Posts by Don Jefe 5109 posts • joined 30 Nov 2011
Exploitation is a function of perceived benefit.
If the video was of a spider manipulating an organic cornea or performing open heart surgery on a premature infant it would be hailed as a civilization changing, if weird, development.
Everybody would be pontificating on the potential of lady bugs for melanoma treatment and stag beetles for tubal ligation. But it’s yanking a thru-hole component from a breadboard and people can’t see beyond that.
Facebook is an echo chamber for this kind of thing, but they’re not the only player. Sites like infowars and other extremist breeding grounds engage with much more action oriented groups.
The original “call to arms” is still posted on the Alex Jones hate porn site and the comments are telling. Some saying that if the police attempt to impede the militants then they will have sided with the “terrorists” and must be treated appropriately (presumably shot by armed children).
Facebook does have a role to play, but as long as there’s a rabid racist in the White House actively demonizing protestors, while simultaneously approving of white nationalist retaliation, it’s (unfortunately) unfair to hang everything on Facebook.
Peter’s Palantir is eating $1B/annual these days. You can’t expect that sort of private sector performance if you start killing the programs that feed it.
Our government has completely abandoned the idea of growth through excellence and is nothing but the pivot man in the biggest circle jerk in history.
It’s embarrassing.
Sonos speakers are lifestyle toys. If they get bricked, or effectively bricked, over time it’s unfortunate, but that’s all. But this kind of bullshit is coming to your durable goods like home appliances as well as safety products like environmental sensors (smoke detectors et al.) and doorbells, automobiles and, eventually your pets (probably). We’re a decade out from the kind of extortion that just isn’t fun or safe.
I don’t like looking to legislation for help or protection, but this kind of thing isn’t something market pressures alone can mitigate. Regulation is going to be a slippery slope, but it can slow down the march of these kinds of assholes and it’s much better than nothing.
Kumquats to donuts, stoats to pangolins, cow burgers to Incredible burgers, Spendor to Sonos, etc...
You can’t really compare actual audio products that use the clever application of physics through engineering to manipulate a physical medium to Sonos products that are (in)effectively faking physics via software.
Not to defend Boeing in any way, but they’ve got over 10,000 planes in the air and almost 6,000 more on order. Then they’ve got a telecoms empire, missiles, all kinds of weird microwave products as well as radar, IR and a corner on foundational remote sensing tech. They’ve also got a substantial financial operation, leasing services as well as third party support services for everything imaginable. Key to their ongoing success is their contract services for their products. Wall Street loves a company with over a decade of guaranteed future revenue...
The point is they are a very large company with interests in many areas. It takes a lot more than what they’re going through to bring down something that big.
Unfortunately a lot of their work now looks more like the Federal lobbying agency for the aerospace industry than the agency for the science and engineering of space exploration. Political appointees are awarded administrative positions and they spend their tenure trying to balance Federal policy with the strategic goals of industry players and pork barrel demands of Congress members.
Boeing & Friends created a situation where they are driving not only mission selection, but also the technical aspects of those projects and the metrics of success. The biggest impediment to returning NASA’s rocket program to excellence is its role as a political reward. Currently it’s what you give someone when you’re out of military, State Department and agriculture presents to hand out. It’s treated like a toy and it sucks.
What they’re saying is that previous versions will not perform as well as the latest versions with the newest technology.
It’s sales speak designed around some low key FUD. It has nothing to do with the performance of an older version compared to the performance the same older version but the way it’s worded is supposed to make you think an older version is intrinsically bad.
Audio equipment lasts for a very, very long time. Assuming non-abusive use degradation over time is not a factor for years, often many decades. It’s part of the reason audio companies charge so much and have such a hard time staying in business even if they have good products.
Lewis “Plutonium” Page was rabidly rhetorical in his support of a hotter planet with a more corrosive, slightly glowing, atmosphere. It was embarrassing enough to keep some people from coming around here, but he was just loud and liked managing comments to suit himself. It wasn’t really El Reg, or the peanut gallery though, just the one guy who let his own authority override his editorial sense.
I’ve been around here for a long time and the climate debate actually gets a pretty fair shakeout here. Something that’s exceedingly rare on either side of the arguments. I’m living proof that you can say grossly unpopular things here and still sway the masses if you’ve got a good argument.
The preferential treatment Boeing receives is no coincidence. Jim Bridenstine, the NASA Administrator, is a presidential appointee whose aerospace expertise is as a Congressman where he pushed a space policy that feeds Boeing & Friends billions. He pushed for greatly changing the way the government approaches civil and defense activities in space (Space Farce for example).
Lockheed-Martin rewarded him for his work in Congress with his NASA appointment and now he’s working on his next paycheck as consultant with Boeing (although I think Lockheed may up their bid if Bridenstine manages the Boeing debacle well).
My point is, SpaceX isn’t playing at that level and they’re never going to get a fair shake until they do. The whole thing is disgraceful.
We’re not getting the whole truth, I think that’s fairly clear. My vast experience in the field of obfuscating a paucity of excellence says that a defense related system is the actual culprit, but we’ll never hear the actual details. This thing wasn’t landing at White Sands to celebrate the new National Park there.
“Demand is high” is a meaningless marketing statement. The fact is every major element of the modern phone production line is geared to unibody devices.
From a manufacturing standpoint a flip phone is effectively two devices. They have to dedicate a line to produce half of a single device when the same line could be turning out complete devices instead.
That’s an expensive prospect and that can be seen in the high price.
I've actually thought about your notion of some sort of gradient/curve for copyright for the last day or so (something similar never crossed my mind before). I actually like the overall idea. In fact, I like it a lot.
Without getting into the muddy trenches, the big concern I see is that in the binary 'copyright/non-copyright' system we currently have the abuses are just overtly obscene. I'm a huge fan of semantic debate and argument, but the fools currently mucking up copyright for everyone have been able to do so when there are only two possible outcomes to any argument.
If it wasn't so detrimental to the general consumer it would be hilarious, but it really is shit. My concern is that debates rage for years over a single point, a curve introduces a lot of new points that gum up the works even more. The idea is certainly interesting though!
For individuals, including creative professionals and very small companies, there is zero real advantage in filing for copyright for their individual works. It's a different thing for brands and products where you want to be sure nobody else in your space has a brand or product that could be confused with yours. In those cases official registration of copyright is a great convenience as it serves as a centralized clearinghouse of sorts that helps protect you against allegations of infringement. Take my word for it, having some hillbilly come out of left field and sue you for 'stealing his products name' sucks.
Beyond that however, you quickly get into math where the costs of protecting your property exceeds the value of the property. No matter the country, the agencies responsible for granting and organizing copyright are not active participants in protecting that copyright. It's 100% on you to be on the lookout for those infringing and to pursue legal action against them.
As you might imagine, that's an outrageously expensive prospect that grows continuously more expensive as time passes. It's kind of like hiring Congolese mercenaries to guard your strawberry patch. It's extreme overkill that requires enormous resources to maintain. That's why copyright is automatically given to the original creator. It's there if you need it, but not only will most creatives never have a need to enforce their rights, by the time it's all said and done any such enforcement is likely to result in a break even situation (or even a losing situation).
How does the length of time involved in a given action determine the value of the end result of the action? If something takes a long time that could just as easily be caused by stupid as it could be by Goldbergian tactics. If we apply your logic to other things then one could argue that Human babies resulting from premature ejaculation don't count as people and can therefore be owned like any other property but a baby resulting from 500ml of bourbon and hours of a couple going at it hard enough to lose weight is 'more Human' and can't qualify as property.
I think you might be surprised at how much bone moves. Particularly when it's broken. When I was being fitted for my aftermarket ankle assembly (the OEM assembly had been crushed in spectacular fashion) there were eight or nine imaging sessions of the damaged parts in the weeks leading up to the surgery and two sessions each day of the day of the surgery.
It's a little known fact, but except for bones at your extremities, most bones in your body are connected to other bones. It's also quite common for muscles to be attached to those bones (people in movies diagnosing broken bones by the fact they can move that body part is dumber than too many bullets in a gun) . If you're dealing with a severe break with splintering and lots of little bits have simply been crushed to powder then movements in seemingly unrelated parts of your body can move all sorts of stuff around. So much so that even with completely custom made replacements and no budget ceiling the manufacturer still had a guy in the OR with a rolling cabinet full of various doodads specifically to deal with movement in the bones.
Granted, my incident was severe, but, as a rule, you really want doctors working on bones that aren't severely damaged to know what the fuck the bones look like without a 3D model. Bone structure is pretty basic stuff. If the design guys at Herman Miller know more about your bones than the doctor who wants to cut you open then I suggest a different doctor.
If it's a truly serious issue then the number of variables is high and subject to change until everything is completed. If it's a simple issue then they shouldn't need the model to begin with. Either way, I can't see this as practical or useful, at all unless the hospital you're at is just plucking random people off the street to perform surgery on you.
OK, this is fine and dandy and all, but isn't it kind of like printing the code from a beta version of a piece of software? Sure, it'll give you a general idea of what's going on, but five days inside the Human body is a looooong time and anything you see on the model will not be as accurate as a pre-op CT/MRI that reflects the present.
Printing an out of date model when every major healthcare system on Earth is still struggling with digital records seems like things going backward.
Too expensive to integrate with their HR system, probably. But I can guaranfuckingtee it is integrated with their security clearance system. It's entirely possible that not booting him out was simply to save the Once and Future Ruler the indignities of another colon level security screening.
To me that sounds highly plausible as I can't imagine any Once and Future staff wanting to catch hell for putting his Once and Future boss through the screening process because of nothing more significant than a contractual oversight. It would not be a fun place for an admin to be. Sure, they wouldn't be fired for annoying the New Old Boss, but they could sure as shit be reassigned to act as on-site liaison/exchange in some hellhole like Texas (or somewhere equally awful). Senior
Management never plays by the rules anyway, and as the guy responsible for breaking rules and being ultra-secretive about it I would expect 'by the book' compliance to be even less prevalent. Seriously, who do you report that kind of thing to? Those five days would seem like a super compressed 1hr 33mins and your sphincter would likely never fully recover from the strain.
No, you completely miss the point. Raping people is an entirely different thing and even making the comparison is outrageously childish as well as indicative of the fact you aren't ready for commenting on the issue.
In a professional capacity ones will, as projected in their confidence and demeanor, is the only thing you have that might trump anything else in the room. Somebody is always going to have more money, more power, more everything than you, that simply can't be avoided. But will and self respect neutralize all that other stuff, if you actually have will and self respect.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many adults have no idea how the world around them works. They get sidetracked and think it takes money or special connections or fame or other such nonsense to get respect. That's just bullshit coming from people with, at best, no self respect and at worst absolutely no idea of what respect actually is. Which makes a lot of sense. If they knew what respect actual was they would have some for themselves. How can you possibly respect others if you don't know what respect is?
The answer is you can't. There's always a respect fire brigade running around to come claiming to be protecting the respect of others, but the fact of the matter is they're most often seeking their own self respect by pandering to the public. The opinions of others goes right up there with arrogance, boozing and sluttiness as a facade of self respect.
Long before I was anybody there was approximately zero chance of someone not respecting me. They fucking knew better. Even then I didn't have to say anything nor did I have a reputation for violence or confrontation. People know how to behave, even if they are extremely drunk, and they are going to behave in a manner befitting the most willful person involved in the situation. If that person turns out to be the kind of jackass to say inappropriate things and/or get grabby then you really shouldn't expect much.
The trick then, is to be the most willful. You don't even have to deal with the bullshit behavior of others. They're not going to fuck with you. You should be able to walk right into the center of the rudest, most disrespectful group of people you can find and have them instantly treating you as you deserve without saying a fucking word. If they don't do that then you're going to need a mirror to see the problem.
Christ, take my wife for example. Outside of her field the only people who know her know her as my wife, not who she is. People who have no idea who she is still give her tremendous respect. She's super tiny, extremely bashful and has such a small voice that she's hard to hear in the car, and she doesn't get harassed. If she does choose to speak people automatically stop talking. Nobody would even carry on a conversation of which the subject matter might embarrass her, even if they are complete strangers. Why do you think that is? Why would strangers alter their behavior just because she shows up? If you need a hint, it sure as fuck isn't because she's threatening.
If you don't understand all this then I feel sorry for you. You'll obviously have lost so many opportunities simply because you've got no presence. That's sad.
The problem with the issues covered in articles like this is that they always come from someone who has already been run over. Yes, there are some real asses out there, but bitching about that is like bitching about the position of Sol relative to Uranus: Completely pointless.
If you're not getting the respect you believe you deserve then that needs to be dealt with internally, inside your head, using whatever mechanisms you use to define yourself. The question that needs answering is how people knew they could run over you. You get that answered and the rest sorts itself out automatically.
If you don't think you're broadcasting weakness, but you're still getting run over, then your concept of strength is faulty. That's got fuck all to do with ones reproductive system, that fact is the same in all Humans. It's easy to see the poor attempts people make to increase their own valuations of themselves. Guys tend to do it with attitude, booze and flash, womenfolk tend to do it with bitchy attitudes and sluttiness. But those things amount to a person plotting to fool themselves without being noticed by themselves, and if that works then the problem is far, far deeper than self respect issues.
Make no mistake about it, this is 100% an issue of self respect, or lack thereof. Lack of self respect is a tangible thing and people are drawn to it. It's Human nature to assert oneself over the weaker Humans and everybody does it. There are no exceptions. So why are you coming off as the weak person? It sure as fuck isn't any of your lady parts, because at the table right next to you some guy is getting run over because he is being perceived as weak. Women tend to put too much emphasis on the value of their fun bits, and it blinds them to the truth of the matter. That truth being you are presenting yourself as the easiest to dominate.
What's worse, is that a conference/tradeshow in any industry is packed to overflowing with people highly adept at recognizing weakness and pouncing on it. You've got public facing operations people, you've got Salesdroids and marketing types as well as professional management at nearly all levels and their livelihoods depend on knowing how to identify their targets and knowing how to get to them before they've even spoken. Those people aren't trained social anthropologists, those people are natural born predators. They can't help it, but you can stop them. Hell, you'll know you're doing it right because they won't even start. They'll know, innately, to look for easier prey.
I can't give you instructions on how to do it, but commanding respect (not demanding it) is something that comes from inside you. It is just as palatable as weakness and requires no show of strength or display of power (well, maybe a few displays, early on, but word spreads quickly among the weak).
I'll finish with this. You can't, really, control the behavior of others. You can manage it, to some degree, but truly control it? Never. You can control your behavior though, so start there and start by respecting yourself. Which you clearly don't. Plenty of others aren't going to respect you either, and why should they if you don't respect yourself.
That's a general truism, and doubly so as a professional. As a professional one of the easiest was to work people is to identify the weak one and feign respect so as to manipulate them into whatever it is you need them to do. That's not being cynical, that's being still mostly sane after playing this game, successfully, for quite some time. Bullshit self respect tactics always fail, and the fallout is always worse, and more embarrassing, that it has to be. Be you. Be proud of who you are and unwavering in your belief in yourself. That's the only way you're going to get what you want out of your career, and your life in general.
Ending here, promise. You seem to be making the same mistake as so very many others with your idea of what constitutes professional behavior. Here's a hard won nugget for you to stick in your shoes (so as not to forget it). The further you go in your career the more important a robust, and true, level of self respect becomes. That corner office is a bastion of bent ethics and broken moral compasses. You will be absolutely destroyed, to the very core of your soul and being, by the people who work in those offices if you don't believe in yourself absolutely and unwaveringly. It won't be anything personal, but the entirety of getting that corner office and obscene salary is based on your success rate in battles of will disguised as respect with some platitudes on top and the first one to blink loses. I used to take everything from the loser, but I've mellowed. Some won't though, and tits or no tits, they will put your severed head on a pike by the gate as a warning.
Practice with the drunk asshats at the conferences and you'll know you're heading in the right direction when you can yuck it up with the drunken Proles, but nary a single one would even consider uttering an untoward comment, much less lay a hand on you. Wordlessly commanding respect from drunken predators through projection of sheer, indomitable will is a good entry level test for those who have lofty professional goals. Junior Executives and Clients come after that. It's a long road ahead of you, you don't believe in yourself, but you should, even though it will be difficult. Work on it and get back to us after the VMware event a year from now.
Why is that a problem? If you wait for design to be 100% before you start production you're losing years of time on the market. Manufacturing at scale does not support the notion of perfection. You go with what you've got and pump it out fast enough that you can cover any negative repercussions of initial problems.
The days of robust pre-release R&D for consumer goods are gone forever. Industrial and scientific goods still have quite a bit of the traditional design process happening, but not stuff for consumers. There are upsides and downsides to that approach, but it most certainly makes things cost less. A lot less really. Plus there's much less chance of a single product killing off your entire operation if it sucks or the market shifts (see RIM/Blackberry).
What people call 'market forces' are much like Democracy. The Proles have about 17.6 million priorities higher on their list than practicality, utility, value, etc... Unfortunately, the larger a market, or a Democracy, the more the voice of reason is drowned out by the mouth breathing sounds of the 'common man'. It also means you get stuck with the decisions of the Proles because it becomes more difficult to change anything in direct proportion to the size of the market (or Democracy). In short, there are too many stupid people. But there's nothing to be done for it.
Less philosophically, every last bit of mobile communications and consumer IT has always been fashion driven, and it always will be. The professional side of those things are fashion driven too, but done from inside dank, windowless offices instead of the sides of bus stops and such. I blame Motorola.
Lastly, there's no such thing in large scale manufacturing that's done by any single entity. The amount of logistics involved in making $.0009 surface mount capacitors alone is mind boggling. There are mines and trucks and ships and satellites and mills and foundries and laws, etc... that come after R&D is done. What I'm getting at, is that when an industry (any industry) starts moving in a given direction, it is extremely hard to change that direction. Once miniaturization became a primary goal there wasn't going to be any changing it for a long, long, long time.
The ideas and inventions people came up with 10 years ago are still in the queue, waiting for their turn in the spotlight. The investments have been made and the people who made those investments aren't going to allow the market to change direction until they recoup their monies. This month we ship out a machine that will be used in mobile phone production. Total timeline from idea to reality has taken a little over four years, has a 15 year life expectancy and the client has paid a little over $40 million for the entire project. The machine performs vibration testing on assembled phones but capacity is 8x over the current equipment (but same footprint), all because 'thinner' was the direction the industry went. There are thousands of similar stories every day, so don't look for 'not thinner' to be a goal at any time soon.
Yes, stuff like this is terrible to watch. Seeing actual people actually get killed always sucks, even if you don't like the person who died. I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the small numbers who watched the entire thing.
I see no point in people watching this sort of thing, but I see no point in criminalizing the viewing and sharing of it either. It is real, it did happen and to attempt to deny that by discouraging its viewing is just fucking stupid. If ignoring something made it not real then the aliens would stop coming into my bedroom at night.
The following doesn't apply to very small companies, but becomes a huge issue once revenue is beyond a few million annually and for all publicly traded companies.
Once you're past that point, how you book expenses becomes more important than the cost of those expenses. Cloudy services go in the same column as utility bills and facility cleaning staff. Because of modern bookkeeping practices those things don't represent capex or other NRE's like licensing that you want to avoid on your books.
Super simplified, monies spent to actually buy something affect financials in a bad way, even when amortized across many years. But a whole bunch of small sums, even if the total is larger that an outright purchase of the same thing, has a very small effect on financials.
Accounting Macumba means that beyond a certain point it becomes cheaper to spend more money if you spend it in the right way. So, for small companies the 'hidden' costs of Cloudy things can be a killer, but for larger companies it's 'cheaper' for them to pay those costs than to buy things to do it in house. Ultimately, this all means that 'hidden' cloud costs will continue to rise, even if the 'simple costs' continue to go down.
On a lighter note, what this also means is that big array vendors are going to have to develop affordable, high performance products that target the small operations the Cloud providers are starting to ignore. Which is good news for small companies, but it also means I'm going to be able to put EMC kit in absolutely everything and not much would make me happier than telling my EMC rep that I'm using their once mighty arrays to record the drying of paint and the effects of gravity on large rocks for no reason other than it is cheap (we spend about $7m annual with EMC right now, so they are on my 'list of vendors who owe me' :).
Some sports stadiums are buildings with no roofs. Sure, in most places a roof would probably be required for a building to be considered a house but, in fairness, the author of the article spun the 'house' angle. The acquisition, and the quote, was about buildings in general, not houses.
Our ancestors were most certainly a more robust people. I'm quite certain my great grandmother (who would be about 3,400 yeasts old next weekend) could have outperformed me in nearly any physical feat, even when I was in my prime. It took all three (then) living generations of the men from my family to get her down and a Babalorixa from Uruguay to get her organs far enough away from each other to prevent resurrection and get the squirrels in her yard to stop screaming. You just don't see that kind of thing so much these days.
'Because air conditioning products are a necessity in all buildings'...
What the fuck? What a stupid thing for someone to say. All buildings require a door/entryway, everything else is optional. Air conditioning is required about as much as the snow making machines on my lawn that let me confuse migratory birds, and passing aircraft, in the summer.
Air conditioning is nice, I guess, but far too many people are just a bunch of pantywaists who sweat if it's above 28C. How is it even possible for people who aren't moving to sweat when it's 28 degrees? Instead of 'smart' HVAC, how about some 'smart people'.
It's not so much that the 'stuff' changes owners, it's more that nothing involved has an owner until the court/administrators work out what belongs to who. That can be an extraordinarily complex mess. Even more so if records are kept in a co-lo facility on rented kit. They'll likely have financials on-site, and that's all the administrators are immediately interested in. Once they find that info they stop spend on everything else and that includes off site services and the information held there. If the administrators can find information regarding proper ownership they'll return the property, eventually...
Regarding the other comment above, Samsung can't be held responsible for the failings of another business. That business fought hard to win the Samsung contract. It's not like like there were any surprises, they knew exactly what they were getting into. They underbid competitors but didn't leave enough money for themselves. That's just bad business.
It'll be interesting to see if Samsung can retrieve the customers products, at least any time soon. I have shut down more than a few companies, and I've never seen 3rd parties have much success in retrieving other people's property from within the closed company in a reasonable amount of time. Take all a big mess and the only people who might be able to sort it have usually been fired.
It sucks, sure, but one really can't fault Samsung too much in this. It's a terrifically horrible idea to tell people you're about to close up shop. The mess is always bigger than just shutting it down as a surprise. If you announce a closing all you've done is create a race where the first large creditor to call their debt gets everything and nobody else gets shit. The only way to prevent that is through surprise so you can use legal means sort it put as best as you can.
It's all very unfortunate, but the legal system in the EU and the US is most certainly structured such that being wildly irresponsible is the most responsible thing to do.
That has been official policy since the 1960's (in most States), but that hasn't stopped untold numbers of law enforcement personnel from 'leaking' information. In this case, the police are choosing to bestow special treatment on another officer. That in itself is a major failing in law enforcement in general and only compounded by the paramilitary mentality mindset, actions and mindset of modern law enforcement.
If the police 'leak' details of an accused celebrity/famous person and that person gets lynched 'too bad, but cops are underpaid and that $250 from the reporter really helped out buying school supplies'. Fuck that. The police should treat themselves the same as they treat others. This is nothing but police rallying together so they can shoot somebody too. Fuck 'em. If they're judged responsible enough to carry a gun then they should be held accountable for what they do with that gun and held accountable in the public eye, like they so love to do to the people they arrest.
The original AC is correct, the case absolutely must go through the system in accordance with the law. Any debate about vigilante justice cannot even begin until the case has been heard and ruled on by the court. After, but only after, the court has dealt with the case those who might be inclined to administer their view of Justice, as they see it, can make those decisions then. But to do so prior to the hearing is wrong on every single level of society. No different than shooting an unarmed man trying to surrender. It is wrong and cannot in any way be justified.
That being said, as far as I'm concerned the public has every right to know the name of the shooter. In fact, I can't think of a single better example of 'in the public interest' than knowing which of the public protectors is going around shooting people. If (celebrity) shot someone the police sure as fuck wouldn't be doing anything to keep the shooters identity secret. The police are simply being lazy twats and not wanting to do their job. A job which would include protecting people who might be endangered by others.
Enhanced 911 is deployed in a county-by-county basis in most States here in the US. Many places use an Enhanced 911 capable system, but use none of the enhanced features. My office and big house are in a part of Virginia where all the bells and whistles of Enhanced 911 are used. The county in the State of West Virginia where my actual home is does not use GPS or tower data to locate the position of the calling the device, nor does the county in Tennessee where I have my bunker.
It's all a big mess. It's best by far to know where you are and assume the 911 center (which is private in most places and staffed by zero police officers) won't have any idea where you're calling from.
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