good, since we wouldn't want to inconvenience users (of software and of security holes). Did I wake up in Bizarro World or what?

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

@DavCrav:

> The quick way is to do 1-(0.95)^52=0.93 (2 sig figs),

> which gets you almost exactly the right answer.

No, it gets you exactly the right answer. The use of a hypergeometric distribution is technically correct (but only if the sot keeps track of how many times he's been drunk and stops after twelve such days); personally, I would apply a binomial distribution with a fixed probability of drunkenness on any one day of p=12/260, just as you did.

The results are: P(X>=1) = 0.935646978954 for the hypergeometric case, P(X>=1) = 0.914321213168 for the binomial distribution. The commenter that decided that the result must round to 0.90 is living in a state of sin.

Headless body found near topless beach: Missing private sub journalist identified

Re: Making light of tragedy

Finally -- I was already wondering whether the Humour Police might have been disbanded. Welcome back, Comrade, and don't forget to check in with the Commissar For Serious Matters to pick up a copy of the current List Of Things That Are Inappropriate to Joke About.

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

Re: but fines cannot be a solution

> Because US authorities [will] find a European business […]

> and lob a retaliatory fine in their direction.

The difference is that the US have a real court system. Milked, bilked and amazingly abused by lawyers, granted; but what the US do not have is a political, completely unelected, body of slimy politicians in a position to play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. Oh, and the European Commission is also the owner of the slush fund that the fine will flow into. O happy coincidence!

Born and bred European, and I cannot tell you how disgusting the whole bunch of them are, up there in Brussels.

MS denies Win 7 backdoor rumours

Backdoors: 0. Idiots: plenty.

One guy doesn't know how to spell "Echelon", another commenter apparently does not have a clue how information from a network is processed once it hits the network interface. But all these idiots -- sensu stricto -- are sure that MS has nothing better to do than sell them a backdoored OS.

Leaving moral and ethical issues aside (and having worked on parts of Win7 that would be relevant to a backdoor, I do so only for the sake of this discussion), here is why the NSA or any of the other agencies that you cretins fear more than the FSB would never permit a backdoor: The code would be found. The time you spend whining about MS (instead of fixing the bugs and holes on _your_ favourite platform, natch) is used by others to take apart the network stack, from the offloaded code on the network interface up to the crypto layers and beyond.

So go back to playing with whatever OS is your favourite today, and keep in mind the old saw "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses."

Microsoft rejects call to fix SQL password-exposure risk

Cluelessness abounds.

The amount of cluelessness displayed by some of the comments is truly astounding.

First, this affects only a legacy authentication mode inherited from Sybase back in the 90s. It's the equivalent of using NTLM instead of Kerberos -- you can force the system to do that, but it's a Bad Idea, and the consequences are upon your head.

Second, as the above implies, Windows authentication ("integrated authentication", in SQL Server parlance) is not affected; it uses the OS-provided mechanisms.

Third, there has to be code running as system, or with similar permissions, _on_ the machine that runs SQL Server. So much for Senrigo's "any user". If an admin opens a database server up for interactive logon by normal users, he should be fired on the spot.

Fourth, the reasons for not fixing the issue are two: (1) Backwards compatibility (yes, some _really_ old apps expect to be able to manipulate the old-style passwords directly) and (2) lack of benefit (why fix deprecated junk?).

Cheers,

Felix.

P.S.: I work for Microsoft, but never in the SQL Server group. I did and do use SQL Server for my hobby, which is unrelated to my job.