Posts by Gerardo McFitzpatrick-O'Toole 34 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2013
> Having the information in the logs doesn't mean it doesn't need to be pointed out to the webmaster.
It *doesn't* [mean that it isn't necessary for a member of the public to send an administrator an email], but it *should* do, seeing as it's the public website of a big company that ought to be able to give the impression that they know what they're doing with software on networked computers, with logging and alerting/reliability engineering and such.
That environmentalism doesn't ultimately care about what happens to the environment - that much has been made clear. It would be more accurate to view it as a modern manifestation of a death-cult, the like of which has been amongst the human race for tens of thousands of years, demanding human blood (metaphorical in this case, but no less deadly in its effect of preventing access for people in the developing world to modern technology) to be sacrificed on a regular basis to appease a higher power, preventing the destruction of the harvest/tribe/planet. It may yet kill us all.
When you invent a functioning cryptocurrency that also folds proteins or searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence, then let us know. There's almost certainly a Nobel Prize waiting for you.
If, on the other hand, you just want other people to do the stuff that you want them to, rather than the stuff that's making them money and changing the future of commerce, then there's nothing to stop you from setting up a global SETI@coin/ProteinFolding@coin network, and buying the resulting coins from miners at a price that the market recognises as justifying the costs and risks of that enterprise. The question is: are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?
Adobe do have features (and patents) in their software that make them the market leaders in some areas, but it's awe-inspring what they have managed to get their customers to agree to over the last few years. It's not that they aren't bastards for doing this, it's just that the sheer arrogance of the Just Works crowd in assuming that they can safely swallow the marketing whole and cede ever more responsibility to the vendor wthout any real protection more than balances this out on the sympathy/pleasure-in-misfortune scale.
It's impressive enough that they have managed to incrementally push DRM that is more and more fail-deadly into products that businesses pay good money for, and which publishing houses grind to a halt without, but their balls in moving to a subscription-only service while also making their core offerings dependent on their own infrastructure (and customers' Internet connections) can only be marvelled at. The next step will be for Adobe to provide products to their customers though leased dumb terminals (perhaps iPads), also including wireless internet connectivity (so that customers can outsource this to them as well), with the only way of extracting files being through this, via Adobe's servers. The logical conclusion of this will be for businesses to avoid having to deal with and hardware, software or Creative Professionals at all and to pay Adobe for (AI-generated) Creative Services directly.
It's ironic that you should try to crowbar-in your Anthropogenic Global Warming sentiments here, because de-industrialising or depopulating the human race (which is what every single "mitigation" proposal that I have seen ultimately amounts to) is only going to render us yet more helpless in identifying and averting potential asteroid extinction-level events.
I live below the domestic poverty line according to the standards used by all of the major charities, but I don't feel impoverished. If you are prepared to forgo meat, and eat mainly bread, butter, milk, bananas, rice and brussel sprouts, tomato purée and chickpeas, which are all fairly inexpensive, it's perfectly possible. A large proportion of the population, especially in the UK and the USA, could do with losing weight, but it seems to be in the interest of these charities to create the impression that hunger (which is itself a highly subjective thing) isn't a normal part of the human experience (even right before breakfast, lunch or dinner), and that we should banish it from our society to right a terrible injustice. If eating three or four conventional "square" meals (delivered in a convenient form) is important to people (like me), they should use this as a motivation to earn (more) money.
Oh but gender is /so/ much more complex and nuanced than the relation between a person* and their reproductive organs - it's a social construct, doncha know. Or that is what those involved in the academic pusuit of Gender Studies would have us believe.
*Please forgive what could be seen as personist language; I wasn't trying to exclude those who self-identify as not being people, or as not having identities, or not existing.
Ah, hang on, no, they aren't. So for a limited number of government customers, Microsoft are talking about allowing them to view selected parts of their source code, and they are then expecting them to take it on faith that it is this same clean code that is compiled, packaged and released. Right...
What an unfortunate juxtaposition.
To me it seems the vast majority of BBC programming aimed at adults has for some time been designed to maximise ratings (and therefore justify revenue) rather than educate, inform or provide access to culture which would otherwise be beyond people's reach (like world-class Opera, in my case). When the BBC does try to educate, it ends up providing entertainment, and when they attempt to provide inform people, it tends to shallow and carry a predictable bias in one of several areas. If I felt that Live TV was something that I needed in my life, and that various forms of IPTV weren't superior in almost every way, then I might, if I had the choice, subscribe to one or two of the BBC's channels, but I find that the vast majority of their output is about as good an investment of my time as watching Eastenders is.
I'll wager that it will be a case of
a) Yes please, I would love you to filter my internets.
b) No thank you, I have a reason to want to access harmful material (and understand that this will be interpreted as a risk factor for me becoming a Sex Offender, and that information of my opt-out will be made publicly available in the community for the purposes of crime prevention, community cohesion, and Child Safety).
Than to see a lawyer publicly state that their client is "not the person known as the Dread Pirate Roberts". The whole idea of taking this plot element from The Princess Bride is inspired. I expect there will be another... and another... and that the Captain's legend will grow at every stage.
When people approach mobile computing as though it's Consumer Electronics (which it never really is, in the right hands), it's no wonder that they're naive to the claims of Snapchat and the like. Eventually, they will learn that data is only likely to respect their wishes with regards to privacy in a very limited, legally-defined set of circumstances.
Drug use *is* a problem that won't just be solved by locking people up, but people don't deal drugs because they are "swept up amidst the symptoms of rampant drug abuse" - they do it because there's a lot of relatively easy money in it (due to prohibition). If drugs were legalised, the money in "drug dealing" and therefore drug-dealing itself would vanish overnight.
What separates two people of the same intelligence, life experience and qualifications, one of whom works legally, and the other that is a drug dealer, is that the drug dealer has chosen to trade their scruples for a lot more money. Again, if drugs were legalised, the drug dealer would simply switch to a different illegal activity that commanded a premium above legal occupations.
Don't fail to realise that the reason there is so much money and brainpower involved in financial markets is that they serve to increase the productivity of practically every human endeavour by helping supply meet demand. If a year's work of a nuclear physicist results in a 1% increase in the world's cereal harvest in order to meet an anticipated future need, then that is time well-spent.
Algorithms and systems only make money when they are correct, and implemented efficiently compared to the competition. High-Frequency Trading is just the next logical step, with the potential to pick up information and transfer it to the market much faster, and to make or lose money at a correspondingly increased rate. Remember, traders only make money if someone else, somewhere, is also having their life made better in some way.
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