Posts by Notas Badoff 1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
It will be very interesting, after they have filled all the positions, to find out the relative pay scales of 'civil' vs 'able' servants. Is it possible that they've not been attracting the 'able' because they've been paying below scale?
I just hate it when the 'fix' is to throw lots of money at a problem - temporarily - when the real fix would have been to throw a bit more money at the problem all along. "But we had to now!" versus "I guess we should have back then..."
You think we don't remember certain people blaming Obama for the state of the economy before inauguration day?
I remember years of the GOP deflecting everything negative as "That's old news." They stopped when everyone realized how often and how reflexively they said it. I fear the day will be soon that the GOP resurrects it in its new form "That's old lies."
I'm not surprised at continuing resistance to Python 3. My first and last experience of interacting with Python folk was receiving multiple repetitions of "why would you want to do that?", with variously emphasized sarcasms, all to one question where I needed to emulate data handling of a non-Python-invented format.
They simply were *against* anything externally derived. These are not the iconoclasts you were looking for.
You'd think if someone wanted to write an attack piece they'd at least research it and find out "What was the worst event that best illustrated what can go wrong?" These are mere bon-mots.
User:Mantanmoreland
Eventually found out to be a stock market 'expert' who had been guarding against the concept of "naked short selling". It wasn't the sock puppets or the long-time sneaky edits to protect his articles, it was the way in which he was able to co-opt WP establishment figures to defend him. Years went by, with multiple other users blocked, but defended by luminaries he continued. Most definitely including Wales himself, who knew the user personally.
It was only when several people accumulated inconvertible, though circumstantial, evidence of exactly who the editor was and what he had done, that the majority of users overwhelmingly forced the PTB to ban the user. Unfortunately because of the initial acrimonious dismissal of obvious facts by those powers, several users quit in shock and dismay. Wikipedia's best defenders were pilloried and rejected by Wikipedia!
It is this episode that best illustrates Wikipedia's greatest vulnerability - people can be played. (*and* the second greatest - failures are swept under the rug).
The author here has failed at this assignment, having only amputated a few of JW's toes and quite failed at a head shot.
I may have missed previous discussions, but why isn't it made a requirement that financial and government sites (at the very least) reject new passwords on the top 100 list (with appropriately illuminating error messages), and probe for these and notify existing users that they've been 'unwise'.
I'd think any 'serious' site would get a respectful "...o..k..a..y, thanks" if they emailed users with "we don't want you to lose your hard-earned money/house/job, and we noticed an insecure password and would you please change that to a better password (and here's how)." The customer might up the company's clue rating/reputation. And any customer that would pitch a major fit, well, might they not be worth keeping as a customer?
(Implementation Tip: mention the whole undertaking in a PR announcement - anyone afterwards complaining to friends will get a "but why do you care, this doesn't apply to you, does it?")
... will warm a 20mq ("metro quadro" == "square meter") by 2 to 3 degrees in one half-hour. And will 'warm' for 5 hours. That's all I can find about "how much" heating it does.
*Remarkably* meagre on the details of how much warmth you can get out of the thing. Like, after two hours how much warmer will the room be? Absent the owner shuffling about in coat/gloves/hat and energetically muttering "why am I still freezing?" which will likely warm the room much more than one of these.
Buy a 10-pack!
"... and required to attain the profits as promised in the prospectus given to investors justifying the buyout/takeover/merger."
Not that anything in said prospectus was originally based on realities, but now that they've gotten the money and closed the deal, they've got to pretend they know how to get to that endpoint.
Your blood on the swords shows they are "serious business people" (and therefore can't be blamed in the future for unexpected reverses (see 'reality')).
"... but I would therefore have three suggestions as to how the situation might be rectified: ..." I see "publish an apology and retraction", and I see "BBC could publish another article" ...
What was his third suggestion? Oh I do wonder...
Was it unprintable, though "... things that come in threes are funnier, more satisfying, or more effective"?
China: the communist government using capitalist methods to fund an aggressive modern military to impose hegemony as legitimated by imperial maps.
The idea of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" rises again not even a 100 years later. Just... this time it is the Chinese giving all and sundry the benefits thereof.
"We’ve found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way."
Oh that's going to help! Hmm, these three people didn't share the article. Ahh, this person shared it with 100 of their friends, who shared it with 20 of their friends, so it's just fine. "Obama confesses: Hillary's tail is longer and blacker!"
Friend of a friend has a friend that insisted everyone must vote for Trump to bring on the Apocalypse. Because, y'no, the Trumpets of Doom. It was foretold! No, really. And it wasn't her idea to begin with.
(As much as possible I hide even the tenuous connection I have with Alabama.)
Everything the Chinese government does is with a view towards how it benefits China. Hmm, sounds okay...
But since the backdrop is a long-term historical perspective fostered by the government - obsessively - that the Western powers (oh, and Japan and others) have exploited China for centuries and ground down and impoverished its people, well, they don't really have fair-mindedness in mind, y'kno?
It is not a small leap to assume that everything the Chinese government does is with a view to exploit and belittle Western governments and businesses. After all, that *will* greatly satisfy their people (who have been fed a complete education for 3+ generations now on every historical transgression against China).
Ask yourself this: how would the average Chinese citizen react to hearing their government actually benefited a foreign company over one of their own? Outrage! (and as calculated by the party).
Until the mindset inculcated by the party allows for fair and equal business with and by foreign elements, expect nothing but "The East is Red Ink".
It just clicked. Every time I unbox some bit'o'kit, out falls a postcard or envelope to post to "register your product". I've always chucked those away as useless and with the downside that I'd start receiving _more_ unwanted postal advertising directly from manufacturers and resellers.
But Mark 85 has opened my eyes. If we all returned those registrations we could be posted warnings whenever a past purchase needed to be patched. If we also added email addresses the warnings could be timely! Isn't this just wonderful?
And given the frequent need for these notifications that would enable the added in advertising in these important communications. And with such engendered warm feelings for the caring and responsible manufacturers surely we would welcome each packet of love.
Why did the rose-colored lenses in my glasses just shatter? Hmm, let me go look in my mailbox...
No, just the return of "the data says what we want it to say, after we sculpt it into shape". Oh dear, let's put these two guys into a trial set of 'scientists' ranking them by 'stupidity' and see what happens when the result is "Chinese are more likely to be stupid scientists". I think a few of their colleagues might have a bone to pick or two. Skulls indeed.
"Gotcha!"
Hmm, so maybe the idea could be to continue allowing this to be done, and after six months or a year, say to the shady advertisers "Okay, show us the figures of who you sold to / leased to / etc." And now that we've established an obvious pattern of discrimination, your fine / sentence will be this much.
't ain't entrapment if you do it to yourself.
Oooo, and then FB get to claim the high road, that they cooperated with society to squelch the ne'erdowells! (I've got my rose-colored glasses on)
"... created cookies that could have enabled such intruder to bypass the need for a password to access certain users' accounts or account information."
They have code which allows this as a feature? It's easy to have security problems when you have undiagnosed stupidity problems.
Quick, how many languages were announced in each of the last five years? With "major industry backing" aka Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, AlsDeli, etc. (oEck, madly inadequate list)
This has been going on forever and the reasons why have always been more social than technical, prestige than practicality. Back in 60s Texaco Oil had their own programming language, TexTran. Because they needed a Texas-sized language?
I have to wonder if this all couldn't be summarized as "I'm going to win this campaign because my orcs have _six arms_ with blades for fingernails and eyes that shoot out porcupine quills! And they smell so bad everyone closer than 20 meters is incapacitated! And Gygax helped so I'll get the respect I deserve!"
"... looks like the Chinese population won't put up with ..." Good lord, you have quite mistaken things, haven't you? They never had a vote. They never will. What the party wants, the party gets.
And when establishing the structures of repression, how do you yet look enlightened? "six months" Sounds just fine, really. Later, after the next 'incident' that can be exploited, a year. Then the next after that (see the country is under attack!), two years. It is actually a mark of sophistication that appearances are taken into account from the beginning! Yay.
Everything done in China (that can be controlled) is required to be of benefit to China directly. Much of that is judged by how directly that is of benefit to the party. Appearances. If the party can crow that they have fostered technology to the point that Chinese-produced IT is world-quality, great. Since more and more will be required to be sourced from China, "... equipment from a list that has been government tested and approved" will provide the PR material, yes?
I've have to be the switchboard operator before, when an Indian publishing house wanted to contact "Notas Badof" and had lost their contact info, so just sent the email to the first address popping up on Google. Fortunately for them, I _had_ met that particular namesake a couple years before, from the subject matter knew it was for them, knew where they worked, and was able to triangulate down to their email address to forward the email.
I guess the Indian boyo figured that with such a strange name we'd all be from the same family?
I was given the immediate impression of laziness on the part of Lockheed. It is a terrible lot of trouble to build applications that can be installed at customers' own sites. (That they then could control themselves) All those on-site visits and hassles when things don't work as advertised. Pfft!
Instead, let's just build a networked centralized system that we (LM) can run for you! Networked applications running somewhere else are all the rage, right? Hey, we can work into the marketing material a 'benefit' that everyone needs - OaaS ! Ownership is such a pain, we'll do it for you, wholesale prices!
Ah yes, your codebook can be in plain sight on your shelves and no one would be the wiser! :)
Me, I'm going to switch to a password set suggested by something funny a friend said to me a couple decades ago, him from a different discipline to mine and using a language I don't know (he had to explain _why_ it was funny). Now how is a profiler going to guess that from perusing *my* emails?!
Some of the negative aspects of the industry are not by any means new. And now that more people know about them, well even the kids will self-select earlier.
I keep a copy of "Soul of a new machine" for the times when someone mentions a child is "interested in computers as a field". It's a text that is both the best case for and against being 'interested'. If after reading it you are awed by the unique miracles you can create, you're 'our' kind of people and probably nothing could stop you from getting in on the action. On the other hand, if you are depressed at what happened to the individuals who toiled in the basement to produce the miracles, then it is a wake-up call and warning not to get involved in any way at all.
Enabling self-selection is a good thing. The last two kids reading my copy, one went into statistics and accounting, the other into submarining. I see two forms of intense stifling containment I couldn't imagine enduring. They see it as way better than what I do.
Hmm, maybe I've got bad genes...
"... $35.5m of that package also be earmarked for return to customers in the form of discounts on accessories" Hot damn, now that's a settlement of real benefit to the customer!
They get to disown their previous misleading words, agree to make "less misleading" misleading words in the future, and atone by giving gouged customers useless vouchers? This watchdog accepts hushpuppies. There's no meat here!
So they manage to drop nasty bits o'code into your sausage grinding server, and wait to pluck out the juicy bits as the handle cranks the credit cards through. Their code caches the tasty morsels in a place they can reach any time they want, just by accessing the sales catalog. They *don't* have to re-access the server via the original networking backdoor (and which might leave tracks to trace back) since they've probably closed up the original vulnerability anyway cuz competition from other baddies.
A single access to break in, drop code and clean up tracks. Then they re-sample at will retrieving the latest data using plain and anonymous public web access. I am in awe. I'm off to go hide under the covers and wait for the cold sweats...
Since the "Tired of fog? Try the frogs!" campaign illustrates that it is _possible_ for a government have "nous now", can we hope that some EU country will propose a special economic zone for IT companies, which combines both taxes and data in their definition of "none of our business"?
Relocate the headquarters to Luxembourg, say, and you've solved your monetary headaches and forever declared independence from arbitrary government interference. In fact, bull-headed short-sighted government actions may be cited in the future as the reason multinationals became supranationals, beyond any governments' control.
Which country do you think will be first to establish a SEIZ or SIIEZ?
The charming euphemism is rather obvious, appropriate both for the companies tired of being screwed in all the wrong ways, *and* the former host countries experiencing sudden turnabouts - SITZ
So I look all over and they just don't like torrents. FTP is good enough for anybody! Everybody who counts has great connections to suck down 2+GB 'overnight' with no troubles! Wah? Why the hate?
BTW: oh look, power cut off to home just now for a few seconds (twice) so 'net connection is strangely not continuous. _They_ have ideal lives - the rest of us are benighted blighters... How do they encourage newcomers?
OBTW: ElReg doesn't like href="ftp://..." so here's that link to images
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/11.0/
"... after acute exposure ..."
I had to scan through the report twice to answer (?) a simple question: how spread out was the exposure to this radiation? They keep talking about the long duration of exposure that a Mars transit would entail, and yet are not forthcoming about how they replicated that exposure. The above was the only mention I could find.
We say we're investigating X (because funding!) but we actually test Y (because easier!) and report results from the latter as though it said something definite about the former.
Here, let me give you a year's worth of sunlight in one flash, and check 30 days later how well you can see.
"At your service, sir!
Yes, combining fixed wake phrases with with 'pre-primed' Google/Bing searches could result in some really interesting political debates: "Ok Google, Trump as president" announces in every home "His biggest bankruptcy yet!"
Aside: Instead of just walking up and just saying "tea", did Jean-Luc always crisply specify "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" because just saying 'tea' would then prompt for "what's the second letter?", and asking for 'chamomile' would get him a cup with a green chameleon?
I scanned through the article's links, and none to past articles in the Reg about Alex Stamos at time of leaving. What was said? What was known? Were the usual 'family' reasons satisfying enough that no one cared to check into it more? Anybody know of previous hints to this mischief?
I'm using this election as a worst-case benchmark - what proportion of people are simply irremediably stupid/antisocial/uncaring in voting.
My thought until now has been that about 1/3 of the people will always vote Republican just'cuz daddy did and about 1/3 of the people will always vote Democrat cuz'justice! Thus there really is just a small middle portion of the voters that can actually be influenced.
Now take away those that will vote based on some cutesy sound-bite like "I'm a uniter, not a divider" and you realize everything hinges on maybe a fifth to a sixth of people who can be influenced *rationally*.
Hell, there are even people who _will_ vote for a candidate that can't think of a single foreign leader!! And *they* swear they are the *most* rational!
I think America ought to take out the part of the constitution that says a candidate for president must be native-born. America desperately needs to import brains!
won't let you start up the quarterly video conference with Wall Street. You'll just have to send them an email about how secure our network is. Sorry about your bonus benchmarked to stock price..."
"He emphasised how, once installed, it learns how the client’s network operates over a period of two to three weeks and then act on unusual activity from there."
Two to three weeks to learn about daily behaviours and weekend reconciliations. Two to three months to learn about the once-a-month activities, that are spread throughout each month. Two to three quarters to learn about the quarterly activities. Two to three years to learn about yearly activities (vacations, holidays, a coupl'a industry conferences, tax reporting, product rollouts, merger bids, etc.)
And then after two three years it'll be ready to notice the merely new coming in and old falling away. Things which change every week.
If you don't staff these automatic tools with 24x7 attendants well-versed in all company activities, they will constantly be tripping up business activities or flipping off alerts. Where's the big red button for the automatic monitor that keeps hitting the big red button?
'bout 10 years ago I was in a meeting where the network people had done their homework and were able to successfully propose that the company could give up its class B Internet blocks (plural) and manage the whole network with two class A blocks. 5 digit intranet counts and rising. Oh, and increase network security because everything would have to go through the best centralized net boxen to be had. If you had a clue and looked ahead it was easy to benefit both your own company and everybody else.
'twas also the meeting where the CIO, after some time listening to the discussion, interjected "What's a class B address?" After a *very* long period of quiet, the nicest guy there answered succinctly and kindly. CIO didn't last another month, though.
Indeed, the examples of what is 'Asian' are definitely needed for clarity. As I read the detailed complaint, Dept of Labor don't seem to qualify 'Asian' at all . That's really annoying.
Given the current geopolitical realities, heck given the recent convictions and cases made against certain national actors, there is going to be a higher bar for specific nationalities. Sorry folks, we're not all just folk.
Filipino, Malay, Indonesian, Pacific Islander, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, Singaporean, Japanese, Vietnamese... are all Asian nationalities. That's a really wide range. Hmm, what am I missing? Umm, yeah, you know and you know why...
BUT... reading the detailed complaint, the numbers do look really bad. (Sorry, having to type this in cuz PDF won't copy-n-paste easily cuz it's a graphic copy):
"For the Software Engineer position, from a pool of more than 1,160 qualified applicants -- approximately 85% of whom were Asian -- Palantir hired 14 non-Asian applicants and only 11 Asian applicants. The adverse impact calculated by OFCCP exceeds five standard deviations."
"For the QA Engineer Intern position, from a pool of more than 130 qualified applicants -- approximately 73% of whom were Asian -- Palantir hired 17 non-Asian applicants and only four Asian applicants. The adverse impact calculated by OFCCP exceeds six standard deviations."
That's going to be really really hard to 'normalize'.
Hmm, could they plead customer requirements? That the positions where for particular projects were the 'customer' specified really high security? PDF mentions lots of non-discrimination points. Could the company interject 'security' as an overriding consideration?
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