Posts by RandomFactor

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: Incumbency

Don't remember RMN being referred to by his initials, but I was mostly just pissed off that Watergate interrupted my cartoons at the time.

Party Nomination

They do, and there are always a few challengers that run hoping for some long-shot miracle, but actual chances of it not happening approach nil.

Even an unpopular president tends to have a better shot at defeating an unpopular challenger than some other pick.

Also bear in mind that -ANY- nominee of either party will get similar treatment by the opposition. All that changes is the name on the mental mail-merge.

Revenge pornography ban tramples free speech, law tossed out – where else but Texas!

Ignoring the fact that Texas is about 2x the size of Germany and not some small monolithic paleolithic group think land as it is portrayed...

As written this law put cloud services at risk if someone uploaded content, before the service was made aware the content was an issue. That's a bit complex but in short this would require -everything- to be vetted before it could be made available by a service. That would certainly affect free speech and eliminate the effective 'common carrier' status that cloud services enjoy currently.

Now as i see it the laws regarding cloud services and censorship are out of whack anyway.

Currently it is very much a have your cake and eat it too arrangement here.

Phone companies were exempted from liability as common carriers because they did NOT censor content whatsoever.

Cloud services get all that protection of common carrier status but are allowed to censor anything at any time without repercussion or recourse.

Personally i feel this pendulum needs to swing a bit, if the service takes it upon itself to censor/demonetize/shadowban legal content then it should lose this effective common carrier status and become liable for its content.

You get a criminal record! And you get a criminal record! Peach state goes bananas with expanded anti-hack law

Re: Georgia?

What's fun is that sometimes they take over downtown streets and trash them up to film.

Zombie's hanging out, smoking, chatting, passing the time, then someone yells action and they magically transform into shambling terrors.

Interestingly they don't care if bystanders are in the background these days. Passing by on the way to lunch you can just stand outside the shot and watch. They just digitally remove you later.

>Isn't that where they film The Walking Dead?.....

Re: "I am so happy will not be around when "Generation Triggered" is writing the laws"

Georgia is a lot of things, but they like their guns as much as Texans do.

If it was news to home-town Delta (based in Atlanta, GA) that they would get blowback from GA's public and NRA A+ rated legislators by publicly dissing the NRA, then they need to do some re-hiring.

The trend in recent years of companies drunkenly recoiling from each new day's target for social outrage has been stupid since the beginning. I have no sympathy.

>The lieutenant governor of Georgia just declared that he would kill any tax legislation that benefits Delta Airlines because in the wake of Parkland they ended their discount program for NRA members.

Re: Not Surprised

Fair, but that principle in no way indicates your target doesn't deserve a rock to the face.

I attended sessions of the GA state legislature back when we were pushing to incorporate a city. Fortunately not annually like the GP (*shudder*). Some of the representatives had to have the most basic concepts explained to them over and over again (the -same- concepts, not even different ones) in the same session. One was specifically pointed out to me in advance as 'dumber than a stump' and he didn't disappoint.

Eventually they passed the bill creating the city. Similar bills had failed in the past, but the reason it passed this time was instructive. As best i can quote it: "If we don't, you'll just be back here in front of us with it again next year. I vote Aye."

All the plans and planning, all the thought, hours of research and interviewing other cities, statistics, studies - and the reason a CITY was created was simply because it annoyed the legislators to have to listen to the arguments and information related to it and they didn't want to do it again next year.

> Barely literate? Ever hear the old one about people in glass houses?

> > I get watch the annual follies up close every year.

A tiny Ohio village turned itself into a $3m speed-cam trap. Now it has to pay back the fines

Re: Speed limits have never saved a single life

"Again, my driving record and my racing license proved that I was doing the right thing, and was far above-and-beyond capable of what I was doing"

Perhaps the right thing in that particular circumstance, however the above statement edges into hubris.

A driving record doesn't show how many accidents a person has caused, and isn't complete until you are done driving.

A racing license is for a very different environment and proves little relevant to the public roads.

If you think about it, the public roads

- are a least common denominator public cooperative. Drivers won't always react properly to new situations.

- comprise of 'untrained' and distracted drivers that won't even see a vehicle coming at high speeds in time

- are poking along for hours every day, not just for a short blistering race once a week. Attention levels aren't the same.

- hold vehicles with a fraction of the safety and performance features of a 'race' car, street suspension, etc.

- no on-hand medical and emergency vehicles when a problem occurs

- no timeouts for an accident

- cars crossing traffic, going in different directions and behaving unpredictably

- pedestrians, kids, pets, grandmas

- roads that are not perfect but instead have potholes, dips, barriers, tractors and other hazards that don't exist on a race track

- visibility designed for a fraction of racing speeds

- etc etc add your own............

The eagle has been grounded: Dutch anti-drone squadron retired

Just give the drones wedgies!

The idea probably came from Down Under - the Wedge Tailed Eagles there shred drones as a hobby.

Glance away for a second and it's too late to save your drone...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-05-24/wedge-tailed-eagle-takes-down-drone-over-wa-wheat-farm/8554120

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-xBtVU4lg

While you're preparing to carve Thanksgiving turkey, the FCC will be slicing into net neutrality

Re: There wouldn't be such a push to kill neutrality...?

"God knows what they'd make of someone like Jeremy Corbyn."

A private citizen.

German robo-pastor preaches the GNU Testament

"My CPU clocketh over...."

ftfy :)

Folders return to Windows 10's Start Thing

Re: Does anyone even use the Win 10 start mess?

"Dumped that pile of shite for Classic Start Menu - first thing I put on the system after the Win10 install finished.

Then a decent browser and a proper command shell."

Same - ClassicShell...decent browser...

Powershell is actually quite nice if your needs are windows-centric.

Re: Can you imagine Windows 95 going at the speed of today's hardware?

"I seem to recall 98SE could run for about a week at a time before needing a reboot. (At least, that's roughly how often I rebooted my machines at work.)"

Interesting tidbit - the actual limit in 95 and 98 was 49.7 days at which point it would lock up regardless. They fixed it in 98SE I think. Not that anyone realistically approached that limit due to the system becoming angsty and crash prone within a week or so anyway.

Nowadays my Windows machines run until patch forced reboots.

How Rogue One's Imperial stormtroopers SAVED Star Wars and restored order

Re: Not seen R1 yet but...

"Of course, I'm also one of the few that consider ROTJ my favorite film, at least until Lucas ruined the end by replacing David Prowse with Hayden Christensen in the Vader/Yoda/Kenobi spirit sequence."

On a related note, some fans asked for permission to reshoot Vader's death scene with David and were told flat out NO by Lucas. They did it anyway, but presumably can't release it. There's a youtube documentary about it out there somewhere.

I'll watch TFA and R1 if they ever hit Netflix.

Samsung are amateurs – NASA shows how you really do a battery fire

Re: How much water?

"Sand. Lots of it."

The utility of a good old sand bucket is not to be denied, but every now and then.... http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time

'What this video game needs is actual footage of real gruesome deaths'

Re: why is it that every single piece of the critters is made out of food?

>> one does not eat a rock simply because it tastes better than an onion (I speak in generalities, your tastes may vary).

Err, i remember looking up what Twinkies were made of once, digging back to the actual sources of the various ingredients, and, yeah, lets just say rocks DO taste better than onions.

It's Wikipedia mythbuster time: 8 of the best on your 15th birthday

"Moreover, Wikipedia's coverage of topics that would actually be useful to those lacking access to good education is often inadequate."

Wikipedia is an online open encyclopedia. If something needs expanding, go expand it (bringing up issues in the submission process would have been more valuable...and valid...)

If you want online education there are countless sites actually intended for that purpose.

In my case https://www.khanacademy.org/ does a great job with common school subjects and I've sat down with the kids and used it a number of times when they were digging into subjects i have long since forgotten.

Going on a date, and it's just the two of you? How ... quaint. OkCupid's setting up threesomes

Re: To answer your question about demisexuals

"Given a -1 to +1 range for each axis, pretty much everyone on the planet can have their sexuality completely described by a triaxial coordinate. "

I've been to DragonCon. Your model is...incomplete....

Hold on, France and Russia. Anonymous is here to kick ISIS butt

@'s water music

Or the head of the FTC over on this side of the pond now that i think about it :-)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU&feature=youtu.be)

T-Mobile US megahack cost Experian $20m, class actions coming

Re: Shouldn't T-Mobile sue Experian over this?

I'm sure remedies are defined in the contract between Tmo and Experian.

Unless this is considered negligence, as i understand it you can't contract away your liability for negligence...

Ex-NSA lawyer warns Google, Apple: IMPENETRABLE RIM ruined BlackBerry

Re: Toe the line...

> One I've seen a bit too often recently - "full proof" (as in "I want this UI to be full proof").

I just want the liquid in this bottle to be "full proof"

No more free Windows... and now it’s all about the services

Re: With love to our fellows Windows users!

Monetizing people's lifetimes...wait is this a company or the government?

General Motors to intro hands-free driving tech by 2016

And more importantly...how is the tech going to be able to distinguish from spoofed 'for the lulz' updates on the fly where someone, say, reverses the signs on approach speeds.

RealVNC distances itself from factories, power plants, PCs hooked up to password-less VNC

Many security audits use a long list of best practices as a starting point. VNC is one of those checkboxes (protocol flaws, lack of brute force protection, default blank passwords - all from early days and long since resolved in major distros), so you will get something back like

Issue: VNC running on system XYZZY

Best Practice: Remove VNC

If you need the utility, you'll need to provide the analysis showing how those early issues with VNC no longer apply or are mitigated. In a previous company, I did this a few times by requesting the reason for VNC being on the list and then point by point showing how these didn't apply or were mitigated in the version/environment/configuration we had it in. Much of this information to do this you can pull straight from the documentation of your distribution.

Have fun doing this over again at subsequent audits also :-p