* Posts by Carpet Deal 'em

399 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2017

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Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: How many watches to tell the right time?

Imagine you start with two watches that are synchronized: if one drifts, you never know which is wrong. If you start with three, you can tell which is defective because the other two will match. If all three are different, you've probably got bigger problems.

It's Friday lunchtime on International Beer Day. Bitter hop to it, boss'll be none the weiser

Carpet Deal 'em
Coat

Re: How Times Change

It may just be a story, but I recall hearing that Heineken developed a special brew for the American market to recreate the flavor of beer that had spent too long in transit because they'd managed to hook everybody on it before opening their own brewery in the US and didn't want to risk a flavor change. People get what they expect, I guess.

Mine's the one with the extralarge Hershey's bar in the pocket.

Will someone plz dump our shizz on the Moon, NASA begs as one of the space biz vendors drops out

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Facepalm

Re: There is no "case for Mars"

It has an atmosphere, which protects against radiation and micro-meteorites

Its atmosphere is a fraction of a percent that of earth's. That's not even thick enough to let you walk about without a pressure suit; it's certainly not going to help you against radiation or meteorites.

It's regolith is more weathered. Moon dust is razor sharp.

It's also toxic. You're still going to have to go through the same effort to avoid breathing it in.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

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Facepalm

Re: Why the fuss?

I can't recall ever, in my 60+ years, ever needing to send something that I would be worried about it being read by the national authorities.

You don't realize the number of things you can get in trouble for sending or obtaining even in first world countries, do you? On a more harmless level, you have things like Australia's ban on women smaller than C-cup in... certain kinds of films(no matter how clear their age). I'm not quite sure of the legalities of digitally importing such material from abroad, but quite a few countries that ban the seemingly innocuous will throw you in the clink if they find out you've done so.

Official: Microsoft will take an axe to Skype for Business Online. Teams is your new normal

Carpet Deal 'em
Black Helicopters

Re: Yeah..

The Stasi also liked to deliberately rearrange things to drive dissenters insane. Different tactics strokes for different victims folks, after all.

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

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Re: lightspeed

"This whole resisting gravity thing is a pain. I think I'll just collapse into a nice black hole for a while."

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Why didn't they follow the phone system?

To my naive eyes, extending the address space without heavily modifying the protocol should be possible: use the reserve bit to indicate it's an expanded packet and then include the address in the options data area. Older systems would still have to be patched, of course, but not to the degree that completely replacing the protocol requires.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: A little sensationalism?

They might not have known if there were any weapons currently, but the owner's history sounds like an indication to bring in the heavy guns.

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Not-an-Autopilot

The fact that is isn't called 'self drive' says more about it that people having no idea what an auto pilot does.

Tesla can argue until they're blue in the face that they only meant to invoke the avionics equipment, but nobody's going to take them seriously if they try to claim they didn't know people would take it to mean the sort of autonomy implied by the typical usage of the term. Not to excuse the driver, but it's beyond time to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and start holding them to account.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: RTFM

Nobody on the internet knows you're a dog, but sometimes they can figure out when you're a fox.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

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Facepalm

One of the (nominal) points of the Intel Management Engine is that you can remotely control the computer, even when it's off. In other words, it's meant to undermine everything you just said(and with Intel-qwalitee security, being a person of interest almost guarantees you're screwed). AMD's PSP is less helpful, but I still wouldn't assume you need physical access to plant an OS-proof bug in there.

Here we go: Uncle Sam launches antitrust probe into *cough* Facebook, Google *cough* Amazon *splutter* Twitter...

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Facepalm

Re: Too Easy

"antifa" is one of those terms I hear bandied around, like "SJW" that seems to be ill defined. If you are referring to people who are, as the abbreviation suggests, anti-fascist, then that really should cover 99.9% of the human population, because if you're not anti-fascist, then you either don't know what fascism is, or you are pro-fascist.

"Antifa" was the name a group gave itself; what it nominally stands for is irrelevant(does this really need to be said?). The continued invocation of its name is done to recall its actual antics - which could be quite violent. You can argue whether the invocations are correct, but that's what they are.

What happens on the internet, on social media and on messageboards, and in discussion groups, is that the hosts put in place acceptable use policies. These typically run into several pages of legalese, but the general gist is, "don't be a bigot" - i.e. don't post sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. content.

The problem is that these policies also tend to be incredibly vague(and tend to include an "other" category that's completely undefined). If the host just doesn't like something, they can almost always find a reason to do so. Thus your post on how Round-up causes cancer gets nuked as harassment(should they deign to give an excuse at all) because a certain ag company has some rather deep pockets.

My personal position on all this is that Facebook et al are big and important enough that they ought to be held to the same standard as physical privately-owned public spaces. Being digital doesn't make them categorically different.

The Empire Strikes Back: Trump discovers $10bn JEDI cloud deal may go to nemesis Jeff Bezos, demands probe

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Facepalm

Re: Here is a first

The military couldn't get a hold of and keep the level and quality of talent needed for this even if it wanted to for one simple reason: it's the military. Personnel are held to standards that disqualify many of the choice hires, whether or not those standards are relevant to the job. Outsourcing is the only way to go about this sort of megaproject.

The pro-privacy Browser Act has re-appeared in US Congress. But why does everyone except right-wing trolls hate it?

Carpet Deal 'em
Boffin

Re: More privacy is good isn't it?

The opt-in requirement is strictly for "sensitive user information", which the bill defines as thus:

(A) Financial information.

(B) Health information.

(C) Information pertaining to children under the age of 13.

(D) Social Security number.

(E) Precise geolocation information.

(F) Content of communications.

(G) Web browsing history, history of usage of a software program (including a mobile application), and the functional equivalents of either.

There's an opt-out requirement for most everything else. An exception to all this is made for "protect[ing] the rights or property of the provider", which stands out to me as one of the iffiest parts, but I'm not a lawyer, so this might be more problematic:

(2) COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934.—Insofar as any provision of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 151 et seq.) or any regulations promulgated under that Act apply to any person, partnership, or corporation subject to this Act with respect to privacy policies, terms of service, and practices covered by this Act, the provision or regulations shall have no force or effect, unless the regulations pertain to emergency services.

Other than that, it seems pretty straight forward.

(The article links to the last Congress's version, so here's the link to the current bill)

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Aren't we missing something ?

How many of those are recent, though? The moon has no atmosphere, so what you're seeing is a record of impacts over four billion years long.

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Define "Safer".

*But safer if an asteroid hits earth*.

Gambler's fallacy if I ever saw it.

That's actually one of the better arguments for space colonization at this stage, though going straight to Mars is straight-up nonsense like you point out. Cutting our teeth on lunar colonization has the benefit of help being mere days away, as well as providing a place to produce larger ships more suited for the journey at a lower price than if they had to be launched from earth, making it far and away the superior option.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Carpet Deal 'em
Pint

Of course we can do something

We need to know when the asteroid of doom needs to hit or else we won't be able to properly arrange the ultimate party in time!

Awkward! Bernie tells Bezos-sponsored event he'd break up Amazon and other tech titans

Carpet Deal 'em
Stop

Re: Dance with who brung ya

If you actually want to change things for the betterment of the general population, this is exactly what you should be doing.

But how do you get support for your change if nobody hears you? Yes, there are rivals to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but none have anywhere near the reach Big Tech(and even traditional media) does.

It just wasn't meant toupee: Bloke nicked at Barcelona Airport with €30k of blow under wig

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Trollface

Clearly

His handlers shouldn't have told their mule to use his head when he asked how to slip by customs..

IBM torches Big Tech's get-out-of-jail-free card, says websites should be held responsible for netizen-posted content

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: how about stick to the original intent of 230

Section 230 allows basic moderation, but it only goes so far:

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

In other words, editorialization isn't protected under section 230. Given that Google, Twitter and Facebook have been doing just that in the form of selective enforcement, all that has to happen is for Uncle Sam to come down on them qua publishers with the fury of a thousand suns. At the very least, we can get some experimental data to consider when crafting any revisions.

New old Windows bug emerges, your 'strong' password is anything but, plus plenty more

Carpet Deal 'em
Facepalm

Unless your application needs WMA/WMV support, anything supporting XP will run fine under Wine. You lose nothing by not upgrading to Linux(Mint and POP!_OS seem to be the current newbie-friendly recommendations).

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: How entanglement really works, how to prove it

That doesn't necessarily rule out superluminal events; it only proves that they won't follow special relativity. I doubt we'd be able to detect such things without a theory that already allows for them, though, so we'll just have to wait to see if somebody's grand unified theory is less disappointing.

Quantum goes open and passwords must die in a week of Microsoft fun

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Big Brother

Re: "Go passwordless - switch to PIN"

how on Earth is a PIN an improvement on a password?

It makes it easier to break in without making the proles feel unsafe.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

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Re: Trains'n'spies

Are you talking about municipal light rail/subways or Amtrak? The latter(originally created as a way for the major railroads to extricate themselves from the passenger business) is only around because there's not quite enough support there to axe the subsidies that make it possible. It's hardly surprising you got a better experience at some place that actually cares.

No DeepNudes please, we're GitHub: Code repo deep-sixed as Discord bans netizens who sought out vile AI app

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Happy

Re: Finally a killer app for Google Glass

That might be a better use of AG glasses: replacing the blobs with what they'd look like if they were thin. You'd need a notice of some sort to show the actual collision lines, but it'd still make for a more pleasant day.

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

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Stop

Re: Trouble with his tweet-continence

Remember that the Autopilot that's already installed can't be bad as the collisions we've heard about are fairly low when viewed besides the number of miles driven with Autopilot engaged.

The self-driving feature on any AI car tends to only be enabled in optimal circumstances. Human accident statistics, on the other hand, include everything from divided highways on a sunny day to blind turns with driving rain. The two aren't as comparable as advocates like to pretend.

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Conflicted who and what to bash

A lawsuit to determine who to blame for stupidity; lawyers must make a living too.

The lawsuit's pro se; ie, the plaintiff is self-representing. They were definitely being idiotic(the request for subpoena mentions private medical documents as amongst the lost data, for instance), Google's a bit out of line here if they took weeks to inform a paying customer their data was deleted(during which time they probably charged the company at least once while giving the impression access would be restored).

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

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Meh

Re: Profit Margins

Unless you have a plan to make the country substantially carbon-negative, then that's as good a plan as any. Most of the first world has already cut its emissions to the bone; unless China stops, going further is just an exercise in masochism. As sorrowful as it sounds, that money would be better spent building seawalls for those island nations that are under threat.

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: So, how long is Youtube going to get away with this?

To my knowledge, nobody actually depends on ad revenue at this point. Everybody has Patreons or oter off-site ways to support their channels. Most will stay on YouTube as long as they're allowed simply for that exposure, since that's all they're getting as it is.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Carpet Deal 'em
Facepalm

Re: ReactOS is in Alpha

The rolling release model works when you're a distribution of packages all maintained by independent upstreams, not when you're providing an entire OS in one piece.

NPM Inc settles union-busting complaints on third try – after CEO trolled for ordering internal mole hunt

Carpet Deal 'em

Shall we strip price caps from .org, mulls ICANN. Hm, people seem really upset... OK, let's do it

Carpet Deal 'em
Facepalm

Re: Monopoly

When it comes to the internet, ICANN is the Lord thy God. The only way to avoid this would be to completely decentralize things, which is utterly impossible with what we have. Now, it's possible we could be able to neighborly negotiate IPv6 addresses to avoid overlap, but good luck with DNS.

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

Carpet Deal 'em

Re: Am I the only one who...

Horny straight guys are the larger market, so it's not surprising that's where they focused their efforts. Once it's been cracked open, though, somebody can add the male training data without worrying about the ROI.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

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Stop

Re: It is hardly surprising that there is a problem with Brexit

> Ah yes the "we shouldn't do anything because no-one else is" argument.

The UK emits about one percent of the world's CO2 emissions(less than global aviation). At some point, you're just hurting your economy to no benefit. What would help would be to harangue China into acting on its emissions, which are twice the next highest.

Suspected dark-web meth dealers caught by, er, 'using real address' when buying stamps

Carpet Deal 'em

Stamps can be bought in rolls as large as ten thousand online, which strips away their last excuse for using a pre-paid label. Somebody might have noticed even then, but a purchase of a single product isn't likely to set off alarm bells.

Carpet Deal 'em

Supposedly they sold at least 28 thousand packages, which works out to $314.29 each(the indictment alleges they sold on other sites as well(though without giving numbers), so that would bring the average price down a tad). They probably made it that far because they claimed it was a much less dangerous substance, so were lower on the priority list until the feds analyzed their product.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Carpet Deal 'em
Boffin

Re: Android vs Robot?

The original use of the word "robot" was for the organic kind(see R.U.R.). Meanwhile, "android" was originally applied to human-shaped automata that were actually produced(toys and novelties, basically), with the sci-fi sense coming much later(though that idea predates the term).

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

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Re: "I have a small business where it is just me, I can't afford two laptops."

Which is why ideally you'd have a backup of similar specs. However, if you can't afford one, a cheap backup that can slog through at least some of the work is a better option than none at all.

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

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Boffin

Re: Dates? Don't talk to me about dates...

Point of order: the US doesn't use the imperial system, but rather its own that agrees with it in most respects. The most obvious difference is liquid measures: the imperial gallon is 160 imperial ounces while the US gallon is 128 US ounces.

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

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Facepalm

Re: Why not use 4G/5G?

Hurricane Maria knocked out almost the entirety of Puerto Rico's cellular grid, which remained crippled for years. Aerial transmission is far hardier as it can be brought online as soon as the transmitting and receiving points are rebuilt.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

Carpet Deal 'em

A public ledger doesn't make fraud impossible; it makes it much easier to track the stolen funds, but that doesn't guarantee you'll catch the guy.

FedEx fed up playing box cop, sues Uncle Sam to make it stop: 'We do transportation, not law enforcement'

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Big Brother

Re: I don't even need archive.org...

Some would say the currently active Authorizations for Military Force count as declarations of war. Granted, they're against completely unrelated countries, but since when has that ever stopped anybody?

Out of Steam? Wine draining away? Ubuntu's 64-bit-only x86 decision is causing migraines

Carpet Deal 'em

They're gimping multiarch as well. They've just backtracked a bit, but only just as much as major printer drivers, Steam and Wine require.

Carpet Deal 'em
Stop

Re: This is not a surprise

Valve's not prepared because it can't be: 32-bit applications require 32-bit libraries and almost the entirety of their catalogue is 32-bit. Targeting a distribution willing to implement proper multilib(which isn't difficult) is the only logical course of action.

Carpet Deal 'em
Stop

Re: Valve should fix this.

> Nothing to stop Valve shipping the relevant libraries and drivers with Steam

No, it can't. One of the big, vital things is the OpenGL library, which it needs to link to dynamically to get graphics acceleration; another issue is that shipping older versions of libstdc++ will cause drivers to not load if they're built against newer ones(I've had to deal with this more than a few times). Proper multilib support is vital for Steam to run properly on amd64 installs.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

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FAIL

Re: "the cost of which would be automatically taken from their wages"

Downvote for the anecdotal downvote. The current unemployment rate is 3.6%, which is lower than any time in the last twenty years. And while it's true that the marginally attached and discouraged worker counts are still higher than in 2008, both numbers are still on a falling trajectory and the "persons not in the labor force who want a job" count is lower than any time since the "Great Recession".

So while "record levels of employment" is overstating things, it's still on the right track.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

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Facepalm

Re: Machine learning

First, zips are single files; even if there's no actual compression, copying one is fundamentally the same as copying any other single file.

Second, torrented files are expected to have holes in them; copies are expected to be complete. The occasional corrupt copy from an interrupted operation is acceptable; an entire directory tree of unfinished files is not.

What you want would involve cooperation from the very structure of the file system itself. Needless to say, no major FS implements the necessary components.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

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Re: All good things come to an end

Most of them likely have 64-bit processors under the hood. x86-64 is old enough that Microsoft released a version of XP for it.

Carpet Deal 'em
Boffin

Re: To Everything There Is A Season...

I have five i386 laptops and two i386 netbooks in regular use. Why would I get rid of them when they are work fine and do what I want them to do?

Unless these were made before the mid two thousands or have first generation Atoms, then what you have is seven amd64 processors not running in long mode. Unless you're severely memory-starved, upgrading to the 64-bit version of your OS/distro is a good idea at this point.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

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Trollface

What do you expect when they're trying to come up with policy whilest typing it up one-handed?

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