Posts by Doctor Evil 256 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2013
There may be a legitimate use for such a device -- but there are so many opportunities for abuse that such use should probably be tightly controlled/monitored. I just hope (a) that the homeowner carries the principal liability for the harms done and (b) that the actual product manufacturer is also being sued in addition to Amazon. And I hope that nobody involved gets off at all. This is scurrilous!
It looks like OpenAI spoke too soon: after Altman was fired, Brockman announced he too would be leaving the business. He was president as well as chairman of the board.
"After learning today's news, this is the message I sent to the OpenAI team," he said on social media.
"I'm super proud of what we've all built together [...]
But based on today's news, I quit."
Ballsy move!
I pointed out that she was clicking on the screenshot she'd taken earlier and the actual button was behind it. Ticket resolved.
Fair enough -- but I'll be the first to admit that I've caught myself clicking on some application's "close window" X in the upper-right corner ... only to realize belatedly that it was on the screenshot I'd taken and forwarded earlier. Face palm!
Well, sure, but a lead-acid battery weighs about 17 kg (thank you, Google!), so in a car weighing around 1500 kg, we're talking about 1.1% of the total weight -- so say you save half of that or 0.5% ... I'm not sure you'd ever notice it.
Now in an industrial lift-truck (forklift) where the lead-acid batteries weight something like 1500 kg, this will be more significant -- but then, in that application you generally want the battery to weigh more because it's also the ballast for the truck.
So perhaps stationary applications are best for this technology?
Holy carp!
I've finally gotten around to reading Cory Doctorow's excellent "Radicalized", a collection of 4 science fiction novellas, and the eponymous tale describes exactly this scenario!
Of course, in the book, victims are "radicalized", taking matters into their own hands rather than banding together to launch a class action suit -- but still! Prescient!
(And highly recommended.)
"I sort of hope I never live to see flying cars."
"The war will not be over until Russia is willing to admit defeat. Not that it ever will actually 'admit defeat', but it needs to get its collective head and spirit into a space where it can admit that as a possibility."
May I suggest ... up its own anus, where it is dark enough to allow for a thorough self-examination.
I think anyone who's ever done any length stint in IT probably needs a pint or several to again repress all the memories of the myriad of tortured use cases Excel has been forced to serve.
Compositional petroleum reservoir simulation (using several linked spreadsheets plus custom add-ins). Yikes!
Hats off to the steely-eyed rocket men who considered the possibility that this might be a useful capability. In case, you know, somebody were to screw up and send Voyager an incorrect antenna-aiming command sequence. Which, of course, would never happen ...
"Installing Linux in essentially a life saver and prevents e-waste."
This, in spades!
I have an ancient (probably 15 year-old) Acer laptop which happens to have been equipped with a 64-bit dual-core processor. I ran XP on it until that was no longer even remotely feasible. Then I installed Mint, have gone through 2 version upgrades since, and it's still going strong today. Even with the HDD and relatively limited (4 GB) RAM, its performance is quite acceptable as a second machine for playing around on. My antediluvian HP printers (a laser and an inkjet) are supported just as well as my modern router. As someone else pointed out below: yes, it does take a long time to boot from cold -- but waking it up from sleep to ready is almost as fast as my year-old Acer Predator running under W10. Amazing!
And the version name: Vict-o-o-o-ria! Vict-o-o-o-ria! Victoria, Victoria!
"Space exploration, for example, has always understood that in order to make progress there will inevitably be some loss of life. Despite this, space exploration has by and large been subject to the most rigorous processes for minimizing risk. Also all those risking their lives have been seasoned professionals who fully understood the risks."
Well, maybe? I wonder how much Christa McAuliffe understood of the real risks to the craft she was riding to space? Not that school teachers aren't as bright as anyone else, but they're not (usually) engineers either.
"Were those the "best available options"?"
No, of course not. They had some of the best available options (female mathematicians of colour) in the back room, doing the calculations that allowed those missions to succeed.
It's a crying shame that NASA didn't see fit to train one or two of them up and send them aloft (nothing would focus the mind more on getting the numbers right than also getting to ride along), but those were the times that were.
So, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols, you think Microsoft have changed their spots, do you? Tell me, what's this all about, then?
Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/21/microsoft_office_count_update/
No, it's not my dad's Microsoft, because I'm old enough to be your dad and I was writing programs on punch cards before there was a Microsoft.
"But even when I pay with cash, many retailers will ask for a mobile phone number. Well, they don't really ask, while staring at the register they intone "What's your mobile number?" in a demanding tone of voice that assumes compliance. I've noticed that people automatically comply. But when I respond "No", there's usually a bit of comic relief when they hesitate, frown at me, and say it's for their rewards program or something like that. After a brief argument they give up.?"
They want a number? Give them a number ... any old number you can make up on the spot: yours, varied by a single digit, or a completely unrelated string of the appropriate number of digits, or anything in between. There: request satisfied with no need for argument or raised blood pressure. No privacy violation either. And it's not as if they're going to immediately call or text the number to test it. The cashiers are given their script and have to follow it -- but feel free to salt their data. I've done it for years.
For the curious ...
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/initiatives/notam/what_is_a_notam/Pilots_NOTAM_primer_for_2021.pdf
Example (from the reference):
IAP LOS ANGELES INTL, Los Angeles, CA. RNAV (GPS) Y RWY 24L, AMDT 5... LPV DA 628/ HAT 505 ALL CATS, VISIBILITY ALL CATS RVR 6000. LNAV/VNAV DA 632/ HAT 509 ALL CATS. TEMPORARY CRANE 342 MSL 5513FT EAST OF RWY 24L (2016-AWP-6554-OE
"I'm betting a 2000s era IBM mainframe emulating a 1980s IBM mainframe running an IBM mainframe OS from the 60s with an app written in System360 Assembly"
And if you've ever actually read a NOTAM, you would believe this to be true. They look as though they're intended to be distributed via teletype (as they probably once were?), character-limited to minimize the cost of transmission.
My wife came up with that "Notice to Pilots" independently over coffee this morning -- except she suggested that they be called "PIlot NOTification" (or PINOT), with coloured suffixes for the gravity of the situation being notified about: you know, PINOT noir for life-and-death type stuff, PINOT blanc for more nice-to-know information, ...
I mulled it over while having my toast.
Cheers everyone!
(I'll get my own coat, thanks. It's the leather bomber with the aviators in the pocket.)
So, the breach dump file is inaccessible without first registering/logging in. All they want is a username, password (hopefully not re-used, right?), and an email address. And then you can have access to the data.
Except ... I don't know who's behind breached.vc -- so why would I trust them? What a great way to harvest live/active email accounts, possibly with a useful password (for the lazy).
Anyone else want to be the guinea pig here?.
"This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence."
Well, of course it was.
Except, you know, computers do what they're told and rarely make such mistakes of their own volition. So there's someone responsible behind the scenes, and that person should probably be answerable for it, to explain how this happened and specifically what steps are being taken to "prevent a reoccurrence".
Maybe they should just apply the same rules to the crypto sector that already apply to casinos. There's a lot of commonality there:
- it exists outside of the conventional financial system
- it's an out-and-ouit gamble (ok: speculation)
- the house always wins
- organized crime takes a real interest in it
Hmmm.
"We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto," said SEC chairman Gary Gensler in a statement.
You know, those two elements aren't necessarily contradictory and SBF was well-positioned to know that. Not that FTX wasn't a house of cards, but the crypto sector could, in fact, be so unsafe that it would make putting money into a Ponzi scheme look like a hedge.
/s
Counting partial successes only reduces the failure rate to 38.2 percent, indicating that for such small, cheap and off-the-shelf satellites, six-out-of-ten isn't that bad.
Yes, it is. Statistical expert Meatloaf has publicly (and repeatedly) indicated that the line of demarcation is "two out of three ain't bad" so therefore, by inference, a 60% success rate is bad.
How bad? Well, worse than good.
Is it Friday yet?
"I've never had a problem with them but then as an ex-pat I have to talk in "RP" English if I want to be understood. I don't think the researches at Amazon had any idea of the extent of regional accents in the UK.
Anyhow, sounds to me like there's something flaky about your hardware or Linux set-up?
Not impossible, but it's a vanilla-grade relatively ancient Acer laptop which ran under XP just fine for well over a decade until I formatted the disk followed with a clean Mint Cinnamon install (1 version back). The update to v21 this year went smoothly. But it could be my set-up ...
I've run into other issues besides software installs -- mainly occasional system freeze-ups when reviving from sleep. The main cause I ran down and resolved (I thought) but once in a while it still happens. So it could be my hardware ...
Or it could just be Linux. Nah -- it doesn't happen to you, so that can't be.
"Linux is also easy to use. Even now, people claim that Linux is hard to use. That just shows they haven't used Linux in decades. Once upon a time, you had to master shell programs to install programs and get work done. That hasn't been true this century. Just like everything else, today you get Linux software with a click and install front-end."
Erm, no. When the "click and install front-end" fails with a relatively cryptic message about a missing piece and you have to google for what it means and what to do about it and then "sudo apt get" from the command line for the missing piece, you have just crossed a line that the average user will not put up with. And yes -- that still happens today.
Mint Cinnamon v.21 user
I agree with your comments and I upvoted you accordingly -- but the implication of the message "Your browser is being managed by your organization" when you are an individual home user and not expecting this is absolutely "Big Brother"-ly.
So is the follow-on message "Updates disabled by your system administrator" (they're not; the option of changing the setting from "Automatically install" to anything else is). The only other locked settings I've found in the Mint version are the options of making Firefox NOT be the default browser and of checking to see if it IS the default.
However, the messaging to the end-user is suboptimal and I was taken aback initially. The combination of Firefox's hardwired messages and the removal of options by Mint (for arguably benevolent reasons) can leave a perhaps naive user with a poor impression.
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