Posts by VicMortimer 538 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2017
Not good enough.
What they need is a news story about how they paid, and then the CEO spent the next year in prison for the crime of paying.
The ONLY way to stop ransomware is to criminalize paying ransom. Lock up some CEOs and the payments will stop. The payments stop, the ransomware stops.
It's absolutely insane that the FBI is allowed to participate in paying ransom.
It's time to stop the ransomware and criminalize the payments. You can't arrest a botnet operator in China, but you can arrest a CEO whose company paid. Stop the payments, end the profits, and you stop the ransomware.
And to those idiots who like to whine "it's more complicated than that" - No, it isn't. Ransomware is about money. Stop the money, make paying a crime, and the problem WILL go away. It IS that simple.
I first read that as $1.98, and I was ok with that.
But when that 8 is really a B? Nope, corporate welfare needs to die.
If the government wants to give out money, give it out to HUMANS. For corporations, it's time to end the carrot approach and go with the stick. "Oh, you're not going to build a factory in the EU? Ok, here's an extra 250% import tax for you then." End this stupid "free trade" nonsense, and for the really big corps let's tax them at least 10x what they're saving by paying 3rd world wages if they don't build locally.
Buses are slower, because they get stuck in traffic if you don't build dedicated bus lanes. And if you're doing that, why not put in electric wires and power the bus from them? And if you're doing that, why not put in rails and get that energy savings from rolling friction and be able to transport more people at the same time by making the trains longer?
The reality is that trains are just better if you've got a lot of people to move. And even if your off the shelf bus is battery powered (and it should be, diesel is NOXIOUS stuff) then it's not cheap either. And trains eliminate the heavy vehicle road damage, and the tire particulates.
Fuel cells are idiotic.
Hydrogen is a dead end. It's either dirty and energy intensive to produce, or clean but INSANELY energy intensive to produce. We don't have enough clean electricity to even consider it as a possibility, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Batteries are the only practical choice.
WHY?
How is this even remotely useful? If you want to install Alma Linux so you've got a RedFlat clone, install that. Otherwise, might as well install Fefloora. I see ZERO usefulness in having a separate "desktop" distro of what's supposed to be a clone of a dead-end server distro. I've used CentOS as a desktop in the past, it was fine. I ditched the asshats when CentOS was killed.
Also, meh. Xubuntu is what I'm putting on servers and desktops. GNOME has been unusable for many years now.
(Though I'm seriously considering switching to Devuan, if systemd pisses me off one more time I'm done.)
Cell towers don't go at the top of hills any more. They go at the top of streetlight poles. You probably haven't even noticed the hundreds that are likely near you if you're in a city.
Satellite is very much a worse option.
And maybe don't go out to the middle of BFE if you don't know what you're doing and are going to need to be rescued. Is saving a few idiots really worth polluting the sky? Is it worth it when there are many other options that don't involve putting a cloud of satellites up? When a system already exists that can be monitored by far fewer satellites? EPIRB
Don't kid yourself. These aren't about emergencies. These are about your boss being able to call you while you're on vacation camping in the mountains. It's about increasing corporate profits by taking away your ability to disconnect.
I don't know about midges, but mosquitoes love me. I can bathe in DEET and permethrin and they'll still come after me, while anybody around me will be like "there are mosquitoes here?"
What's worse is that the bites swell up and itch for weeks.
I mostly avoid being outdoors as much as possible from March through November.
That wasn't really a fail.
Your comment is both true ("the grid is getting cleaner") and irrelevant ("over time"), because the comment you replied to is showing that an EV is already cleaner NOW even if you're unlucky enough to live in a place where 100% of your electricity is produced from the dirtiest possible fossil source, coal.
Obviously the grid IS getting cleaner. But the EV would still be better if if it weren't, because gas/diesel is worse than coal.
I don't understand that at all. I step out of the car, grab the cable, plug in, and go inside. No planning, 2 seconds of effort, and most days I don't use any gas. My PHEV weighs about 250 pounds more than the non-plug-in hybrid model of the same car, it was a no-brainer to get the PHEV.
Either model is going to have a lower CO2 footprint than a pure ICE car, even if you're an idiot that can't be bothered to plug in the PHEV. Easily determined in the case of my car, because while the US models are hybrid only, there's a European ICE model. And even the smallest ICE available for it there (a crappy little 1 liter engine) has worse CO2 emissions than my PHEV with a 2 liter engine driven on gas only would.
The numbers you claim are pure nonsense.
Yes, it depends on electricity source, obviously coal is worse than hydro or solar. But if you live someplace with 100% renewable power the minimum is closer to 9,000 miles to break even on production CO2. With a typical mix, it's closer to 19,000 miles, you're not going to get near 30,000 unless you happen to live somewhere that does nothing but burn coal for electricity.
And production CO2 will go down over time as mining and refining move from fossil fuel to electricity.
In any case, there's nothing unrealistic about banning new ICE car sales in 2035. It just means manufacturers that haven't switched by then will go out of business because they don't have anything to sell. So they'd better get on it now.
You know what the REAL charging time for every EV is?
ABOUT 2 SECONDS.
That's about what it takes me to grab the charger and plug it in as I'm walking into the house. It's not a damn gas pump where you have to stand there in the cold or heat beside the car as it slowly fills. You plug it in and walk away, you're done.
Now, I've got a PHEV, because reasonably priced decent BEVs didn't exist when I got it. But that at least means that unless I'm on a road trip I almost never have to go to a gas station. And when I am on a road trip, I'm reminded of why I will NEVER own another ICE car. Road trip with a BEV = you plug in and walk away to do something like eat or goof off indoors for a while - or even just hang out in the air conditioned car and take a nap. Charging STILL only takes a few seconds out of your day, because you can do something else.
The "life" of the battery is a non-issue. My car is now 11 years old, the high voltage battery is FINE. I did have to replace the 12V battery once, but those don't last as long on ICE cars either, because those have to start an engine, mine just has to flip a HV disconnector. I just hit 150k miles this year, service costs have been significantly less than any other car I've ever had, mostly tires, a few oil changes and an evap emissions valve because it's still got an ICE.
Oh, and the cost of the home charger? For the first few years I had the car, I just used the 120V charger that came with it. Then the local utility board ran a rebate deal, so I got a 40A 240V charger for free.
It's already illegal, but nobody cared until recently. Collusion to fix prices being unlawful has been a thing for over a century, doing it with a computer doesn't change that.
But because it happened with a computer, it didn't even get investigated until the infection had spread nationwide. Doesn't matter if you're in San Francisco or Podunk Iowa, the vulture capital corporation that owns the majority of the apartments is using something like this. And even if it's stopped today, a tremendous amount of damage has already been done, the prices that are putting people on the street are not going to drop, they just might possibly not climb quite as quickly - at least until the next company that claims they've found a legal workaround for this criminal behavior starts selling their robbery software.
This is not the first place I've heard that, and it's INCREDIBLY stupid.
It's going to increase your reaction time if you need to move suddenly, and your brake lights will go out, which means you're no longer signaling to the cars behind you that you're not ready to move. You're going to significantly increase your chances of being rear ended.
And at least in most of the US, when you do get rear ended, you're going to get a ticket because doing that on a public street means you're not fully in control of the vehicle, having engaged a brake with a locking function when you should be prepared to move.
Oh, and that handbrake is generally significantly weaker than the hydraulic brakes, and typically only acts on two wheels.
And the ONLY time a recovery key should EVER be required is for a forgotten password. There's no excuse for Micro$loth's bad behavior here.
The only time I've EVER had to use a FileVault key was for a user's forgotten password. Booting a Mac into safe mode just takes a user password.
I KNOW they alter prices depending on who is looking. I've seen different prices for the same thing show up at the same time depending on what account is used.
I can take a link that will open in my browser with one price, paste it into a remote session at a client across town, and see a different price. It doesn't happen with every product, but it absolutely DOES happen.
Yes, 2038 is going to be really annoying for everybody still running Mac OS X 10.5 and earlier.
And 2040 is going to be really annoying for everybody still running Mac OS X 10.13 and earlier.
So... me (assuming I'm not dead yet) and other vintage Mac geeks. I mean, it's not that the machines won't boot, they just won't have correct dates. But most folks aren't likely to be running pre-2017 Mac OS in 2040 or pre-10.6 in 2038.
(It uses 64-bit dates now. So there's a Y292,277,026,596 problem. Humanity is unlikely to have to worry about it.)
While I understand the sentiment, and I'd never cause a stink if other people were enjoying the break and my saying something would ruin that for them, there is a very good reason.
Boredom.
The longest stretch I did being paid to do nothing was about two weeks. And I was bored out of my skull. My job for those weeks was literally to occupy a seat in an office so that the position (which I was utterly unqualified for) was occupied. I was not expected to actually do anything other than sit there until the regular person returned. And no, there was no internet, there wasn't even a computer on the desk, the web had only been invented the year before, and nobody in that place saw any usefulness for computers or networks yet.
My work is typically entertaining, except for the watching progress bars bit. And I've been known to take that as an opportunity to go off the clock and duck out for a snack, if looking around doesn't find me something interesting to do.
As long as the chicken gun test has been around, I'd be surprised if somebody didn't accidentally load with the wrong chicken at some point.
I'd call it plausible - as did the Mythbusters when they revisited it. They'd initially called it busted, but then decided the glass they were testing the first time wasn't adequate.
American unions have NEVER been anywhere close to as criminal as American corporations.
The problem is the American education system. They tend to indoctrinate "capitalism good, workers bad" into kids.
The decline of unions in America has directly coincided with the stagnation of wages and the increase in wealth of the new robber barons.
Synthesis of 2,4,6-Trinitrotoluene (TNT) Using Flow Chemistry
Sulfur mustard:Synthesis and reactions
Not exactly difficult to find. The TNT paper is on a US government website, took one search term to find it. It's all public information, you're only breaking the law if you actually make the stuff.
It's idiotic to pretend that LLMs are somehow special here. The only stuff that goes boom or is poisonous and is also actually secret at all is the specific methods and materials of building a nuke that will actually go boom, and really the hardest part of doing that for somebody who knows the physics involved is obtaining the fissile materials.
As an American, my next car will be a full EV. I'm not just considering it, the decision is made, I'm just waiting on prices to drop on used ones.
But it WILL NOT BE A TURDLA.
And that's mostly because of the elongated muskrat. I'm not going to buy a car made by a neo-Nazi's company.
I'm also not going to buy one because I hate the interiors. Minimalism does not appeal to me at all. I have no problem with screens, but I want LOTS of them, not a single one in the middle of the car. And I insist on having a turn signal stalk. Turdlas just don't cut it. Oh, and it's idiotic to control the HVAC vents from the screen.
(Not kidding about lots of screens. My current car has 6, it came with 3, and I'm thinking about adding more.)
"How can you *possibly* run a business that you don’t actually make any of your product?"
Apple builds 0% of their product.
It's an incredibly bad way to run a manufacturing business, but it makes a lot of money.
And BYD absolutely IS dumping. I don't blame China for doing it, they're doing what countries do, subsidizing domestic production to destroy manufacturers in other countries. But the obvious and necessary answer is in fact massive tariffs on Chinese cars. And all countries should implement a "wage tariff" - calculate the percentage of work that went into building a product, and use tariffs to adjust the price of that product to reflect what it would be if it was produced by domestic labor paid domestic union wages.
It's EXACTLY that simple.
Locking phones to carriers should be banned entirely, phone manufacturers should be required to remove the capability.
Requiring automatic unlocking 60 days from initial activation is better than nothing. But locking shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
A thousand dollars is nowhere close to enough.
I will own my own stuff and be happy.
My car is paid for, and has been for years. It's a PHEV, costs very little to drive, and I can keep stuff in it that I might need. If I'm going on a road trip, I can take hours to pack the car. I can get groceries, back up to my kitchen door, plug in, and unload.
No. I will own a car.
Law?
Since when is a default password illegal?
(First thing I'd do is change it back to Fiery.1. I HATE printers with management passwords set to anything but the default. They're printers, quick and easy access is more important than security. Worst case somebody runs it out of toner or paper.)
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