* Posts by Bob Dole (tm)

455 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Dec 2014

Page:

Biz that OK'd Edward Snowden for security clearance is fined $30m for obvious reasons

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Seems like a symbolic fine

>>The CIA did have some adverse information about him but it was not forwarded.

So, standard operating procedure then? Collect data, but don't hand it out to the people that need it most until well after the fact. To be fair it's probably just that they collect so much there's a backlog on the filing systems.

Oi, Google! Remove links to that removed story, yells forceful ICO

Bob Dole (tm)

Streisand

Imagine what would happen if Streisand asked google to forget her. There would be almost nothing left.

Security fears arise over body-worn plodcam footage

Bob Dole (tm)

Given the number of issues we have with be police departments, I'd like the body came to be like other webcams where anyone can pull up a browser and see what officer joe is doing today.

Further I'd like the evidence rules be changed such that an officer can not give testimony unless the recording from the encounter is also available.

I know there are a lot of bad people out there. The unfortunate thing is that the police force is also known to be harboring some of them and they need to be held to a much much higher standard.

Enjoy vaping while you still can, warns Public Health England

Bob Dole (tm)
Megaphone

There are several groups whose interests are aligning on this. Tobacco companies, governments in the form of tax revenue, and special interest groups that want smoking to just go away.

Companies, especially those who have been in business for a long time are highly resistant to change. So they naturally will try to push legislation to make sure no one can disrupt their business. Governments have very high taxes on smoking and are dependent on those taxes. The last group, needs no definition.

So here comes an unknown quantity. No one really knows if it's better or not. It certainly smells better to non smokers and people seem to actually use it as a gateway to quit the addiction. It also doesn't have even 1% of the chemicals that regular cigs have. All plusses.

The downside is that smaller entities can easily jump in and there's no taxing mechanism for it. So tobacco and governments naturally want to regulate it into oblivion.

Me, I am just tired of it. Specifically I'm tired of people making laws to regulate crap when they don't have a clue as to whether the regulation is helpful to your normal citizen.

Let's have a few honest studies. Every one I've read so far has been pseudo science at best with plenty of conclusions that are misleading, not supported by the facts or even incapable of being replicated because critical information was left out. Sometimes all three at once.

Ar this point, I do think the products should have oversight similar to the food industry. Namely that all of the ingredients should be clearly listed on the labels. Which, honestly, even regular cig manufacturers should be forced to do that. Regarding the tobacco itself, that should require a license to sell and be limited to only 18+ ( or whatever the age of majority is in your country).

From a governmental perspective - change the tax laws to tax nicotine on a per mg basis. Instead of targeting just cigarettes, target everything that contains nicotine.

For those that want to tell other people what they can or cannot do smoke/ingest/inhale: piss off. If someone wants to ingest nicotine then that's their business.

Why do driverless car makers have this insatiable need for speed?

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: The end of any driving pleasure

>> "For the next 100 years there will be vehicles available without computer guidance"

I find that to be incredibly unlikely. What I find more likely are groups like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) and many others like them doing everything they can to push for laws to make it illegal to drive your own vehicle. Of course, the car manufacturers themselves will be helping fund such groups. At least initially they'll want to make sure everyone has to buy a new vehicle. Later, they'll be able to really change the market.

For example, I think the big auto companies will change their sales strategies such that they no longer sell vehicles to regular people but rather just charge a monthly use fee for "on demand" access. Imagine if Ford stopped selling cars and instead just sold usage. You tell them that you need to be at work monday through friday at 8am and the car just picks you up each morning and takes you there. Of course, there would be different levels from "Carpool" on up to "Just Me" with associated monthly pricing. Want to go to the grocery store? Just pull up the Ford app on your phone and a car will be right over to pick you up.

Uber is actually helping pave the way for this idea. Each successful entry into a new city, where they decimate the local taxi laws, means that it is that much easier for another company to come in behind them and clean up. Uber's biggest issue seems to be vetting drivers. A driverless car doesn't have that issue.

100 years from now? yeah, I think the world is going to be a far far different place than you imagine.

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

Bob Dole (tm)
Coffee/keyboard

Do vat grown brains dream?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand we're talking about a few converted cells that were destined to flake off and be sucked up into a vacuum cleaner to ultimately end up in a landfill. On the other, those cells were turned into a living brain. An actual bit of matter that has the possibility of conscious thought.

What defines us? I can lose an arm or leg or even have a heart transplant and I'm still me. But if I lose even just a part of my brain then I'm not entirely the same person. Does the vat brain think? Is it technically alive? Obviously it's not breathing per se, but it must be functional on some level otherwise there would be no point in attempting to experiment on it.

Yes - I understand that testing on it is better than testing on animal brains; and, yes, for some odd reason I have very few problems with animal testing. However we have now entered pseudo human testing. It's not like they took an actual normally created human brain and liberated it from it's former body. Yet, still, there's something that doesn't sit quite right with this.

Has an ethical commission considered these questions? Is there such a group of heavy thinkers out there that scientists can turn to? If so, I'd love to hear their thoughts on the subject.

Apple: Samsung ripped off our phone patent! USPTO: What patent?

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) IS THE PROBLEM!

>>based on the company's/individual's net worth

So, I'm IBM and I decide to have the inventors on staff patent things under their name - then assign/transfer it to the company upon approval for some previously established but undisclosed sum.

Yeah, that won't work.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

Bob Dole (tm)
Facepalm

>>The next time an ambitious junior manager at a client’s workplace tells me that he is “rising in the pegging order”, I shall be sure to offer him my hearty congratulations.

It's Pecking Order. As in "a hierarchy of status seen among members of a group of people or animals, originally as observed among hens."

It *sounds* to me as if you either have a problem with your hearing or your accent is so out of whack with how normal English is pronounced that you don't understand the words that are coming out of people's mouths.

NSA: Here’s $300,000, people. Go build us a safer Internet of Things

Bob Dole (tm)
Holmes

Tinfoil to the rescue

I'm trying to understand the schizophrenic nature of the NSA.

On the one hand they want access to literally everything on the planet. On the other they do things like this.

Makes me wonder exactly why the UAH received the funding. Is it because the NSA has little to no confidence that the people at UAH will accomplish anything but want to be seen as trying to help secure the world? or is it because they honestly do want things to be more secure?

Barring any evidence to the contrary the NSA's stated goal is Total Information Awareness. Helping create secure devices is anathema to that. So, I have to go with the idea that this is simply a PR move by the NSA and that they don't really expect the $300k to accomplish anything.

Especially considering $300k would fund maybe 4 people for a year - assuming 3 of them are unpaid interns. That's not a staggering amount and certainly wouldn't even qualify as a Good Effort. Now if they add a couple of zero's and spread it around to a few more groups then I'd be inclined to believe that maybe, just maybe, they actually want to help us become more secure.

Windows 10 is FORCING ITSELF onto domain happy Windows 7 PCs

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: can you elaborate?

Our agreements with our clients forbid us from ever letting their information out of our direct control.

So, let's say one of my support people pulls some customer data out of the app to a local excel file in order to work through issues. MS claims that with Windows 10 they will pull even private files and push them up to their cloud for essentially whatever reason they want.

At the point this occurs we're in breach because we've let that data go to a third party. Now I don't foresee people suing about this particular thing. However if a large contract ever gets to the point that lawyers need to be involved and the other side's attorneys are aware of what Windows 10 does under the covers then my company is screwed.

Given how MS tried their best to hide those privacy settings, it would be trivial for a machine to be set up where the person doing the installation accidentally skipped it.

Yeah, sorry, but we're not going to get on that bus with MS.

Bob Dole (tm)

>>Most competent shops should be pointing all of their PC's to WSUS server and should've had this under control...

It has very little to do with competence on the part of the shops and a lot to do with resources. A large number of businesses are of the small variety. I'd wager to say that the vast majority of businesses out there are.

Would you advocate that a small business who runs say less than 20 PCs should have a WSUS server sitting in the corner? My business doesn't have *any* server on site - and we're a development shop. Everything we do is hosted. Source control, documents, email, etc - all hosted. So I don't even have a spare machine to run some dank program whose only job would have been to stop this one update.

On every single one of our machines we said No to the update. We uninstalled the KB that even asks for the update. Yet, every single one of our machines have downloaded windows 10 in the background and demanded to install itself.

Not only do I not want Windows 10 ( 7 has been perfect ), but with it's insane privacy policies and the agreements we have with our customers I'm not 100% certain that we could continue to conduct business if we install it.

This is a just complete BS and certainly makes me start to rethink our adherence to their platform.

Bob Dole (tm)
Mushroom

More than a little mad

We told Windows that we didn't want this via the little flag thing in the icon tray.

We then turned off the Windows 10 notice by uninstalling the KB.

And the damned thing still tried to upgrade our machines.

Pentagon email hacked, Russia already blamed

Bob Dole (tm)
Coffee/keyboard

The Hillary Option?

Maybe the pentagon should consider the Hillary Option. Instead of using government email systems, sign up for a gmail account.

Of course, it could just be that those email servers auto upgraded themselves to Windows 10 which dutifully started copying all the data back to MS servers.

Derelict TrueCrypt Russia portal 'is command hub for Ukraine spying op'

Bob Dole (tm)
FAIL

When the developer...

When the developer says, "So long and thanks for all the fish!" while also saying "Don't use this" there's probably a reason for that.

Maybe those people still downloading it ought to listen a bit.

Crazy Chrysler security hole: USB stick fix incoming for 1.4 million cars

Bob Dole (tm)
Facepalm

What I find funny is that the researchers can apparently rewrite the cars software remotely. If they can do this, then why can't Chrysler do an over the air update?

Bob Dole (tm)
Holmes

>>so how do you find the IP address of a specific car?

You run a port scanner across the sprint network looking for these car signatures. From this you have each one tell you it's GPS coordinates.

If you know where the car that you actually want to control is, then you look for a match based on those coordinates. Once you have your match, enjoy your new Chrysler Mobile Drone(tm).

Honestly they should be spinning this as a feature. Call it the iChauffeur. All they need to do is set up so that when you enter the vehicle you just say where you want to go then someone in a call center starts the car and drives it remotely. Maybe a combination of Siri with an Indian call center...

(I'll be back in a minute - need to file a patent).

Google: Hey startups, want in on our patent gang? First hit's free

Bob Dole (tm)
Thumb Up

Keep it up

This is the way to fix software patents - by making them completely irrelevant. Get everyone to sign a "we won't sue you" deal and just move on.

Kudos for the first step. Can't wait to see what the next step is.

Windows 10 on Mobile under the scope: Flaws, confusion, and going nowhere fast

Bob Dole (tm)
FAIL

Here's why MS fails:

They put out a "new" technology. However, it's not really ready for prime time. It's more like 80% of the way there. Then over the next year or two they finally fix a couple of the glaring issues, which should have been take care of before launch, but, at least they are fixed. At this point devs actually start looking at that tech and integrating it into smaller projects. They start reporting more things that need to be taken care of.

Then one of two things happens. Either MS End of Life's it or completely revamps the thing back into uselessness. Either way, the devs who spent time in the tech are now faced with the prospect of completely rewriting the applications they built or simply abandoning them.

Because this has happened quite a few times, any developer that's been around for longer than about 2 years knows that you simply don't use the "latest/greatest" from Microsoft. You wait until around the 3rd or 4th stable update. If the product has made it that long then there's a good chance it'll survive for a few years more.

What this means is that the only people who implement the first round of whatever MS throws out there are the newly graduated developers. In other words, the ones who usually don't quite know just what the hell they are doing yet and blindly jump on any bandwagon because someone said it was great. Of course, what these people produce is pretty much crap, costs far more to build then they expected and ends up with half the features they envisioned because that latest tech just can't do it yet.

At this point MS's management decides to kill off the products or "reboot" them into something else.

Thus, we have the MS Circle of Death. Which can be summed up as: Release Garbage, Noobs Rejoice, Make it Slightly Better, Ignore the People Starting To Use It, Reboot and go back to step 1. Fortunately not all of their products fit that circle; but enough do to make it a truism. Meanwhile Windows, starting with 8.0, began the slow orbit and 10 cements their fiery entry.

A quarter of public sector IT workers have never used the cloud

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: lol wut?

>>The cloud is a resilient service hosted typically in 2 or more geographically spaced resilient data centres that you have no control over.

Psst: You might want to check your dictionaries.

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-computing

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/cloud_computing.html

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cloud+computing

I could pull up more references but hopefully you get the point. "Using the cloud" just means that you've opened a browser and pulled up google, or the register. The term "the cloud" is basically used to define any service delivered over the internet.

But that gets away from my original statement. Which is that it doesn't matter if they know what the cloud is or even how their services are delivered. What matters is whether those services are fit for purpose and whether they are the rights ones to get the job done.

Bob Dole (tm)

lol wut?

*"However, it has to be a concern that another 24 per cent of government ICT staff were sure they’d “never even used” the cloud."*

Why does that need to be a concern? Why should a non-IT worker (government or not) care one bit about the mechanics of *how* information is moved around or where it's even stored?

IT loves to come up with new names every few years to rebrand existing services and/or concepts. If you've ever used an internet browser, then you've "used the cloud". If you've sent an email or text, you've "used the cloud." So what? If you are Cloud Knowledgeable (tm) does that make you more attractive?

What does matter is whether the tech exists to make your life easier or more secure. If they'd rather put documents on a thumb drive and courier them to another location then that should be the Giant Clue Bat that the software they have available is at least one of the following: Unreliable, Too Restrictive, Non-User Friendly, Too Damn Slow. Which, quite frankly, describes a horrifyingly large portion of the business software I've seen.

So, instead of performing studies to see how many people are Cloud Aware, maybe they should perform a study to see how many people actually have the tools necessary to complete their job without resorting to the tried and true Sneaker Net. But that might actually be useful so it's unlikely to ever occur.

Pakistan wants to copy GCHQ and eavesdrop on world+dog's comms

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Priorities

It's more like 3rd world countries aren't supposed to be doing the same things the first world (?) countries are.

Things like rigged elections, business controlled government, spying on your (and everyone else's) citizens, etc. You only get to do that if you can nuke the crap out of everyone else.

Greece? Zzzz. EU bank says TWEETING can move the stock market

Bob Dole (tm)
Facepalm

Failing to see the relevance here

In a nutshell they've rediscovered that if people are told that the market will do better, then they'll put more money into it and the market will actually do better. If people are told that the market will be worse, then they'll pull money out of it and the market will suffer.

I'm not sure why this is news because we've known that if you say something loud enough and to enough people then it will become true. We call those self-fulfilling prophecies. I guess the only actual angle here is that they used twitter... well okay. As if the method of communicating something matters to the result.

Honestly, if this is what the EU spends their money on they may as well keep giving it away to Greece. It's the same effect.

Microsoft: Hey, you. Done patching Windows this month? WRONG

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Adobe crapware again?

>>> Perhaps some servers don't need a GUI at all and can do without a font attack surface in kernel mode.

But but but ... all compute devices should be running a unified OS. I mean it's not like there's an actual *reason* to have different server, desktop, tablet and phone capabilities. I mean they are all used for the same thing...

Apple Watch is such a flop it's the world's top-selling wearable

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Who actually wears a watch anymore? And why? @jake

>>allows me to read the time with a relatively simple and consistent twist of the wrist, any time, day or night

Have you seen a professional to talk about your obsession with time?

Rise of the swimming machines: US sub launches and recovers a drone

Bob Dole (tm)
Black Helicopters

Send in the Drones

Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?

Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air

Where are the Drones?

Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve?

One who keeps tearing around, one who can't move

Where are the drones? There ought to be drones

Just when I'd stopped opening doors

Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours

Making my entrance again with my usual flair

Sure of my lines, no one is there

Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear

I thought that you'd want what I want, sorry, my dear

But where are the drones, send in the drones

Don't bother, they're here

Isn't it rich? Isn't it queer?

Losing my timing this late in my career

But where are the drones? There ought to be drones

Well, maybe they're here.

Ashley Madison invites red-faced cheats to bolt stable door for free

Bob Dole (tm)
Thumb Up

Internet ... privacy?

Yet another nail in the coffin that anything is truly Private on the Internet.

If you put it out there, it can - and likely will - be stolen at some point.

Google, Adobe barricade Flash against hacker hordes – we peek inside

Bob Dole (tm)
Holmes

Adobe can't...

>> the fact that Adobe can't find every bug in its source code

Helpful Bug Finder Subroutine for Programmers working at Adobe:

1. Open your favorite programming code editing tool

2. Start at Line 1.

3. It is a bug. Delete said line.

4. If there are lines of code remaining, go to Step 2.

Once you have completed this subroutine you will have purged your application of all bug's and the world will be forever grateful.

Loan application data hacked, company responds: Meh, not our customers

Bob Dole (tm)
WTF?

Belgian law?

I take it Belgian law is a little lax with regards to data reporting and responsibility for security breaches?

Brit school software biz unchains lawyers after crappy security exposed

Bob Dole (tm)
Holmes

A few problems here

First off, I think Slipstream did the absolute worst thing by publishing the exploit BEFORE telling the company that they had a problem.

Second, in many areas it is, in fact, illegal to attempt to break the security on products without prior authorization. One commentard referenced a bounty program put in place by United Airlines. In that case the company expressly encouraged hackers to not only break their network but to also do the *responsible* thing by privately disclosing the information to them. The point is: authorization was given PRIOR to performing the work.

Third, the lawyers are idiots in trying to get a copyright claim on a key. That's just dumb. What they *should* have done is fixed the problem FIRST then go sue the crap out of Slipstream for being completely irresponsible. Not the other way around.

Ideal solar system for SECOND EARTH found – and it's just 186 light-years away

Bob Dole (tm)
Facepalm

Re: Oh, dear...

>>No animals I am aware of have ever done to each other what we do to each other.

You obviously don't get out much. Every single living thing on this planet engages in some type of warfare with it's neighbors.

Viruses find hosts and attack their cells.

Plants use all sorts of techniques to entice others to do their bidding (ie: spread their spore) on up to being poisonous in order to be left alone. You should read up on the life cycle of forests. Each the trees and grasses fight each other.

Animals establish dominance within their own "tribes", usually through physical altercations, while having no issues with hunting down and ripping out the throats of their prey. Yes some are herbivores, but isn't that just enacting violence on plant life? (side note, there's a reason for the phrase "jungle law")

Then we have humans. Creatures which possess all the same qualities of the rest of the species that we share this planet with. We hunt, we kill, we establish dominance and pecking orders. Some are vegetarians, others like steak. That said we also exhibit the best traits as well. We love, share and help each other.

I think your view of what an "advanced" society would think of us is way off. At this point every single living creature that we've found has shown that life is both incredibly brutal and shockingly beautiful. There is zero reason to think that "life out there" doesn't follow the same patterns.

Apple and Samsung are plotting to KILL OFF the SIM CARD - report

Bob Dole (tm)
Holmes

hmm, carriers wanting more money?

Sounds to me as if it just makes things more expensive on the consumer for being able to switch devices.

Consider the situation of buying a phone off ebay. You won't be able to just swap sim cards when it shows up. Instead you'll need to contact the carrier in order to have your device activated on their network. Which means the carrier is going to be able to charge you another "device activation" fee.

Flash HOLED AGAIN TWICE below waterline in fresh Hacking Team reveals

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: BankOfAmerica needs flash to login!

>>BankOfAmerica needs flash to login! I have to allow flash for BofA every time I login.

I found a really neat trick for that: change banks.

China wants to build a 200km-long undersea tunnel to America

Bob Dole (tm)
Thumb Up

I think they ought to do it simply because it sounds awesome.

Very Very Large scale projects like this are the signature of the Chinese and are hall marks of the types of projects mankind can accomplish.

Wow, another NSA leak: Network security code appears on GitHub

Bob Dole (tm)

NSA?

>>The NSA today revealed it has uploaded source code to GitHub to help IT admins lock down their networks of Linux machines.

The NSA, as well as the other US TLA's, have lost all public trust at this point. Install at your own risk.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Bob Dole (tm)
Mushroom

Re: Are you ready? Probably not.

>> I cannot imagine this ... thing .... being installed on my wife's computer.

My wife would actually murder me in my sleep if I installed this on her computer. The last change we made was moving to Windows 7. She was okay with XP. When I "upgraded" her to Vista she raised holy hell. When 7 became available she settled down again with only a verbal warning about leaving it alone. She does use Office 2010 but only because she needed to be compatible.

One day I brought home an office laptop with Win 8 on it. She used it for a few minutes to try and browse the web. Utterly failing, she calmly made a statement about no one being able to find my body. Since then I've decided that it's best for "family harmony" that we stick with Windows 7 until it is no longer possible to revive it. Hopefully the kids will be old enough to take over tech support so I'm not the one in the crossfire when that happens.

Ex-Goldman Sachs programmer's code theft conviction overturned AGAIN

Bob Dole (tm)
Mushroom

plz send teh codez!

Windows 10 is due in one month: Will it be ready?

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: huh?

>> Also the 8.1 upgrade was as easy as installing an app from the store (albeit a very large app).

You mean that upgrade which MS told a large number of people that they had to download the 8.1 update, do a safe boot then manually run the update? Sure...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2226753/microsoft-subnet/how-users-are-fixing-windows-8-1-update-install-problems.html

Will a data centre be driving your car in 12 years' time?

Bob Dole (tm)
Meh

The answers are usually pretty simple

>>for example, in the event of a child running out of the road, should a piloted car hit the child or avoid the child but hit an oncoming car with four passengers?

There's an obvious answer here. The piloted car should hit the other vehicle. The passengers of both vehicles would have a much higher chance of coming out unharmed.

Honestly, I am absolutely ready for cars to be self driven. The number of complete and total morons on the road is astounding and, quite frankly, the robotic overlords seriously can't do any worse.

As the US realises it's been PWNED, when will OPM heads roll?

Bob Dole (tm)

>>>And if all the other departments start complaining of being unable to fill sensitive positions as needed because OPM can't provide documentation quickly enough...?

The funny part of that is that the hole's in the OPM system meant that foreign agents could get data on federal employees *faster* than other departments of the federal government.

It's like they took sharing the admin password to a whole new level and handed it out like candy to the world.

Samsung caught disabling Windows Update to run its own bloatware

Bob Dole (tm)
Mushroom

Surprise, surprise, surprise

Yet another reason to follow these simple steps when purchasing a new laptop:

1) Purchase a brand new, unused SSD drive and copy of your favorite OS.

2) Immediately after unboxing the laptop, remove the hard drive.

3) Put the brand new hard drive in.

4) Install your OS.

I happen to have a fairly new samsung laptop. I didn't even power the thing on before I had replaced the hard drive. Windows 7 installed everything with zero issues - all the downloaded drivers worked. I'll throw the original hard drive back in when I decide to sell it.

Stealing secret crypto-keys from PCs using leaked radio emissions

Bob Dole (tm)
Coffee/keyboard

>>"I would have thought that the low cost of the equipment would make it of more interest to hobbyists"

Clue Bat: Anything that could be accomplished with tech 20 years ago, can be done using "low cost equipment" today. That should be pretty obvious.

As the poster said, this isn't newsworthy. A couple kids figured out how to do something their parents did. Great. Maybe for their next trick they can show us how to change the channels on a TV *remotely*.

FBI says in secret that secret spy Cessnas aren't secret

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Works 4 me

>> If you're opposed to being monitored you best not leave your home or use a phone. I've got nothing to hide, how about you?

As with any government, the rules (laws) are subject to change. Sometimes with only a moments notice. Sure, you might think you have nothing to hide today but what happens when new leadership decides to make something you do highly illegal? It's happened before and it will certainly happen again.

Then there's the little discussed fact that the average us citizen breaks the law every single day, often without knowing it: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/you-break-the-law-every-day-without-even-knowing-it.html

What if they decided to make speeding a federal offense with jail time? With the advent of driver less cars, I could see something like that happening in order to discourage people from driving themselves. After all, it would be for our own protection.

My point is that every time we expand police powers we make it easier for whoever happens to be in power at the time to abuse them. So we need to chain them down as much as possible to prevent that.

Glass door to the ancient past FOUND ON MARS

Bob Dole (tm)

Re: Fingers crossed

Jurassic Park in SPAAAAAAAAACE!!

Ed Snowden should be pardoned, thunders Amnesty Int'l

Bob Dole (tm)

>>>“Snowden’s actions changed the face of digital communications globally. Thanks to him, we now know that governments everywhere are intercepting and storing the private information of people on a mass scale, without our consent,” says Amnesty.

Um, no, any of us with any clue about tech knew that this was going on for *years*. The thing Snowden did was draw attention to it in such a way that it could no longer be simply ignored.

One USB plug to rule them all? That's sensible, but no...

Bob Dole (tm)

More complicated than it really is

I think that most of the hardware vendors really make this whole thing out to be far more complicated than it really needs to be.

We don't need different "levels" of cable. If there's only one cable type then the costs for producing that cable would drop, even if it's at the "higher" level of capability, simply because so many different chinese manufacturers would be putting it together.

We also don't need several different plugs. One would do just fine, and again the costs for that one plug would reach the lowest price point quickly for the same reasons.

That done, then it's just up to the devices to decide what capabilities they provide over that plug. Maybe it's just power, maybe it's just data, maybe (and this is the kicker) it's power AND data transfer.

Essentially the whole concept of plugging devices in needs to be rearchitected slightly. When I plug a mic into my computer's headphone jack it automatically reroutes everything internally so that it still functions as a mic. Seems to me we can do the same thing with the various input/outputs for these electronic devices.

Elon Musk's $4.9bn taxpayer windfall revealed

Bob Dole (tm)
Facepalm

Article is odd

Are you suggesting that a government subsidy shouldn't be taken advantage of?

I find articles like these to be really weird. In a True(tm) capitalist economy the government wouldn't subsidize anything and all taxes would be applied equally. Obviously, for better or worse, such a beast doesn't exist.

Instead, we get various groups deciding that we need more corn products, or we need to lower wheat production or we need space ships, or a particular city/state really really wants that large employer to move in.

This type of market manipulation happens regardless of the type of economy. The part I don't understand is when the desired behavior occurs we get various people (like the author) complaining about those that actually make it happen.

Honestly, regardless of your political leanings, Elon Musk should be held up as a hero of the people. He is not only dancing to the tune of whoever is in governmental power but he's also delivering on the spirit of their desired behavior. If you don't like what he's doing then petition your government to stop subsidizing that behavior.

But, maybe that's the problem. He's certainly made quite a few enemies from established power bases in the aerospace and automotive industries. This leads me to the following question: who is subsidizing your article? Or are you just one of those people that hates seeing others succeed?

NASA picks tools for voyage to possibly LIFE-SUPPORTING moon Europa

Bob Dole (tm)
Alien

Re: Try Earth

They did.

It was dull, unintelligent and frequently complained about the probing.

Why voice and apps sometimes don't beat an old-fashioned knob

Bob Dole (tm)
Mushroom

In our crazy rush to the future it's should never be about "can we do something". Rather it should be "should we do something". In the case of constantly changing UIs, the answer is a resounding No.

However because marketing is currently in control of the horizontal and vertical, it will only get worse. Further, there is no way in hell I'll install another "smart" device in my house. My Samsung "smart" TV is a steaming pile of crap which can't even get the fast forward and rewind buttons to work consistently. Nor can it keep the audio sync'd and I have to reboot the TV whenever I switch from netflix to amazon.

So, no thank you. I won't be buying an IoT fridge, thermostat or whatever else. The old school stuff just works better in every conceivable way - and I say this as an owner of an IT company.

Who's the big Swiss bunch that wants to take Sir Jony's lunch? It's... SWATCH!

Bob Dole (tm)

Didn't know they still existed

Wow.

Seriously, I didn't know Swatch was still in business. Figured they were just a fad from my old grade school days.

Doesn't matter though. I still don't want to wear a watch when my phone provides all that and more.

Page: