
Sheer Lunacy
The title says it. This kind of nonsense should fail any sanity check and in my view the whole project should be aborted. How come "blacklist" is not on the list? Is INI trying to cripple meaningful communication?
218 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
Does anybody remember the Falklands war? BOTH sides had Exocet missiles. And it seems that the British had not backdoored them.
It makes no sense to give away or sell your security. First the West exported its technology. Now they've woken up to the fact that its security accompanied the technology.
I remember reading reports (or rumours) that you could drag the computer icon into the wastebasket, at which point the machine would crash.
I saw my first Lisa a few months later at an exhibition. It was being used in a control application.
So with my hand on the mouse I asked "Is it true that if you drag the computer into......?"
At which point I was physically restrained and almost thrown of the stand.
Is a USB C plug compatible with water? My Cubot N1 is charged by a magnetically attached cable which touches external contacts. My previous one - an Amazfit Stratos - had a similar system but the cable clipped on mechanically.
And anyway, aren't all devices charged by a cable? How much bulk would a wireless charger add?
As somebody commented above, Chrome came from nowhere to become what it is today.
I think the problem is that a lot, if not most, users haven't a clue about how they are accessing the web. If I tell somebody to close the browser I get a blank look. "What's a browser?"
That icon on screen is "The Internet"
Last week I ran Firefox on a new laptop. I found the browser to be almost unusable with all the ads popping up. Some Youtube videos showed TWO ads before the content I wanted. The sad thing is that people don't even know that they can block ads.
So they are free to choose a browser with ad blockers but don't know that they can do so. I personally have given up trying to convert them to useing something sensible,
and taking the trouble to install it.
Is there a good messiah out there?
Heriot-Watt, my old Alma Mater, was initially a brewing school which evolved through Polytechnic to University. Following the demise of Birmingham University Brewing School (or dept, I forget which) HW is teaching just about all the British brewers.
My point is, don't these bastards drink beer?
I was once told that when Esso renamed themselves to Exxon they were very careful to check the name in every language they could find.
It turns out that only Maltese has double x's so if one names a product with a double x in the name they only need to check one language.
Mind you, while "Exxon" is safe, a lot of the more vigorous words usuitable for Aunt Enid's parlour sport double x's.
I may be missing something but this looks remarkably like a storm in a teacup. I run Devuan unstable. While agreeing that it is usually best to use the distro's packaged software. However "rules" are only there to be broken. In my case I believe that Firefox is best installed from mozilla.org.
The process is incredibly complicated:
1. From Help - About Firefox see if there are updates.
2. If yes, download, in my case, to /opt/downloads/firefox
3. Unpack the files to (in most cases) /usr/local.
4. Umm...Er..There is no 4!
Firefox ESR tends to fail at critical moments. I used to use it on my wife and grandson's PCs but frankly it's more trouble than it saves.
FWIIW these are reasons I have found why the switch may not work.
1. Tepid support from above.
2. Senior people saying "I'm too important to use free software."
3. And this may be the worst one: The expectation that openoffice and MSoffice can coexist indefinitely. They can't.
Solutions are obvious.
At school in 1964 I helped the science teacher to build a stereo system around a BBC studio Tape Deck and a Sinclair set of apmlifier, preamp and speakers.
The sound from the Sinclair kit was, for those days, astounding. The Rector suspected that we had spent well over our budget!
When I got to Edinburgh in 1973 the first thing I bought was a Sinclair Cambridge calculator. They were so new that at examination time the Heriot Watt University Senate ruled that while Slide Rules were OK we could not use calculators in our exams as they would give their owners an unfair advantage. Only 2 out of 14 in the course owned a calculator.
I would consider that refusal to be vaccinated constitutes "reckless endangerment" to others and there are already mechanisms for coping with this.
There is compulsory vaccination for children.
So come down on these refusniks with the full force of the law and make the world safer for sensible people.
Strangely, the hack is described in terms of ppm of Caustic Soda. Dosing is usually via a dosing pump (variable speed and stroke) and would be set by adjusting a pH target. It is not possible to dose Caustic Soda directly - it consists of very hygroscopic pearls or flakes.
It is probably possible to set up such a system to work with ppm, by calculating ppm from the water flow rare and the dosig rate but who on earth would bother? !!
In any sanely engineered system you would set the target pH ( usually 7.4 to 7.8) and let the pump and pH meter sort things out. That's maybe 10 lines of code. Then you add another 100 or so to cope with all the error conditions you can think up but essentially if pH drops below 7 or rises above 8 the plant should stop and raise an alarm. The operator should not be able to set insane dosing values.
I've done, or had done for me, several such mini plants dosing caustic, acid or sodium hypochlorite.
Forget the plant security, Windows or Team Viewer. The adjustment should simply not have been possible.
This reminds me of the Falklands war. The UK did not have a suitable rocket so it bought Exocets from France. (I think there may have been British investment there too). The Argentinians also bought Exocets. Some people made/saved lots of money by "outsourcing" vital industries. Others were killed by the consequences.
At least at the moment we can choose Chinese or American kit. The Americans can probably not compete on the current playing field want want to be sole suppliers to the world.
Malta has a growing anti-5G movement. Big to-do with photos of new masts. The sad thing is:
1. There are no 5G masts yet in Malta.
2. None of the providers have even applied for a licence yet.
Never underestimate the power of stupidity. Remember that "MRI" was initially called "NMR" - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance- but people were frightened of the "Nuclear" bit.
I remember when he was foisting pulseaudio on us. His standard reply to bug reports was that it would get better soon. Frankly I cannot understand how Poettering has been allowed to screw up Linux with systemd. It goes against the basic philosophy of ONE tool doing ONE thing very well.
Which is why I dropped Debian for Devuan.
Lusers are lusers everywhere. A few years ago we were building a new production facility. When it came to cladding the front we had to close off the road leading to the Marketing Dept. So we assigned new parking spaces, dotted the area with "Keep Out" posters and we posted maps and instructions on how to walk to Marketing via a different route
Next day 4 girls from Marketing - cookie cut types with long straight hair and sub-par IQs - came to complain that they had torn their tights climbing over the barriers in the road.
Linus is the man who keeps the project going. A brilliant coder but also a brilliant cat-herder. What other OS progressed as fast and as well as Linux?
So he gets pissed off at some people. So what? His system(s) work and the OS keeps going strong.
Linus doesn't need to write code. He does need to manage it. And he does, in a way most managers can envy.
Mr Torvalds, in case you get to read this, consider your hand shaken.