Posts by Someone Else

You may be distracted by the pandemic but FYI: US Senate panel OK's backdoors-by-the-backdoor EARN IT Act

@Claptrap314 - Re: You are a fool to make this issue partisan

But we have FAR more influence on Republican members of congress than you do. Convincing them might, you know, help stop the bill

Who's 'we', Kimosabe? For that matter, who's 'you'?

Re: Democrats

From your lips to Pelosi's ear....

Re: Let the Games begin & may the odds be ever in your favour :P

Reminds me of the old joke about the various body parts wanting to be the "boss"....

Once it affects "those" Senators...

Don't think we can wait that long before the primary damage is done to we non-Senators.

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Re: I wonder why?

There is a polite way to fire someone....

An unfortunate bit of product placement for Microsoft as Liverpool celebrates winning some silverware

@Michael Habel -- Re: Clarification

You're Amanfromars1, and I claim my $5....

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Re: "A trio of Republican senators"

...with the emPHAsis on the first sylLABle

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

You are unfamiliar with the seven deadly sins then?

Kevin Spacey will be displeased....

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

...many of which are derived from French and therefore cannot be correctly spelled by an anglophone. Ever.

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

You don't learn words like that at engineering school.

That's because engineering classes in the Pre-Facebook era didn't need to teach that word.

Round up the usual suspects...

"Tech companies’ increasing reliance on encryption has turned their platforms into a new, lawless playground of criminal activity," said Cotton in a statement.

"Criminals from child predators to terrorists are taking full advantage.

Can't think of a witty rejoinder; this just stands on its own.

The law bill [PDF] is dubbed the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which uncharacteristically cannot be condensed into a pandering acronym.

Well, it they were to name it the Lawful Encrypted Access to Data (which to this trio of fools would make every bit as much sense as the original), it could be acronym-ized as the LEAD Act, which accurately describes what's between their ears.

_{'Course, that implies you pronounce it properly. Given that this is Congress, they would tend to mispronounce it as "leed". But that would be OK, as now both the name and the acronym describe the opposite of what the legislation will actually do. Appropriate for Congress, then.}

Re: While they're at it....

Only in Indiana.

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Comcast to handle DNS-over-HTTPS for Firefox-using subscribers

Re: So will Tor be using Comcast for DNS? Will my VPN also start going through my ISP?

OK, so if I have explicitly set 1.1.1.1 as my DNS server, will I have to change that, or is it simply a matter of telling Firefox to just leave it alone? Or will having Comcast as my provider under this new scheme allow them to snoop it anyway?

Section 230 authors despair of Trump, Barr, Biden, US Congress’ aggressive ignorance of critical tech law

Re: Time...

Yeah, like the Gen X'ers (a.k.a. the Greed Generation) are going to do better?

Re: Trump & Co don't know?

There are plenty of intelligent people in the US. The problem is a culture that favors not intelligence, but bluster and machismo bullshit.

There. FTFY.

_{Although the original made sense, too.}

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

Usability issues...

Micros~1 "usability issues" are by no means limited to (mis-)managing large pixel counts. Case-in point: the damfool "Add a contact to this group" dialog. After roughly 35 years of CUA guidance, you'd think that:

1) Micros~1 would be able to figure out what the default control is, and how to get focus to it. (Hint, you fools: its the edit box in which you add the name of the contact.)

2) Micros~1 would not enable a control, if the user's activating it resulted in an error. Why is the Add button active when there is nothing in the contact name edit box? (Hint: because there isn't anyone working within 25 miles of that project who has a fucking clue as to how to develop a Graphical User Interface (which, nowadays goes by the Millennial moniker "User Experience").)

Fekkin' morons, the lot of them.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: Body language

"acting suspiciously" is grounds for an officer deciding to stop and search, but not grounds for an arrest.

Simply because to get arrested you have to be arrested for an arrestable offense, and looking suspicious is not an offense.

What land/planet are you from?

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: activated by Wi-Fi

activated by 5G, surely.

No! 5G causes COVID-19, as any fule nose.

Re: More Middle Manager insecurity

Middle managers are there to act as a brake so that things can't run out of control.

Control by whom?

_{Answer determines whether I up- or downvote this post.}

Hey NYPD, when you're done tear-gassing and running over protesters, can you tell us about your spy gear?

Faux News. Fox Noise. Funny how even when the name changes, the stench of raw bullshit remains....

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: Golly. RED trangles?

Point taken. Well done.

Re: Trump. A master baiter

tRump ain't the "main baiter", but he's certainly a Master at it....

Re: Apathy Rules

Honest decision-makers? Shirley, you jest.

Re: They actually have a plan...

Actually, tRump may well be able to postpone the election. That said, on January 20th at noon, Eastern Standard Time, his current term (and that of his lapdog Veep as well) ends. Per the Constitution, the next in line to succeed (in the absence of a duly elected President and Vice President) is the Speaker of the House.

So tRump cancelling the election might well result in President Nancy Pelosi...his ostensible worst nightmare.

Irony can be so ironic!

Re: "you see them *everywhere*"

You can tell tRump didn't himself write the ad copy, because he is incapable of forming a sentence (coherent or otherwise) with 12, 13, 14, or 18 words.

Re: Golly. RED trangles?

Another: The US president is a lying orange shyster with stupid hair. Not all lying orange shysters with stupid hair are US presidents.

Probably true in the abstract. However, how many other lying orange shysters with stupid hair do you know that aren't US presidents?

_{I know, I'm asking you to prove the negative....}

The left may loose the election, but the right will not win it.

IR35 tax reforms for UK freelancers glide through committee stage: D-Day set for 6 April 2021

Been there, done that...

Can you say, "Section 1706"?

I knew you could....

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Re: Spelling

Actually the US was well on it way to metricism (is there such a thing?); distance and speed limit signs on freeways (and in some larger towns) were printed in both Imperial and metric in the late 70's. (I think it was by Federal fiat, but I don't recall for sure; this even occurred in Texas, so I'm pretty sure a federal power was involved....) Food and drink containers in grocery stores were also showing up with both measures on them.

Then Ronald McDonald Reagan was elected our first Acting President. As he didn't have the mental fortitude to handle the metric system (!), and was having his political handlers whisper in his ear that it would be a good political move to reject this furrin' measuring system, he dutifully dismantled the slow, methodical conversion of the US to the metric system. Were he not to have been the president, or to have had an IQ above room temperature (is that in Fahrenheit or Celsius?), the US would have been fully metric by the end of the millennium.

Re: Spelling

For all you Boomers, Chris G's sentence makes perfect sense; for the GenX'ers and younger, it sounds like gibberish. Chris, your sentence is a great discriminator...well done!

_{"Yeah, wot 'e said!}

Stop it! All of you!

I couldn't tell you how many ounces are in a pound; pounds in a stone and stones in a whatever. Inches in a yard or yards in a mile.

Well, I actually remember most of those...but the one I'm most interested in would be stones in a London double-decker bus.

_{Wait! Am I mixing my measures?}

Re: Tine to redefine Pi(e)

Now we need the MPs to concentrate on a scientific issue that really matters:- Definining "Pie" as having pastry covering all sides.

I see you've ruled out all pizza as a "pie"...with the notable exception of Chicago-style deep dish!

_{The Law of Unintended Consequences bites again!!! (tee-hee)}

Re: Spelling

Kilogram certainly isn't USAian, their spelling is "two pounds" (or near enough, for some purposes).

Back in the '70s, I remember it being spelled "brick".

_{But they say, "If you remember the '70s, you weren't there," so I may be mistaken....}

Re: Spelling

You forgot kiloJub...

NY Attorney General warns Apple, Google to police COVID-19 tracing apps in their souks – or she will herself

Well, then, how would tRump react if his Twitter-machine were to tell him that one (or more!) of those folks he was glad-handing on Tuesday during his Policing photo-op ... er, nationwide policy address ... were to have been marked as "infected"? Nothing?? Thought so.

If you're despairing at staff sharing admin passwords, look on the bright side. That's CIA-grade security

Sounds like somebody got bored with the whole process and was distracted at the end by something shiny and sparkly....

Re: 123ABCdef

But that same site also considered correcthorsebatterystaple Very strong, and 65 years to crack, but with the first two sites stating weak and instant, with one even quoting xkcd, so go figure :-)

So don't keep us in suspenders, which xkcd panel did it reference?

There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage

Re: "our equipment is used for COVID-19 drugs"

[...] you don't go hiring Someone Else's Server thinking you're covered.

Hey! My Server is not for hire!!

Not so nice, we investigated them twice: EU opens double whammy of inquiries into Apple's biz practices

Re: The Register has asked Apple, Spotify, and Rakuten for comment.

We follow the law in everything we do and we embrace competition at every stage because we believe it pushes us to deliver even better results.”

Yeah, yeah, sure. And the check is in the mail....

OOP there it is: You'd think JavaScript's used more by devs than Java... but it's not – JetBrains survey

Re: I just can't get away with them...

OK, boomer.

Re: Python !?

Maybe at Trump University or "schools" of that ilk....

@James Anderson --

No. The server side is coded in php.

For very small values of 'coded'.

@trickie --

Sounds like your feelings got hurt because your favorite language didn't show up in the top n, or that it showed a modest to steep decline in popularity.

Its a survey. Get over it!

Are you having a hard time following what Microsoft is trying to do with .NET 5.0? You're not the only one

Re: kill the beast...

wxWidgets works well for cross-platform. It's similar to MFC.

<retch> Anything similar to MFC. </retch>

You want cross-platform widgets (and a corresponding framework)? Qt FTW.

Re: I can help.

Stop it, Dammit! - - ->

AWS won't sell facial-recog tool to police for a year – other law enforcement agencies are in the clear

@ Steven Guenther -- Re: Who cares - wear a mask and sunglasses

The only problem here is that when you wear glasses and a mask, when you exhale, your glasses fog up....

Re: Time for Congress

Waddya wanna bet that the "rules" include something along the lines of:

No member of Congress or the Executive shall be identified as a Criminal (regardless of whether said member of Congress or the Executive is indeed a Criminal)....

The only way is bork for the UK's embattled rail travellers

So...

Most likely the onboard Passenger Information System (PIS) has had a wobble during startup [...]

So, the Passenger Information System took the PIS, did it?