Posts by sisk

Should the super-rich pay 70% tax rate above $10m? Here's Michael Dell's hot take for Davos

Re: Rich Tax Paradox

"the previous 8 years before Trump"

You mean the massive downward trend in the unemployment rate following the spike caused by the 2008 crash that started a few months into Obama's Presidency and continues today?

Look out, kids. Your Tinder account is about to be swamped by old people... probably

Re: Super likes sound super useless

Not "endless". At least not if you're unfortunate enough to be in a rural area hundreds of miles from the nearest metropolitan area.

On a related note, the dating scene around here is kinda sparse.

Maybe I was Tindering wrong, but these were actual dates

I don't think that's Tindering wrong at all. That's exactly what I was looking for before I gave up on Tinder (for a lot of reasons). In fact, if you actually read profiles that's what a good chunk of the women on there are looking for. At least half the profiles I've seen on Tinder say something to the effect of "If you're just looking for meaningless sex go ahead and swipe left".

Then again, that's my area, where churches outnumber bars about 10 to 1 and there are no nightclubs at all and the culture reflects that. So, you know, maybe a skewed view of it.

are their user numbers more Ashley Madison like, 90%+ males?

I've tried several dating apps in the 3 years that I've been divorced and near as I can tell they're ALL 90%+ male once you discount the fembots (those are easy to spot: a supermodel interested in my overweight, nerdy, socially inept butt is clearly not a real woman). Then again, I'm looking for women close to my age, so maybe it's different for the younger crowd.

Oracle robbed just about anyone who wasn't a pasty white male of $400m, says Uncle Sam

Re: Entire tech industry

Not all companies in the tech industry discriminate. In fact not even all the statistics here show discrimination. For instance, if 24% of their techs are women, given that there is a major shortage of women who have CS degrees that indicates to me that they actually are just as likely to hire women as men. Seriously, for any technical position you can safely assume at least 75% of the qualified applicants will be male. Likewise, if you discount the 90% of new hires who were on work visas then the 6 African Americans indicates 12% of the 50 Americans they hired. Given that African Americans represent about 13% of all Americans that is right in line with what should be expected. Hispanics, at 10% of the Americans they hired, are a little under-represented (they represent 16% of the general population), so there may be a case to be made there, or it may be a case of a distorted applicant pool. You can't tell from the numbers here.

As I keep telling people: you cannot just look at the demographics of a company and assume discrimination. You also have to look at their applicant pool and the qualifications within that pool, especially in the tech sector. We're FINALLY getting more female and minority CS grads, but it's going to take a long time before there are enough of them for our field to match the demographics of the general population.

Put another way: something like 90% of elementary school teachers are women, but no one in their right mind would accuse elementary schools of discriminating against men based on that number because we all know that there simply aren't many men who choose to go into elementary education. Same deal with the tech sector and women.

Now as for the pay issue....yeah, no excuse there. That's flat out discrimination, but Oracle IS alone there, at least from what I've seen. Granted I'm nowhere near Silicon Valley, but still, I've been in this field for 15 years and have never seen that sort of thing in any firm I've dealt with. And the absurd number of immigrant visas? That's major abuse of that program, enough to cancel their government contracts all on its own in my opinion. I don't believe it's ever right to turn away local applicants in favor of giving someone a work visa. Those should be reserved for when you can't get locals to do the job at market value.

US midterms barely over when Russians came knocking on our servers (again), Democrats claim

Re: It's what spies do?

Since the NSA is technically banned from operating outside the US (not that I believe for a moment that stops them) I think what you mean is the Russian equivalent of the CIA.

Re: Always blaming Russia

Eh, considering that it's the DNC being targeted state actors are actually more likely than teenage kids. You can also usually tell the difference between a state actor in a PFY pretty easily. Attacks by state actors tend to be more sophisticated and actually threaten to get in. Attacks by PFYs usually don't make it past the firewall - assuming it's competently configure of course - or do so in such a noisy manner that they announce their presence at every step along the way. If the attack was competent and successful it was probably a state actor.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Users NEVER read on screen messages

Even today it's been my experience that users are incapable of reading the messages in the screen. I could retire today if I had a dollar for every time I've gotten a tech support call that could have been easily solved if the user had simply read the error message and followed the instructions it gave them.

For instance, we've got a system to track a certain subset of student goals. To load a particular student's data you have to have their student ID and be on the permissions list for that record. If you try to load a student who's not yet in the system you get an error message that says "This student is not yet in the system. You may create a record for them by entering their data manually and clicking save.' You would not believe how many calls I get from teachers trying to load data for students who aren't in the system.

What a cheep shot: Bird sorry after legal eagles fire DMCA takedown at scooter unlock blog

Re: I doubt they'll be that cheap

Seriously, if you want these at anything like a reasonable price, go to a municipal auction. Bring cash, and decide ahead of time how much you're willing to pay. Be willing to walk away if the units are in poor shape.

That would be good advice if there was even the slightest chance of one of these showing up at a municipal auction anywhere in a several hundred mile radius from me. Unfortunately, I live in the boonies.

Also, I believe the article mentioned that they're $400 new. Though admittedly Bird is probably getting them for significantly less than that.

Re: I doubt they'll be that cheap

I dunno. I just found one on EBay for $150. I don't think I'm gonna buy it though. I just looked it up out of curiosity.

Then again, my daily commute is only about 3 miles each way, so it might actually be worth my while to pick one of these up and save on gas.

I find it hard to believe that any lawyer with experience in copyright litigation, especially any copyrights involving IT, wouldn't recognize Cory Doctorow's name and know to be damn sure they've got their ducks in a row before picking that fight. Based on that I think Bird is kinda skimping on legal services.

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Re: Genius at work...

My thought on the matter is that he clearly expected the QR code to get scanned at some point during the shipping process. Which was a silly expectation in my opinion, but still more reasonable than expecting the QR code to survive the bomb.

Re: Amateurs!!

Just get the pro cyber security CSI expert to code a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP.

If the dude was able to come up with a QR-code for an extortion letter, he/she is most likely IT literate

Not necessarily. QR codes are pretty well known. I mean the things are everywhere and a quick google search will tell an interested party how to make one without them even having to understand the underlying concept. But someone with no knowledge of networking technologies would be unlikely to have come across the term "MAC address".

Mind you, if they didn't know what a MAC address was before then they do now and are no doubt either spoofing a new one - an easy task to figure out once you know that it's possible - or shopping for a new phone.

Google Play Store spews malware onto 9 million 'Droids

Re: Google ratings

The process is quite simple to understand. They take an average of all reviews and assign that as the rating. The problem with that approach is that 5-star reviews by the thousand are available for purchase from unscrupulous sorts with access to botnets and distort the ratings significantly.

High proportion of negative reviews

Um....that thing has an overall 4 star rating. What criteria are you using to define "high proportion of negative reviews"? I mean, yeah, it's got a lot of 1-star reviews, but not enough to drag the rating down significantly. Granted that's because of 100k almost-certainly-bot-generated 5-star reviews, but still most people are just going to look at the overall rating, not the individual reviews.

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

I think I'm with the smut vendors on this one. When I was a teen back in the 90s I more or less laughed at most digital methods of verifying my age that I came across. Today I think it'd be even easier to get around them since all the age verification schemes I've seen recently can be circumvented with a Visa gift card that anyone can pick up in a market regardless of their age. I would be extremely surprised if the law they're pushing accomplished what they want it to accomplish.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: World's largest purveyor of bloatware

That's how you get DLL Hell.

It may just be me, but I'd much rather track down the occasional missing DLL than give up 10GB of storage to DLLs I'm never going to use. Then again I don't use Windows except at work where I'm not given an option.

Pre-assigning space for updates is sensible enough, but 7GB? Just how big are Windows updates these days?? That's more space then my entire system minus /home takes up (the less said about the multiple-terabyte mess that normally gets typed as ~ on my system the better).

Jeep hacking lawsuit shifts into gear for trial after US Supremes refuse to hit the brakes

I asked this before and I'm going to ask it again. WTF is the entertainment system able to talk to the engine management system at all? To my mind that one is right up there with housing your PDC and your public website on the same server on the list of bad ideas.

Introducing 'Happy Quit', where Chinese smokers are text-spammed into nicotine abstinence

I don't remember nicotine withdrawal even being especially difficult, let alone fatal. Caffeine withdrawal is worse than I remember nicotine withdrawal being. Then again I'm 20 years removed from the experience, so my memories may be somewhat muted.

Cloudflare speaks out amid allegations it safeguards banned terror gangs' websites

Re: Good article

Worse, HuffPo et al decides it doesn't like stuff and tries to pressure third parties into censoring perfectly legal content.

I've long since figured out that HuffPo "journalists" are all the type of SJWs that define hate speech as "anything I don't agree with". I give them the amount of attention that such a status warrants, which is none at all.

Should there be limits on free speech? Absolutely not. If you're limiting it then you can't very well call it "free speech". And let's be perfectly honest here: it is only unpopular speech that needs that protection, so the situations where people mostly want to apply limits are the exact situations where it's so important that we don't. No matter how repulsive the thing being said is as long as it is just speech it should be protected.

Caveat, though. Recruiting terrorists is an action, not speech. As is instructing people to commit violence. That stuff can and should be axed without free speech even coming into it. But having and voicing an unpopular, even repulsive, opinion? That's a slippery slope we'd best just avoid.

Roll a diplomacy check to win the election: Vote tie resolved by a D20

Re: Need to determine your alignment?

Wrong order: tying the bag should be chaotic evil!

Nah. Lawful evil does far, far more damage than chaotic evil. It takes organization skills to do real damage.

Re: Need to determine your alignment?

Chaotic neutral. The alignment of total insanity.....yep, they nailed me.

Re: Before you laugh too loud

The publishers claim to have sold over 900 million copies.

They probably have. You'd have been hard pressed to find a D&D player in the late 80s or early 90s who hadn't laid hands on a copy of Dark Dungeons, either because they thought it was funny or because concerned - and gullible - parents forced them to read it. Me, I was in the latter camp.

Re: Director of ...

It could be worse. At least in California it won't freeze over and be dam dice.

Re: It came in a box?

The original D&D is simpler to learn and play than AD&D, I like RPGs but was never a deep fan, for casual playing IMHO D&D was back then a simpler choice. I stopped to follow its evolution in the late 1990s. when a group I was playing with disbanded.

Oh come on. Who didn't love calculating THAC0? Other than everyone I mean?

Re: Statistically speaking

a fellow game remarked when 3.5 was released that the only new version he would buy would have to be on holodeck

I completely agree with that. AD&D 2nd Edition (where I started with the hobby) was the current edition for 20 years under TSR. And then we had 4 new editions (counting 3.5 as seperate) in 15 years. And the books have gotten more expensive - even after adjusting for inflation - every time. Me, I'm done spending hundreds of dollars on books every few years just because $currentTrademarkOwner decided to make a buck.

Sadly the group I'm playing with these days is mostly twenty-somethings who never had the pleasure of using a single PHB until it fell apart. The old group all either moved away or married spouses who don't approve of the hobby (no, I don't know why not) after college so there are only a couple of us left.

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

Re: Curious precedent on what is allowed

So the fact that the USA is the only industrialised country to REDUCE CO2 emissions must please you?

You wouldn't happen to have a source for that would you? That'd be a study I'd be interested in reading.

Re: Curious precedent on what is allowed

To be fair I don't think you'd find many people willing to defend the particular leader he was mocking, especially in hindsight.

Re: Curious precedent on what is allowed

Socialism and Communism have proven themselves to be brutal, dystopian, totalitarian systems of government. Dont tell me. They weren't "real socialism" or "real communism".

Communism, yes. Socialism, no. They are not the same thing, and many socialist nations function quite well. In fact all of the top 10 happiest nations on Earth according to the 2018 World Happiness Report are socialist democracies. So no, socialism is not brutal, dystopian, or totalitarian.

Re: Very disrespectful

I'm no fan of Trump, but IGnatius is right. There's lack of respect (and make no mistake, I have no respect for Trump) and there there's juvenile disrespect. This, though funny, is an example of the latter and in my opinion has no place in any dignified publication. Scientific papers should be above this sort of nonsense.

Also, just because Republicans were turds to Obama does not make it cool for Democrats to be turds to Trump. No matter how much of a turd Trump himself may be.

Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is

Re: £Half a million for 20 months, great hourly rate?

I would imagine he was required to pay back what they knew about. Or, at the very least, it was confiscated. Then again, the question here is "how much does he have stashed away somewhere that they don't know about"

It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you hackers are targeting 'nuclear, defense, energy, financial' biz

I wonder if this has anything to do with the massive uptick we've seen in infected Word docs and PDFs trying to come in over the last month. So massive, in fact, that we started quarantining all Word docs and PDFs coming in from outside our domain as dealing with the ones that needed to be released was taking less effort than dealing with the ones that somehow slipped past all our filters. I've been working under the assumption that we were being targeted (though I couldn't figure out why anyone would make that sort of effort to break into a school district's systems), but if there's been a major campaign going on maybe not.

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

Re: Black Mirror

My wife and I watched the first episode of Black Mirror and found it pompous, overblown, self-indulgent, and generally annoying.

Some episodes are better than others, and each episode feels (to me anyway) more like a self-contained movie than an episode of a series. I'd personally recommend watching another episode or two before you write it off completely.

In any case, for most middle-class industrialized-democracy citizens the present cultural moment is much more akin to Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four

Absolutely. What's truly terrifying is how few people realize that. Though I will point out that more and more political rallies - in all camps - seem to bear a resemblance to 2 minutes of hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell hated it when people wrote the title in numerals. He felt that emphasized what was a completely arbitrary date, rather than the themes he felt were important.

I vaguely remember seeing him quoted as saying his only regret about the book was the title and that he felt he'd gotten the rest of it basically right.

with few exceptions, I would recommend "testing it under Wine, first" before purchasing a Win-10-nic machine/license JUST to run "that application".

If you're paying full price absolutely. But if you can get a Win10 license for < $10 (which you can if you watch allkeyshop and similar sites and are either patient or lucky, though I think they're only just barely legal) then it becomes worth it. Beside that there are certain games that don't work on Wine anywhere near as well as on Windows or at all. And I've been told that in the case of certain games your game license gets revoked if you try to run it on Wine (though I've not played any of those games).

Re: In what is likely to be more cock-up than conspiracy,

why do Microsoft get the luxury of innocent until proven guilty

Because conspiracy requires competence and Microsoft has none. That said, cock-up or conspiracy you can bet your arse that they're going to be selling all the data they've collected whether they had permission and collected it on purpose or not.

Or, y'know, using applications that simply don't appear on Linux.

That's why I tell hardcore gamers not to bother with Linux at all and college students to be cautious about it despite it being my OS of choice. What you're using a computer for should be a consideration in choosing an OS. Sometimes Linux just isn't the best choice. Most of the time for me though Windows is such a poor choice what with its privacy concerns and generally inferior overall performance - extremely inferior in my experience - that it's not even worth considering (the rare exception to that mostly being when I'm eyeing a particular game).

I have found one sure-fire way to keep Windows 10 from collecting data. First, go into the device manager and find your network card. Second, disable it and uninstall the driver.

It works perfectly for preventing privacy breaches by Windows, though it also slightly hampers the performance of applications which require network access.

Small American town rejects Comcast – while ISP reps take issue with your El Reg vultures

We've got Congressmen (mine is one of them, and this is a very rural state) who would make what Charlemont did illegal on the grounds that "local governments shouldn't be competing with businesses".

For my opinion on the matter, I'll just state that I have not only voted against him repeatedly for the last 20 years, but I'm firmly convinced that the fact that he keeps getting re-elected is proof that no one around here actually pays attention to what he's doing. It's not just this issue. The man consistently works against the best interests of his constituents in favor of aiding big businesses from other states.

Taylor's gonna spy, spy, spy, spy, spy... fans can't shake cam off, shake cam off

IF it merely processes the data and then discards it, and IF it's actually able to pick out known stalkers I wouldn't see a problem with it. At that point it's not so much different from a security guard watching a camera feed. However I highly doubt that it discards the data - more likely it gets sold - and I'm even more doubtful that it could reliably identify a known stalker. So....yeah.

Also, I've got a terrible song stuck in my head now and I'm laying the blame on the Reg Vultures.

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Re: The saga of a class, Pascal, network, and a Novell server...

When I was in college in the early 1990's....I was learning Pascal

Was Pascal around longer than I thought or was your college just a little behind the times? I know it was effectively dead by the time I was in college later that decade.

Re: BBC Micros at college

My alternative was less hi-tech. At Uni (sorry guys) I wrote a simple program that looked exactly like the login system (custom screen, easy to mimic and logged out the current user, me, after recording login details) and ran around a computer room or two, logged in as myself, ran this application and merrily harvested the login details of countless students and staff.

There was a guy who did that on our EduQuest system (I don't know what OS they ran - I didn't go to school here and the things were on their way out when I started working here) at the high school here. He ended up working for the school district technology department. In fact, for a couple years we had everyone over the age of 20 who had been caught hacking our network when they were in high school working for us.

Sadly those days are past. We catch far too many kids attempting to hack the network these days to hire them all down the road.

Ah yes. And for bonus credits and a guaranteed 'A' grade*, selected students get to manufacture Dioxygen Diflouride.

You're gonna have your troublemakers manufacture FOOF? Hey, let me know when that lab is scheduled so that I know to be out of town that day.

When I was in high school the Windows 95 machines in the computer lab could be accessed by clicking Cancel on the login screen. Which I did, frequently, because I was lazy and it was quicker than typing my credentials. I never did any mischief like that but I did confirm that I had full access to the net command and could remote shutdown machines (when I tried it I targeted a machine that wasn't being used at the time).

You do know that students tend to be complete dicks, right?

I dunno about college students, but high school and younger groups definitely have a high dick-to-decent-human-being ratio. Thankfully most of them outgrow it eventually.

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

Re: Sssshhhhhhh!

Beer? It's December. Get into the Christmas spirit man!

Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Re: "Woah there Simon! don't give away all of the helldesk secrets!"

I could believe that helpdesks do all of these things, but the BOFH telling his boss about it? Immersion destroyed, sorry.

I would agree with you but for one thing: it's long been established that Simon cannot be terminated for any reason due to an ironclad contract. If I remember correctly Stephen does not have such an ironclad contract, but does have plenty of blackmail material to insure his continued employment. And, of course, his cache of blackmail material pales in comparison to Simon's, so Simon is doubly protected.

Really now, do you think either of them would still have jobs at this point otherwise?

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Given that Le Grande K has slowly deteriorated over time, it might be more accurate to say that the kilogram will always be the same from now on.