Posts by bombastic bob 10862 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
Nuke 'Em! The game for all the family to play!
"You crossed my LINE OF DEATH"
*BOOM*
(icon for the visuals)
From the original Robocop if I remember correctly. And yet, the line I prefer to remember: "I'd buy THAT for a dollar!" (it's a good swap for "that's what she said")
From the article: Vladimir Putin's country has been acused of hosting criminal extortionists on condition their online theft campaigns are never turned against ex-Soviet Union nations
Back in the day nations hired privateers to attack rival/enemy shipping, and leave theirs alone. In Sir Francis Drake's case, he was (probably) operating under Naval orders to attack and plunder Spanish ships.
So if these ransomware gangs are more like PRIVATEERS, are they REALLY being SANCTIONED to do their evil deeds? And, as part of a MILITARY strategy?
(and what would it take to drop a weapon on their heads, while they're operating from inside of Russia, without causing a war?)
as far as I know it only affects 32-bit systems that still have time_t defined as a 32-bit integer. There are certain backwards compatibility issues in 32-btt Linux, though, and there are time functions (as I recall) that support a 64-bit time_t on 32-bit. But legacy applications could still fall on their faces if they rely on time_t not rolling over.
FreeBSD's headers defines time_t as 64bit when the pointer size is 64bit. I do not have a convenient 32-bit linux handy but in a 64-bit version it is also a 64-bit value for time_t. As far as I recall 32-bit Linux is also a 32-bit value for time_t.
still embedded may need 32-bit in 2038 so probably best to change it to ALWAYS 64-bit at some point.
a quirk that was apparently by design - allegedly bought and paid for by big tech's alleged influence on politicians and electioneering and 'contributions in kind' in its various forms. You know, the best politicians money can buy!!!
(In My Bombastic Opinion)
We've seen examples of this sort of thing from time to time in Silicon Valley, sometimes ending up as an article in 'El Reg', often in the form of non-compete/non-recruit agreements and that sort of thing, or at least that's how it surfaced in the past.
"4 hours of annual profit", indeed.
And so that fine of a few million dollars is just a pittance, a token amount, from their point of view. It's a most likely just another ledger entry, filed under "expenses", probably a mere FRACTION of what they're already forking over to get what they want [in my opinion] from the politicians.
and, sadly, it seems to be working for them...
(FAR worse than the military industrial complex we were warned about by Eisenhower, at the height of the cold war)
we now use the "plural" form for 2nd person
that would be BAD GRAMMAR. even an old American knows that. I don't care WHAT the diaper babies cry over. I'll continue to use good grammar whenever I can.
In the case where the sex of the subject or object of a sentence is not known, you always use the masculine pronoun. That is well understood by ANYONE that understands grammar, even in languages like SPANISH where there are actual 'genders' i.e. masculine and feminine nouns.
And another thing - "de-COLON-ize, sounds ilke ripping something out of a 'colon', kinda like saying "ass pull".
when I read about the rounded corners and comparison to Windows II I wonder if maybe the SAME driving force exists in BOTH the Gnome 3 and Windows desktop projects...
still I'll look forward to what Mint might do in its derived version, if for nothing else but updates and fixes to various things. I guess I'll need to update my Mint VM.
(I really do like the general stability of Ubu and Mint coupled with being slightly newer than Debian and Devuan, aside from the other obvious things)
when Demo[n,c]rats do these things, I bet you say NOTHING. (my opinion this guy needs to hand in his Republican card and and exchange it for a HYPOCRISY card)
They are politicians, (allegedly) manipulative gaslighting dishonest ignoramuses, who's primary occupation is to get a bunch of people to [re]elect them every few years, and NOT do what is best for anyone EXCEPT themselves.
He needs to forfeit his "Trump Card" then. Chances are he's only a Trump supporter to motivate the base to re-elect him. As another person said, "Typical politician".
On a related note, would you have had EQUAL kinds of criticism if he had been a DEMOCRAT?
(knee jerk reactions and manipulative gaslighting are their specialty, even MORE so than Republicans)
(Too many examples of this kind of arrogance+ignorance throughout government for too many years, frm DMCA to this current fear-based idiocy)
some time in the next billion years or so I think we'll just move to a different neighborhood. How long does terraforming take... ?
So far all of the speculations about "how many stars have planets" (before exoplanets were discovered, anyway) lowball reality by a significant amount. With current models, most (if not nearly all) stars have planets (including this white dwarf system). The next guesstimate, "how many can support earth life", suggests there are a LOT of potential new planets to discover and visit in the next billion years [and maybe terraform and live there] long before Sol runs out of gas.
within a couple of centuries it might be practical to use starships with fusion-based impulse engines, that can harvest liquified gasses from gas giants to spew out the tailpipe (you need mass more than velocity with an impulse engine for any kind of thrust efficiency) and accelerate to a high enough fraction of C so that the astronauts don't have to breed to keep the mission going... and a 100 year "earth time" mission becomes more reasonable, at least until FTL is invented at any rate.
systemd
it could simply be that Debian's tendency to opt for stable vs cutting/bleeding edge (and Devuan being based on Debian) means that installing on bleeding edge hardware could always be an issue.
To save money I usually do not get bleeding edge anyway. Devuan works well for me. I think I'll try the new one on an RPi and see how that goes.
you do have a point (geometrically), though being part of the orbital system of Jupiter might (in some vague way) make them "near". Is there a better adjective for "a member of the orbital system" ??
(Greeks and Trojans for now I guess)
still kinda fun that the gravity depressions caused by Jupiter's L4 and L5 attract so many natural objects, many with (apparently) stable orbits. Well, we'll know for sure within the next decade or so.
I bet if you wanted a really cool space telescope you could do one at Earth's L4 or L5 if it has not already been done. Stable orbit and no nearby planets or moons to occlude or out-shine things, direct line of site for radio comms.
Once the monopolistic control exists, those who perceive themselves as "owning it" are VERY unlikely to relinquish their power and control, even a fraction of it. Kinda like GUMMINTS, that way.
Control freaks control (In My Bombastic Opinion) NOT because they are benevolent and/or best suited for the task, but because they FEAR, and "control" assuages their fear by giving them a false (or sometimes REAL) sense of, well, being in CONTROL. (as such they can NOT trust)
Fearing loss of power or money or ability to manipulate the market sounds like a likely motivation to want to retain monopolistic control, at ANY cost even.
And MY behavior and use of a product (or anything ELSE about my life) should NOT be dictated by "someone else's FEAR".
14k miles per year? Seems low to me (only ~50 miles per day 5 times per week). Don't forget air conditioning for those mega hot freeways, or heating in places where it gets cold as hell. If traffic is stopped, your AC and heater do not. Yeah weather plays hell on batteries (and range)
Perhaps it's improved a bit since the Prius days but as I recall I knew a couple of people who had them and battery replacement was their biggest gripe. Battery replacement was every 2-3 years as I recall. Those were the earlier versions, so I suppose it's a bit better now. And even if manufacturers warranty them for 100k miles (apparently they do, but at 60%-70% capacity or something like that) it may not cover the fact that capacity has dropped significantly by then. It's a fair bet people will have to get them replaced MUCH more frequently than advertised.
Electric cars seem to be for people who do not commute any significant distance, do not live in rural areas, and do not need (or want) to drive for long distances EVAR. No road trips for you, you have an electric car. And that battery you're using in freezing weather (Chicago let's say) or hot weather (L.A. or San Diego areas, especially away from the coast, maybe with a mountain between you and your destination) is being stressed in ways that significantly affect its ability to operate. I have to replace a regular car battery every 3 or 4 years for that very reason (weather, age). I would expect something like a Li-Ion or LiPo battery to be about the same.
the oil companies already do that (recycle motor oil). And if you get your oil change done at the dealership, Ford just sends the used oil to them.
You have to replace electric car batteries every couple o' years or so. At that time the old ones could be recycled. All you need to do is make it CONVENIENT. A bin outside of a store. Automatically done for you when you get new batteries. A refundable core charge. Things like that. Doing that already with Pb-acid batteries so the supply channels are already there, just modify for Li-whatever.
No need for "recycling fees" - that's just a SCAM anyway. There are better and more economically incentivized ways of getting recycling to happen (the CARROT, and not the STICK)
you want the process to include grinding 'em up into bits, then extracting the rare earth metals like you would from ore, or that seems to be what was suggested in the article. then size and shape of old batteries will not matter. Heh. ('she said' joke withheld)
what is especially important is a reliable file system recovery DVD that boots into live Linux and then lets you fix things, do backups and restores (without windows interfering, as with the registry) and things of that nature. I DL'd such an image a few years ago and it had an alpha-quality NTFS driver, but something that's part of the kernel and "blessed" makes this more practical.
I've never seen the point in Fast startup or Hibernate, first thing I disable on my personal machines.
Agreed, though I have seen some people close laptop lids, pack in briefcase, then re-open in another spot and "just keep going". I prefer doing proper shutdowns and restarts.
If they're ever to make it useful, they need to make it generate a set of AI parameters that can be applied to a much more modest hunk of hardware. Maybe the mega-AI-thingy with zillions of cores and parallelism is needed to establish those AI parameters, but once established, it should be possible to bake onto a single piece of silicon on a PCIe board or inside of a USB device... or just soldered onto a motherboard.
(I suppose it would be a kind of 'codec')
mail is sent from somewhere. Is there an automated utility that you could use to scan headers, find out the original sender, and generate a complaint to the 'abuse@' for the owning mail server owner and/or netblock containing that IP address??
(it's a fair bet that it was hijacked, right? Telling them may cut down on it. It's a lot of work, though. And I admit I generally do not file complaints on EVERYthing trapped by my system, but the more heinous examples become "my new special friend")
Xming or similar as an X server and you can run GUI applications across the network via 'DISPLAY'.
But I'd rather use Linux as the host and remote desktop for windows, if it had to be 2 separate machines. Then I could use Mate and NOT HAVE 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE everywhere.
WSL "the app" is part of the whole "Embrace Extend Extinguish" master plan.
I think we're currently on 'Extend'...
From the article: "and in the long term we'd like to move WSL users to use the store version"
a) entice us into using a CLOUDY Micros~1 LOGIN to run their CRapp from "The Store" (instead of native system and local logon)
b) strong-arm us into ONLY BEING ABLE to use the CRapp with a cloudy Micros~1 logon if we want WSL
c) EXTINGUISH TIME!!!
I see a pattern...
Attacking Cloudflare for hosting infringing sites is like attacking those who make roads for facilitating a criminal's getaway.
I had a few other analogies in mind, but this one is pretty clear and "a good match" where comparisons are concerned.
google "fixed" it so that half the devices/browsers I use [and those of a couple of others I know] cannot access any kind of google service without getting a 403 error (or similar) in the process. IMBO, it is TOTALLY google's fault. Happens with Chrome, too... but not Firefox (go fig), same machine and/or IP address. And an Android device does it, too. And an iPad. Weird huh?
Just as well, I do not like their policies. And i recently learned how to tell Chrome to use a different search engine.
when I was in the Navy it was like this:
For Official Use Only (just don't go and disclose it, seriously nobody needs to know this)
Confidential (power plant info and engineering specs were usually Confidential)
Secret (may be a few of these on a sub, like current position may be Secret, depending)
Top Secret (cannot confirm nor deny - that's what they tell you to say)
and whatever else they need, "eyes only" and whatnot. You had to have a need to know, and a clearance.
'Restricted' is like 'Confidential' I guess...
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