Posts by holmegm

WordPress's Automattic openly tracks websites bailing from rival WP Engine

Insane.

As someone who works with WordPress as bread and butter in an agency - they both kind of suck as hosts, though I would say that WP Engine sucks *less*.

You don't *need* special weird non-standard hosting for WordPress - which is a fair description of both Automattic hosting and WP Engine - you only need php and MySQL.

Anyway, zillions of hosts advertise WordPress hosting - it's just a marketing tactic. Fine, Mullenweg has a bee in his bonnet about WP Engine, but that shouldn't be anybody's problem except his.

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: It isn't just Gooooooogle

"When I dare to have a peek at a website's code and structure, it, often, leaves me with the impression that site was never designed for human consumption, but, rather, for other machines."

Well, to be fair - the source *was* designed for other machines.

Days after President Trump suggests pausing election over security, US House passes $500m for states to shore up election security

Re: Its too late now

He won fair and square in 2016 and he'll likely win again.

Your strategy is still to call those whose votes you need stupid and racist. That didn't work well enough for you, for some mysterious reason. Now you've added the rioter as your poster child. That also isn't going to work well, strangely enough. Nor is the, er, electric excitement of ... Biden.

Unless, you cheat enough.

Re: Its too late now

It's strange how you believe these things. I guess propaganda works.

In the real world, Hillary recounts have to be stopped because Detroit precincts "vote" greater than 100% for Hillary. (For the mathematically challenged, that's impossible. Without fraud.)

Poor people being bused from polling place to polling place to vote early and often are not "voting" Republican. Illegal immigrants are not "voting" Republican. Dead people in Chicago are not "voting" Republican. You have the players backward.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

Wait, what?

You are a brave rebel because you *almost* published something that you *think* "probably" breaks some law?

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

"Male" for the thing that sticks out, and "female" for the thing it goes in, are perfectly logical terms. Also very conducive to clear communication, and safe execution of steps in procedures.

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

Which is it?

Is it an immigration program, or a school program?

-If it's a school program, then why do you need to physically be here to take online classes?

-But if it's an immigration program, then 1. why not be honest about that, and 2. so *I'm* the racist because *you* want a thinly veiled IQ-based immigration program?

Um. If your classes are online, then you don't need to physically be here. It's pretty simple.

Re: PSA

You people really have completely lost your minds. You do realize that you sound stark raving mad, right?

"The fascist crowd", to the extent that one even exists, are the ones who are engaging in political street violence, with the tacit approval of some of the authorities (sound historically familiar?). Hint: they don't even like Trump (to put it mildly).

You are completely confused as to who is who.

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

What? No integration of Pocket like Firefox? I demand my money back!

Hey NYPD, when you're done tear-gassing and running over protesters, can you tell us about your spy gear?

First of all, it's "protests", scare quotes needed. They are really riots.

Secondly, if it's time to "vote for change", then I guess we'd better figure out who runs all these big city police departments, and vote them out, right? They have been run for decades by the same group, so that should be fairly easy. What's that ... no? Not what you meant?

To test its security mid-pandemic, GitLab tried phishing its own work-from-home staff. 1 in 5 fell for it

Re: Not bad? Users? Policy?

"74% recognize it as phishy but don't bother to inform security?"

I don't bother reporting most phishing in general. There's just too much of it.

I guess a really good looking one that appeared to be from my own employer ... well, yeah, I probably would. You have a point.

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Re: Greedy and careless

The cool kids look down on PHP. The rest of us use it, to power, oh, I dunno, most of the web.

It looks like you want a storage appliance for your data centre. Maybe you'd prefer a smart card reader?

Er, well, two perfectly unborked possibilities present themselves:

1. They *are* both storage related? Granted, the category is broad, but ...

2. One might be an "also bought" to the other. If an item is rarely bought, there can be some odd bedfellows sometimes.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: The question should be "Who has never made a coding mistake?"

I was always deeply grateful for the testing b* from hell at my previous job. I think 95%+ of bugs were caught by her, not users.

Like all worthwhile things, sometimes painful, but well worth it.

Human intelligence may not be enough: US military turns to machine learning algos to predict food shortages

All the incentives are actually to inflate the death numbers. Funds from higher to lower levels of government, insurance coverage, private charitable efforts, all sorts of things incentivize reporting *higher* death numbers.

Died from a heart attack while also testing positive for C19? A "C19 death". For example.

"representing over a million people in retail, meatpacking, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing industries, estimated that at least 72 of its members had died from COVID-19 so far."

I'm not a math wiz, but maybe that isn't quite as scary as you seem to think that it is? How long is "so far", for one thing?

ICE cold: Microsoft's GitHub wrings hands over US prez's Trump immigration ban plan

Re: What November elections?

There are some state governors who certainly hope that there aren't.

Re: Aren't his wife and/or ex-wife born and raised abroad?

Don't try to confuse us with facts!

And yet, despite all your "clever" quips, they do. And if anybody dares suggest stopping them, you have a fit.

Keeping a pipeline of foreign immigration open during a pandemic makes no sense. Period.

Yes, there are administrative bits that aren't directly equal with travel, but they are in support of the ultimate goal; flow of people from there to here.

Yes, there are two parts to it - 1. why keep the flow of people in during a pandemic, and 2. *especially* why do it to fill jobs, when the anti-pandemic measures have resulted in artificially high unemployment?

This is a *great* time to ask why we need immigration right now. To increase our population density (now??)? To fill plentiful jobs? Why, exactly?

"Anyone who likes democracy in general should be very, very wary about a leader who attempts to leverage an emergency to push unrelated policies."

This is so rich in irony that I'm almost tempted to just let it sit there. It's the *governors* who have used this emergency to suspend civil liberties, suppress protests, engage in wacky arbitrary command and control economic regulation, etc.

Re: It is called playing to the voters

So you'd be fine with it, without that provision?

Re: It is called playing to the voters

He might. His opponents remain utterly clueless and fall right into his traps.

Do explain to voters why *they* can't be allowed to go a few miles to work, but they have to let other people travel here all the way from foreign lands to, um, go to work.

It's almost funny, watching people sink into a quagmire of contradictions, while they think that *you* (I guess?) are the ones sinking (sinking upwards?).

Go ahead, explain to ordinary people why they can't be allowed to go to, say, the dentist, or even, you know, work, but they *have* to allow other people to come here all the way from foreign countries. To, um, work. And if they disagree, they are just evil-racist-bad-ungood. Go on, I'll wait.

Go on, tell them how *essential* it is, how we just *have* to do it, to fill the plentiful jobs, because we clearly have no workers available here to do it. I'll wait ...

Sometimes one can go a little too far in search of isolation

A nearby petrol pump has had a very large, very obvious mummified bug carcass behind the screen for ... 7 years? Possibly more. The pump has been inspected with the appropriate stickers/seals multiple times. I guess it's a feature, not a bug.

I am alternately repulsed and somehow impressed.

Billionaires showered with wealth as experts say global economy set for long and deep recession

OK, the economy = people making and doing things and getting paid for it.

You have banned people from making and doing things.

So, you expected ... what, exactly?

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Trump didn't tell anybody to inject or drink anything.

He mused aloud in what is basically word salad ... but he certainly didn't tell anybody to inject or drink anything. Reacting as though he did makes *you* look nuts, not him.

Fright at the museum: Bored curators play spooky Top Trumps on Twitter over who has the creepiest object

Re: School field trips that scarred me

"The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center had a live cow with a hole where you could look into its stomach (link is to a similar study program)"

I know from experience that this (at a different location) was still on offer for school field trips, as recently as last year.

Facebook sort-of blocks anti-quarantine events – how many folks are actually behind these 'massive' protests online?

Re: "Give me Liberty or give me Covid-19"

"I do have sympathy for those fed up with being treated as guilty until they can prove their innocence. Being pushed around and punished by jobworths. Those criminalised, named and shamed, for not doing as told rather than posing any actual actual risk. And it seems worse in America than in the UK where their police state is more advanced than ours"

This is what people are actually protesting.

"But these American protests are purely political, pro-Trump, anti-Democrat, organised and supported by the usual right wing suspects, white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis, fascists and ultra-nationalists, militias and assorted gun-totting nut jobs and conspiracy theory loons."

And these are like five guys the media cameras zoom in on.

Darn viruses just won't get woke.

Re: What will Trump do

The time frames vary. For some reason, it took only four years for Carter's goodness to kick in, for example, while it took eight years for Obama's goodness to kick in. It's all rather elastic ...

Re: What will Trump do

You really show your true colors with that stuff. It's almost as if "hate has a home" with you.

Anyway, you do know the hotbeds of infection are places like NYC, right? Centers of the hip, the woke, etc.?

No, that's just a few people the media love to zoom in on.

The Michigan protest, for example, was overwhelmingly people staying in their cars, as the organizers had in fact requested. The protest you saw in the media bore little resemblance to the one that actually happened.

But, I know I speak into the wind ... the true situation just isn't as delicious as the imaginary one.

Right. The mere fact that people are protesting does *not* make them unwashed idiots who just want everybody to die. However convenient that might be for those who don't like the protesters.

Yes, there is a difference between politicians seizing an opportunity, and creating one from whole cloth.

Though, if your *goal* was to create conspiracy theories, then gleefully seizing the opportunity is a good way to go about it.

Re: Big rant, lots of capital letters...

"I do have some doubts that this actually works, but one can at least hope... Or as an American friend of mine recently said: then there will be less Trump-voters."

Classy. Wishing death for your political opponents. Must be all that love and inclusion I keep hearing about.

The hotbeds of infection are places like NYC and Detroit. Strangely enough, these are not hotbeds of libertarians. These are the hip, the urban, the woke. Maybe *they* need martial law, for some reason ...

Everyone I know who is cheesed off about the capricious arbitrary restrictions is *voluntarily* distancing, wearing masks, etc. They don't need to be ordered to do it.

But they do think that it's stupid to be forbidden to buy garden seeds but allowed to buy marijuana. They do think it's stupid that you can't go the dentist but you can get an abortion. They do that it's stupid that you can go to an overcrowded trailhead, but not to work. But "shut up", their betters explained ...

Re: Big rant, lots of capital letters...

Mockery isn't a substitute for thought though.

Liberty does, actually, matter. If we substituted "terrorism" or "violent crime" (both real things, that cause death) for "virus", I guarantee you that it would not just be some Republicans protesting the practice of the governors ruling by (basically) martial law via executive order.

For those unfamiliar with ordered liberty, executive orders are supposed to be orders given to government offices that are under the executive branch, not orders given to the *people*. Governors are not supposed to be able to create civil and criminal law by fiat.

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

Re: Mr Trump getting re-elected come November

Trump? It's the *governors* who are doing the martial law thing, and it's Trump who keeps saying that we should think about when and how to open things up.

Stop worrying – Larry Ellison and Prez Trump will have this whole coronavirus thing licked shortly with the power of data

Re: Salvation from the Devil

Um ... it has been governors issuing unconstitutional shutdown orders. Governors reveling in emergency powers.

It was Trump saying we should think about opening ups soon as possible, and said governors having hissy fits.

So Trump plays them like a fiddle (again), knowing they will do the opposite of whatever he thinks/says. Now they want to show how cool and rebellious they are, by opening up (maybe - that extra power just feels so so good to them).

But what do I know, I just live here.

Suspicious senate stock sale spurt spurs scrutiny scheme: This website tracks which shares US senators are unloading mid-pandemic

Re: Shock

You people are literally nuts. Your hatred has made your brain leave reality.

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

Re: "has died after suffering from COVID-19"

"Technically true. But actually, he had been very ill with other problems for several years."

And that worries me.

There is a difference between dying *with* COVID-19, and dying *from* COVID-19. Anybody confident that the difference is being respected? It *is* kind of a big deal when it comes to assessing risks and tradeoffs (as a mathematician would appreciate).

Sorry to bring it up at a somber moment, but actually I didn't bring it up, the article did.

Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)

Re: Audio versions

Er, no - I've never heard anyone call the surface of a dirt road "pavement".

Re: Audio versions

It's a strip made of "pavement" that runs alongside a road, for pedestrians to walk on ;)

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Fortunately in the US we still have some regional variation on this score, albeit less than could be hoped as the control freak mental state spreads. Not every state is as asinine about it as New York.

That said, this is inevitable - power corrupts. There's a *reason* that we enshrined in our Constitution the right to peaceably assemble, to freely exercise religion and so forth. It's very worrisome how eager some are just to chuck all that out. Even if we have to temporarily look the other way on it, it should bother us greatly more than it does.

The people generally are more sensible than their government drones anyway ... for example, we knew that masks were good when our betters were poo-poohing them.

Upstart Americans brandish alligators at the almighty Reg Standards Soviet

In your swimming pool, or your neighbor's. This is Florida, after all.

Keeping an alligator between you and others would indeed help with the social distancing, come to think of it.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Played Quake (I think it was) with fellow students on some classroom computers at a naval shipyard. Can't remember if we brought a CD in or simply downloaded it.

Ah, that network was lightning fast! Good times. Stupid of us, but good times.

The civilian instructors apparently had some software that showed them all of our screens in a grid ... they simply showed us some screenshots, told us to knock it off, and nothing more was heard about it.

Facebook does the right thing for once: Joins Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube to clean out dodgy COVID-19 info

Re: So now they've taken the first step

"So we are going to be faced with the next problem : who decides what should be curated ?"

Oh, so there's a problem? That might be just what us "rabid free speechers" were on about, ya think?

It's a virus that literally came from China.

Um

Um, even authorities can't get their stories straight. E.g. are masks helpful, or not? One week they are useless for us commoners, the next they are discussing mandating them.

In January, WHO tweeted that there was no evidence of person to person transmission . Should *that* tweet get memory holed? (It's still there.)

The problems with censorship don't go away magically just because we want them to, or because it's important that they should.

Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake'

Re: American definition of family friendly

I'm fine with (voluntarily, like this is) blocking graphic violence too. But that's not really what you want, is it?