Posts by veti 4497 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
@Peter2: did you actually read those links at all before posting them? There's nothing in that memo that suggests Clinton's preferences, nothing that even hints at "commanding" the media ("free and independent" or otherwise), and nothing about promoting Trump to the exclusion of everybody else. He's mentioned only as one of three names on a "non-exclusive" list of loonier candidates who could be plied for leverage against the more serious ones.
I mean - I get it, Clinton was a poor candidate with no charisma and a tin ear for politics in general. She was way out of her depth. She made dumb decisions. But this memo doesn't say anything even remotely like what you characterise it as saying.
Nor does it show anything about Clinton, because it says nothing about her views or preferences at all. It's interesting, in an academic sense, as a sliver of insight into the early stages of her campaign - but that's all it is.
The ads themselves may have swayed a vanishingly small rounding error of people.
That's not what they were for. Clearly, the originators spent more on crafting the messages than they did on publishing them. Hundreds upon hundreds of ads, each one only viewed a few dozen times? - that's not a campaign, that's A/B testing. What these ads were for was not to sway voters, but to find out what messages would give the best click/response rates.
That's why the ad spend was so low. The real heavy lifting was done by the trolls on message boards, some on Facebook but many more out here on the real web. They were the bastards who reduced just about every well-trafficked forum on the 'net to a cratered hellhole in the second half of 2016. And they're still here, ready to do it again.
It's not "just' for that, though. That's really the least of Notepad++'s many excellencies. Tabs, character counts, syntax highlighting, decent default font, ability to launch with multiple files already opened - these are things that even the most naive user will discover and appreciate very quickly. That's without even touching on the 'power user' features.
Microsoft has never been shy of adopting new platforms, once they reach some minimum threshold of seriousness. "Embrace and extend" flows inevitably into "extinguish" iff Microsoft's additions make the existing platform significantly more attractive to significantly more people.
If people start switching to Linux purely because they can now use SQL Server on it, it'll be in trouble.
The TRUTH about Mrs. Clinton's crimes is that she's been the target of investigations by some of the fiercest and most motivated prosecutors on earth for a quarter of a century, now, and they still haven't managed to pin a single indictment, let alone conviction, on her. Or her family, her lawyers, her campaign managers...
If you've got the evidence to do better, then go do it. Go do it now. I guarantee you'll make headlines in the "non-Fox media".
It always annoys me when people claim things are JUST OBVIOUSLY SO, and yet they won't take the trivial amount of effort it would require to actually show it. Like - remember when the Weinstein story broke, your friends at Fox were saying "this was an open secret, we've all known it all along" - but they didn't break the story, did they...? If they knew it all along, why didn't they fucking say so earlier, rather than waiting for "the non-Fox media" to do all the hard homework and take the legal risk?
And who's to say when an ad is "political"?
This is the old spam debate over again. Rules have to be applied to everyone, without exemptions - otherwise they're completely pointless. In this case, all you have to do is not check the box for "political content", and you can continue to run whatever the heck you want.
... there's a lot of bollocks talked about passwords.
My bank, and my main email account, are both pretty important to me. On those, I use strong passwords that are not reused from anywhere else. If I thought for one moment that my bank or my email provider was broadcasting my password, however encrypted, to every other internet service in the world, I'd close the accounts faster than you can say "formal complaint". I would deeply resent the idea that my bank had even tried to identify my email username, let alone password, or vice versa.
At the other end of the scale, there's dozens of tinpot little blogs (El Reg, I'm looking at you) that require me to log into something to post on them, and don't allow OAuth because... I dunno, they want to sell password managers or something. On those I see no reason not to reuse passwords, and I'll deeply resent anyone who tries to prevent me from doing so.
So this proposal is calculated to piss me off in two entirely separate ways.
If by "welding glasses" you mean basic goggles, they're probably not protective enough to save you if a laser hits your eye directly.
If you mean like an arc welding visor - then sure, that would solve one problem. You wouldn't be blinded by a laser pointer. However, you also wouldn't be able to see a bloody thing in the cockpit, or much outside it unless the sun happened to be straight in front of you. So, kinda self-defeating.
If you are a non-combatant, which is probably the case since you don't at least have a rifle or a sidearm, then the guy in the assault helicopter is also a war criminal for targeting you.
But he'll be court martialled and tried by his own military.
You - will be treated exactly the same, which is to say, if you survive long enough, you'll also be tried before a tribunal convened by his military.
When you see Randall Munroe post his opinion about the baker case, then you can reasonably try to pick holes in it and, if appropriate, compare with his other stated or implied opinions. Right now all you're doing is arguing against your own imagination of his opinion, which is textbook straw-manning.
I'll turn your question around: can anyone name an instance in which education alone, absent legal support, has resulted in an opinion being abandoned by all?
For 200 years we've been crying "education is the answer!" It doesn't work because we can't agree on what the question was. Education that creates social cohesion and consensus? - that's brainwashing. Education that tries to lead the way to a more advanced, enlightened consensus? That's not only brainwashing, but also divisive and calculated to alienate half the country from the other half.
Thousands of organisations that promote discrimination have tax-exempt status in the US. They're mostly called "churches".
And this is really an example of the pervasive bias that campaigners complain about. You see an injustice and want to correct it, which is fine. But in the process, you overlook a much larger injustice that just happens to be weighted the other way (in favour of the majority).
Did you overlook it because it's weighted the other way? I would guess, you simply didn't think of it because it's not news, hence not part of this story. But whatever your reasons, the net effect is inherent bias in favour of the status quo. This is precisely why proactive steps are sometimes needed to make any headway in the other direction.
You don't need to know.
The same response that's accepted without question when addressed to a man, may be inappropriate when addressed to a woman. The obvious example is if it makes some jokey mention of bodily functions or sex, but there are more subtle differentiators too. When talking face to face, we unconsciously adjust to our audience. Online, we don't have the information to do that.
(Not that we should, of course.)
Then those users would have to come up with some new processes, clearly.
One of Gmail's key selling points is its spam filtering. That's nice and all, but it puts Google in an ambivalent position. They have an active disincentive to fight spam, because every spam message people see is a reminder of how much better they are than the competition in this important area.
Adopting actual standards is no part of their plan. Google didn't get where it is today by doing things the same way as everyone else.
It's the other way round - they store sent emails in the inbox. Or rather, they store all emails in one big folder. When you "change folders', all that really changes is the filter applied to your view.
I don't know if that violates any RFCs, but nobody seems to have noticed until now.
Think back to 2009. Cameron was fighting a flanking action from the usual suspects in the Tory party, and UKIP was on the warpath. Immigration was a big issue. The Home Office was desperate to show it could get immigrant numbers down.
Unfortunately, it didn't really have any legit options to do that. And so, instead, under intense pressure from several sides, May eventually finds a target she has some hope of hitting - by losing their paperwork.
It was as slimy a move as I can remember seeing. But it was what happens when politicians are pressured into making promises they can't keep. Brexit and Windrush are two outcomes of the same crisis.
Because it would be insanely stupid for an academic at a university to do that. These people have pretty good jobs already, don't particularly want a massive payday (they are in academia after all, not known for its inflated salaries) and it would be fairly easy to trace it back to them.
That's the fallacy of homogeneity. This may be true for many academics, maybe even most, but there will always be exceptions. And it only takes one bad actor to compromise millions of accounts.
C.f. Cambridge Analytica, which did exactly this.
If you think it through, there's no reason why the political/brainwashing classes can't work just as well with anonymised data. So long as there's enough of it, they can still aim a campaign at "all people who live in $AREA, visit $SITE more than once per week, and 'Like' stories about cars and immigration." You don't need to know names to do any of that, just numbers.
If it's the political abuse we're worried about (and for the record, I am), then anonymising the data is no help at all.
Whenever there's a lot of people who think that a company has decided against exploiting its digital assets, some of them will take matters into their own hands. Always happens, and usually nothing happens to stop it. That's what "abandonware" is - and by using the word in their own official statement, 343 Industries acknowledges that legally murky fact.
So at the very least, they should have seen it coming. It would be nice if they'd made a statement on the subject earlier.
Actually, there's a good bit of overhyping going on here.
If you're logged in to Google, and you open an incognito window - even while keeping your regular browser session still open - the incognito window isn't logged in to Google, or any other accounts for that matter. So any searches you do in that window - unless you log in again - will not be recorded against your account profile. I know this is true in Chrome and Firefox, it's probably also true in the others.
Of course Google will still know it was you making those searches, but frankly if there's anything you don't want Google knowing about you, you're best off not doing it on a computer at all. But (unlike Facebook), Google don't tell.
It says "Chrome won't save" all those things. It very clearly does not say that anyone else will. And considering who publishes Chrome, I'm pretty sure that's deliberate.
Do you think the naive user understands the role of each party involved in their internet browsing? Seriously, if they realise that their ISP is separate from Google, it'd be more than I expected. As far as they know, if "Chrome", whoever that is, forgets these things, then they're forgotten.
... but headline misses the mark.
Nuclear war won't solve the pension crisis, because the hit to GDP would be greater than the hit to population. Given the distribution of wealth, it may well be that the older population survive in disproportionate numbers.
Even assuming some means can be contrived to keep paying pensions, and even if there isn't a complete breakdown of money and banking, they'd still be worthless because nobody would be making Tetley's and carpet slippers and the Daily Telegraph any more.
So your argument is, "we need better people, these ones are defective"?
If we lived in that world, we wouldn't need laws at all.
As for the "old playground lessons" - I remember those. But I don't remember that people were particularly more virtuous in those days.
The option to spoof the calling number is a feature, not a bug. It's something that, historically, companies have gone out of their way to enable people to do.
The use-case is for - yes, call centres, but also other types of offices, where people make outgoing calls but want the return call routed to somewhere else.
Of course, scumbags quickly came up with another use for it. But that's true of approximately every feature ever added to anything. Scumbags are inventive.
Look, autism is a real thing, and it's not the same as psychopathy. It doesn't help anyone to paint every criminal with the same brush.
True, some people are just plain fucked up and need to be kept away from us all for everyone's safety. But for a lot of them, the only reason they do what they do is that no-one has ever taken the trouble to explain to them why it's bad, or how to determine what is bad. (Because you're expected to know that instinctively, or something. In practice nobody does, but the autistic kid - knows that they don't, and therefore has a compulsion to find the limits by testing them.)
According to the BBC, at least, he's autistic. That's not the same as psychopathic.
I think the sentence is about right in this case. I'm heartily glad he wasn't extradited to face US "justice". The sentence is enough to show the crime is being taken seriously, but not enough to ruin his whole life. Good.
What strikes me is the closeness between proposed sentences. One side wants him to get 94 months, the other 45 months? That's - really not a very wide difference of opinion.
If I were employing the defense team, they should be seeking a writ of "boys will be boys" and arguing for a six month suspended sentence, or whatever it's called in California.
Since Slovenia and Slovakia are both in the EU, it doesn't much matter...
I've never opened a Facebook account, but I assume it asks you what country you're living in (if not your whole street address). And I would also assume that's a lookup table thingy, you can't just type "the Moon" or something. So further looking up who is and isn't in the EU can't be all that hard.
In the old days, you may remember, they used to send someone out into the streets, complete with microphone and camera crew, to interview random passers-by about $NEWS_STORY_THEY_KNOW_NOTHING_ABOUT. It was called "vox pop" interviewing.
Trawling Twitter is the 2018 equivalent, it's a helluva lot cheaper.
2) The reality is that Facebook has photos of him, and are using them for commercial gain. It doesn't matter who gave them to Facebook, in order to use photos of people for commercial gain you need the explicit permission of everyone involved except in very restricted circumstances (e.g., news reporting). Holding the copyright is not enough.
Under what law, exactly?
I'm asking as a (admittedly, long ago) trained journalist who's never heard of this particular law.
Granted, there are risks to using someone's image without their permission, particularly if you insinuate that they endorse some product or message. But I've never heard of a law that says you have to do it every time. If you can cite such a law, you could probably make a strong case for having Facebook firewalled entirely from that jurisdiction.
Example: do you think anyone asked for or got a signature from the two ladies standing in the bus shelter in the right in this photo?
And ten thousand other companies that don't do any of those things will be hit as well. Lots of people think they know a foolproof way to secure a network, but every single one of them is wrong.
That's why I'm delighted to see them talking the language of containment and mitigation, not prevention.
The "right to be forgotten" is based on what someone at Google had for breakfast.
You're thinking of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which is based on duration of sentence. An offense that results in a sentence of more than 4 years is never "spent". But that doesn't necessarily intersect with the "right to be forgotten", which is a whole separate thing.
I agree with the bank's classification.
But changing the rules without notice - even if the former rules were "clearly wrong" - may still be illegal. I'm no lawyer, so nobody's paying me to read the Truth in Lending Act, but to me it seems at least superficially plausible that there may be a case to answer there.
@codejunky: how quickly we forget, the Blair "ID cards" proposal was inherited from the previous Tory government. It was Michael Howard, as home secretary in John Major's cabinet, who first floated it in that form.
The Tories remained so wedded to it that they promptly made that same Mr Howard their leader. It took two terms in opposition for them to see the error of their ways.
... does anyone need a password for a railway system anyway? Why do you need an account with them?
All you need is some way to buy tickets and know about services. Both of these functions are best served by a public portal that operates on the basis of anonymity. There is zero reason for GWR to know anything about its users except what journeys they've bought and what trains they're riding on. Name, sex, age, address, nationality, employment - no, no, no, no, no, no. None of your f***ing business.
This fetish for "knowing your users" is creating bazillions of points of failure in our world that just don't need to exist.
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