Posts by sisk 2455 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2010
which btw was devoid of story but thoroughly enjoyable all the same
That tells us all we need to know of your taste. You're welcome to your own opinion, of course, but if you can call a movie "devoid of story" and "thoroughly enjoyable" in the same breath then I've got to say your taste in entertainment is sorely lacking.
Normally when people start talking about discrimination in IT companies I point out that there really aren't enough women in the field to expect tech companies to have anywhere near equal numbers of male and female technicians. Basically the demographic of people who bothered to get that kind of education long enough ago to be getting into the upper echelons of the field today is male and white or Asian. No, I don't know why, nor does it really matter because the point is that's who the tech companies have that can do the job. It's ridiculous to expect the demographic of working technicians to be different than the demographic of educated technicians.
But here there's more substance to the allegations. If she truly is getting less pay for the same job and is preforming as well as she says (which I take with a grain of salt - not because she's a woman, but because I always take it with a grain of salt when someone is making claims on their own performance) then there's a serious problem in Redmond.
The content owner being victimized in the dancing baby case is not the owner of a song playing in the background of a video. It's the mother of a toddler who was forced to take down a video of her son dancing to a track you can barely hear over the noise of the video. That you could even begin to call UMG the victim in this case is utterly ridiculous.
There is nothing about the case that broadens fair use in any way. Fair use is exactly what it has always been and has never expanded past its original definition. Can you honestly say that the video in question doesn't pass the doctrine, very well defined in the law, of fair use? Just because licensing is easier these days doesn't mean that fair use should go away. The ease of getting a license has nothing whatsoever to do with why fair use exists. A win for Big Content in this particular case would have meant a massive over extension of DMCA and the erosion of fair use (which, sorry Andrew, IS a legally defined right and has been for nearly 4 decades, and existed as a matter of legal precedence for over a century before that).
EFF is very much on the side of the individual content owners in this case, whereas a win for UMG would mean that Big Content could claim ownership of a video of your kid because you forgot to turn off the radio before recording. What EFF is doing is making sure that the law can't be used frivolously. Copyright is a good thing. Copyright used to prevent other people from making brand new stuff is a bad thing. This is a case of the latter.
Call me crazy, but I can't help but feel that any pimp who would otherwise traffic young women against their wills would not do so given the option to traffic a robot that doesn't have a will. For one thing the robot isn't going to require food or sleep or any of the other things those pesky humans need. At most it might need plugged in for a few hours every day. For another trafficked women sometimes escape and almost always want to, whereas the robot wouldn't. All in all pimping out a sexbot would be a whole lot less headache than pimping out a woman. Basically if the things were convincing enough (ie, more human-like than we can currently make them and firmly on the other side of the uncanny valley) and within a certain price range (cheaper than a human slave but much more expensive than a night with a prostitute) I could very easily see them making a bigger dent in the human trafficking problem than any thing else we could do.
I haven't used an ad blocker in years. I don't really mind ads. I do, however, use NoScript, which tends to catch a metric crap ton of ads, because it's stupid to allow every random site out there to run every random script. I also block any adserver that I know to have a history of serving malicious ads in my hosts file. Anyway near as I can tell very few sites can tell that ads are being blocked at all on my machine.
To be fair Lewis does have an annoying habit of leaning more heavily on his own biases than on actual data, and when he does use actual data he has an annoying habit of cherry picking it. But I find that's true of just about everyone who takes an active role in the climate change discussion, regardless of which side of the debate they find themselves on.
In this particular instance I find myself in a rare agreement with him. All the raw data I've seen (far from a complete set, but comprising of some very important factors) indicates a strong possibility that we're in for cooler weather over the next few years. Though take that with a grain of salt. Climate is just too complex with too many variables to be putting too much stock in any kind of long term predictions involving it.
I wrote one that randomly renamed command.com and gave a message along the lines of "Hi dad! Your command.com got broken. Here's how to fix it."
We won't talk about how long I was grounded for that one. In my defense it was supposed to be funny. How was I supposed to know my 5 year old sister would end up being the one who got the disinfection instructions?
Is anyone actually arguing that Tor isn't being used to mask illegal activity? If so I'd so those people need to have the stupidity slapped out of them. Now if they're arguing that Tor isn't JUST being used to mask illegal activity, or even that it's not primarily being used to mask illegal activity, that I could understand. Perhaps not agree with, but understand. But to deny that Tor is the home of everything from kiddie porn to hire-a-hitman sites is just idiotic.
So then someone out there still thinks BitCoin is a secure way to anonymize themselves....not so much. You can't launder money through BC. The money trail is too easy to follow with published block chains. These extortionists are in trouble unless they just let those BitCoins sit there untouched.
Sounds par for the course. Except that, 'round here, the F150 is a status symbol, not a compact car. Though not much of a status symbol really. The poor sod driving an F150 just isn't quite good/rich enough to drive a gas guzzling Ram 3500 with a Cummins Turbo-Diesel engine. (Bonus points if it never sees anything more rugged than the Wal-Mart parking lot and the bed is so immaculately clean that it's obvious it's never had anything heavy or dirty in it.)
These 10 and 11 year olds are doing things that I didn't even have an opportunity to attempt until I was in college. And I'm not even all that old (unless you ask my wife - the perils of marrying a younger woman). In another 10 years we'll have kids just entering the dev field with portfolios that already rival those of people who've been getting paid for their work for quite some time.
If anything I'd say that the offline piracy maximum sentence should be dropped to match the current 2 year one for online piracy. It is, after all, a relatively minor crime. It's morally questionable, but the actual damage done by an individual copyright infringer is so negligible that it takes tens of thousands of them for it to make a noticeable impact.
Yes, they do. And some of them aren't half bad from a pure aesthetic viewpoint.
Basically these types of systems are designed to either allow people with little-to-no knowledge of web design to build complete sites or to allow professional web designers to roll out sites much quicker (and therefore at less cost to the client) than they would normally be able to. They're not anywhere near as good as someone who actually knows what they're doing putting a good deal of time into building a site, but they are quick and easy enough for non-professionals to knock up a decent looking site.
Erm....or water...
When I was inclined to drink heavily (a habit which fell by the wayside well over a decade ago, when thinking straight became more interesting than losing my inhibitions) I usually matched my alcohol drink for drink with glasses of water. The only time I ever got a hangover was the one time that I didn't do so (New Years 2001....I don't remember a whole lot other than the floor attempting repeatedly to beat me up).
I actually want to get some Soylent to keep at the office for those days I forget to grab my lunch on my way out the door. Unappetizing as it is it's still better than the fast food I've had to eat on those does. A hell of a lot cheaper too. Mind you I'd probably opt for the powder with a shelf life measured in decades over the premix that I have to be sure to get through in a year.
He's a rich arsehole who inherited all his wealth. Thus he gets the benefit of someone having done the hard work.
Um....no. He's lost all the wealth he inherited several times over. He inherited tens of millions, maybe as much as $200 million (that's the wildest estimates). He's worth billions. If you think he could have done that through treasuries then you fail at math.
Which is not to say he could have done it without that inheritance. Once you've got a certain amount of money it's pretty easy to turn it into more money. But few can do it as efficiently as he has.
Trump will put his many, many lawyers on mad-money until these hackers are found and caught, then he will press state, local, and Federal charges.
He can throw all the money he wants at lawyers, but if they did the hack from a laptop in McDonalds or somewhere else with free public wifi (which, honestly, they'd be morons not to have done) the odds of actually catching them are pretty much nil.
In Torvald's case I'd call it a pretty good case of self-awareness. He's NOT a nice person. In fact he's a raging arsehole of a project manager. That fact that he freely admits it makes him only slightly better than a raging arsehole who thinks they're popular.
This entire article can be summed up thusly:
A really expensive computerized sniper rifle scope that no one is really interested in can be easily hacked if the wifi is turned on and left on the default password. So it's pretty much like any other computerized device with wifi then, except this one is attached to a gun. Not to worry though, because a successful attacker can only prevent the gun from firing or make it miss its target. Actually making it fire without a trigger pull is not possible.
I'll say just one thing about Windows 10 since I'm not using it and barely supporting it. My wife has been on the Win10 preview since late May and she's been mostly happy with it until the last couple weeks (when it started crashing for no apparent reason). Yesterday she upgraded from the last preview to the first release and her performance took a very noticeable nosedive. I don't know what Microsoft did between the final preview and the first release, but it was clearly something wrong.
"Trump was the favorite of 24 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Yes, but somewhere around 60% say they'd never vote for him. And as much of a nutcase as he is his lead has 0 chance of growing and 100% chance of diminishing each time he opens his mouth. I know some hard-core Republicans who say they'd vote for any of the Democratic nominees - ANY of them - before they'd vote for Trump. That's how un-electable the man is.
instead of talking about Obama and Clinton as they'd prefer
The further it gets into the race the more it looks like it may be Sanders they have to worry about. He's looking more and more electable every day. Which, really, is just proof that you have to be an extremist to be electable anymore.
"The balance between our security and the civil liberties that our ideals and our Constitution require deserves robust debate, and those who are willing to engage in it here at home."
No it doesn't. We do not give up our civil liberties in this country. Period, the end, no debate allowed on the subject. If you can't protect our security within that context then resign so we can elect someone who can.
You forget that of that 236 million people only about 20-30% of them can be buggered to get to the polls for Presidential elections. For anything less than a Presidential election the number drops to 5-15%. That being the case 167,954 is actually around 1-2% of the population that actually gives a rat's ass. If you have 1-2% of a group signing a petition that's usually a pretty good indication that it's important to the group at large.
frontrunner Trump
Trump is NOT the GOP front runner. He's just the guy generating the most press. You'd have a tough time finding any significant number of people who are actually saying they're going to vote for him.
Me? At the rate the race is going right now Mickey Mouse is looking like a good write in.
It could come out that he's their most active client by far and there would be nothing more than shrugged shoulders. Even if he's one of the "cheating scumbags" on the list people wouldn't even be surprised, let alone outraged. He's already got a rep as a womanizer to put James Bond to shame. It would change nothing for him personally. So I can only assume that his concern about the far-reaching effects of this hack is genuine. Not necessarily accurate mind you, but genuine.
At any rate I suspect we're about to see an uptick in the businesses of divorce lawyers and marriage counselors. Hopefully not in that order.
Personally I've dressed 'business casual' for work for over a decade now. It's just expected where I work and proved to be the key to getting me away from the first line tech support position I started in. I showed up for the transfer interview in my best button down shirt and slacks, which wasn't all that different from what I wore on a day to day basis. I was later told that was the tie breaker between me and an equally competent tech who'd shown up in a ratty old Metallica shirt and torn up jeans. Which is basically the kind of clothes he continues to wear on a day to day basis now.
But that said suddenly changing the dress code on people is bad juju. Some of them will probably have to go out and invest in a new wardrobe to meet the new code and doubtless it will lead to ill will.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
