Posts by wrangler

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

I regularly use a forum on one US web site that blocks "injunction", presumably for PC reasons. I've pointed it out a few times, but they persist.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Re: And then there is this janitor...

Thank you.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Another organization shows the white feather.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Re: This yor folt

"English was obviously not his first language"

Exactly what I was thinking as I read the beginning of that piece.

The show Musk go on: Tesla defies Silicon Valley coronavirus lockdown order, keeps Fremont factory open

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

Shades of Dune.

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Takes me back to when I always carried Norton Utilities and PCTools with me wherever I went.

I remember trying to help out one poor user whose WP program wasn't set to do automatic periodic backups while running. I was the new IT help guy for the room, learning what had and had not been done, or setup. The user had put in a lot of work on one document, and was apparently used to saving on exit by choosing exit, then responding to the "would you like to save first" prompt. Unfortunately, she chose to save the document with the title "con"*. She, like almost all users, didn't know, and there was nothing in the OS or WP program to advise her, that "con" was already spoken for. I happened to be across the room, and arrived just in time to watch the end of the document scroll past on the screen, and explain to her what had happened.

I went through the machines one by one, and set the WP program (the only thing used on those machines) to backup every few minutes, and posted a notice on the wall with "forbidden" file names.

*a law student preparing something on "con (constitutional) law".

Court doc typo 'reveals' Julian Assange may have been charged in US

While the article considers only that the reference to "charged" is retrospective, it could also be prospective, the sealing being requested in case Assange is later charged. I wouldn't rely overmuch on reading meaning into the lawyers' ability to avoid awkward conjugation.

Blood spilled from another US high school shooting has yet to dry – and video games are already being blamed

Your opinions on what should and shouldn't be, regarding gun control legislation in the U.S., disregards the legal context of what is and isn't constitutional there. It also disregards the fact that guns can't be regulated away, any more than illegal drugs. And a call for stricter background checks should start with an analysis of current background checks, which is something I've never seen from advocates of this position.

Do you really want to start a discussion on how two words, "gun control", will or will not solve all the school shootings, and violent deaths? Take a look at the school shootings in Canada, the London murder rate compared to U.S. cities, the lives saved by self-defense with guns, and get back to me.

How about sticking to what you're good at?

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

All sorts of old stuff surfaces from my memory, reading the comments here: MFM, RLL, DOS4GL, XMODEM, IRQ conflict/sharing, not enough files/buffers, CGA. . .

BOFH: Give me a lever long enough and a fool, I mean a fulcrum and ....

Perhaps the BOFH should consider leveraging his expertise into DAAS. (D = defenestration)

Yahoo! Groups! Go! TITSUP! for! Days!

Yahoo Groups allow polls, a useful feature that we use daily to gauge attendance at get-togethers.

OK, it's just basketball, but it's nice to know if we have enough guys to bother going to the gym.

Remember CompuServe forums? They're still around! Also they're about to die

Re: CIS software

OZWIN.

I used TAPCIS myself.

No chips for you! Toshiba takes flash off the menu for WDC

Seems to me the rights under the agreements should be clear. Either one of the companies is arguing in bad faith, or both of the companies did a terrible job of selecting their negotiating and legal teams for those agreements.

G20 calls for 'lawful and non-arbitrary access to available information' to fight terror

“You must ensure that these dark places can be illuminated by the law so that the freedoms you hold dear will not be stripped away by criminals your technologies have made undetectable.”

I don't understand the lack of embarassment that allows the expression of this inherent contradiction.

****

Turnbull's speech singled out Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal, asking why they should “be able to establish end-to-end encryption in such a way that nobody, not the owners and not the courts, has the ability to find out what is being communicated”?

This seems the argument of a police state, where the question in a free country is rather, "Why should the government be able to eavesdrop on private communications?" Scary.

Canadian sniper makes kill shot at distance of 3.5 KILOMETRES

"Thanks to the incredibly long distance for the shot, the sniper's target would have heard the boom of the round being fired approximately a tenth of a second after it hit. . ."

I suspect not.

Samsung releases 49-inch desktop monitor with 32:9 aspect ratio

Not for my spreadsheets

Sure, plenty of room for columns, but I need more than 13.27" for rows, especially for the font size that comes with the need to sit back far enough to avoid excessive head turning to view different parts of the wide curved screen.

Teen texted boyfriend to kill himself. It worked. Will the law change to deal with digital reality?

I think that we can all agree that the defendant's texts, and her treatment of the defendant, were bad things. The defendant's acts were, of course, indefensible, but their legality is quite another question.

Academically, I don't see that this prosecution can produce a sustainable conviction. Massachusetts, strangely unlike other states whose manslaughter crime definitions I've encountered, and unlike model criminal codes I've seen, has no statute defining manslaughter. Instead, from what I've read, it's been left to the courts to define it. The definiton I've seen has a bit of vagueness that seems to have left a gray area that the prosecution is attempting to argue for a conviction. That's difficult in the best of cases.

I think that they'll run into problems with this vagueness, and this case being one of first impression. There was no physical interaction with the victim to cause his death, as has occurred in all the manslaughter cases I've had knowledge of. Also, it's necessary to acknowledge that the victim was a separate individual, complete with free will, who committed the act that caused his death, and did it alone. Further, it's settled law, in general, that a person has to be given notice of what behavior constitutes a crime. In addition to everything else, I think that it will be hard to show that there was sufficient notice for a reasonable person to understand that the crime of manslaughter would be committed, if a suicide ensued.

I have no idea if there are other crimes that could have been charged here, perhaps a conspiracy to commit a crime, if they've got a general conspiracy statute and suicide is illegal there. But I think manslaughter will be a tough sell.

It'll be interesting to see the result at trial, and on appeal. It may even be thrown out of court on the defense motion. We'll see. One thing that may come out of this is the Massachusetts legislature finally defining the crime of manslaughter in a statute.

Scheming copyright scam lawyer John Steele disbarred in Illinois

Re: Needs to be disbarred in each state individually? WTF?

A lawyer can be admitted to practice in a given state by passing the bar exam. Admission to practice can also often be granted by a court, on a motion, based on a license to practice from another state, a clean record, a sponsor, and a specified number of years of practice.

Typically, though the bureaucratic wheels may grind slowly, a suspension or disbarment in one state will be honored by reciprocal suspension or disbarment in other states. You'll note that the reference link (http://cookcountyrecord.com/stories/511117834-prenda-law-s-steele-disbarred-six-other-il-lawyers-also-disbarred-nine-suspended-il-supreme-court-says) contained in this Register article states that the subject was disbarred on "consent". I suspect this was based on the Minnesota disbarment, and that he had no grounds to contest an automatic reciprocal disbarment.

If you read further down the web page referenced in the article, you'll see an example of a reciprocal suspension listed.

Dell kills botched BIOS update that murdered punters' PCs

"contact tech support"

Who will do what?

Apple fans, Android world scramble to patch Broadcom's nasty drive-by Wi-Fi security hole

Re: Drive-by or not drive-by?

From the article: "an attacker simply needs to be within Wi-Fi range to silently take over an at-risk Apple or Android device"

And doesn't the phone's Wi-Fi have to be currently enabled? I can't be the only one who usually has it disabled.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

I've had the same problems with buttons appearing just in time to catch a click, and it's aggravating.

Latest WTF came in with Firefox 52. On several web login pages, the area for username entry shows its usual dropdown list of names, but it's now headed by "Would you like to improve your search experience with suggestions?" and "Yes" and "No" buttons, neither of which work.