"...a gesture once thought reprehensible"
Seriously? In my neck of the woods, it never stopped being reprehensible.
55 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Aug 2021
... meeting my team once a week face to face is not a bad idea.
But this prevents one of the most obvious benefits of a fully remote arrangement: the ability to move somewhere not within easy (or even long) commute distance from wherever the company has physical offices. This is why I see hybrid as a weak solution: it is the worst of both worlds. I still have to commute so I cannot move outside of my area and now I have to figure out my kit for both the home office and the work office as I shift between the two locations every week.
Not only is their incompetence exposed, but also the very reason for their existence on the corporate payroll when the workers under them demonstrate their ability to get the work done without some micro-managing martinet looming over their shoulders. These folks are scared spitless about their future career prospects in a full WFH context, as they well should be!
To be clear, Microsoft will begin to phase out providing 3rd-party printer drivers alongside Windows from 2025 - 2027. From the El Reg article on the subject which you linked in your comment:
Manufacturers will, according to Microsoft, "need to provide customers with an alternative means to download and install those printer drivers."
So it's not as if you will no longer be able to install, utilize, and update 3rd-party printer drivers on a machine running Windows. Microsoft just plans to soon no longer take part in the process for you.
I, too ask snarky, assumption-laden questions about people's backups, secondary backup in a separate format/system, and tertiary backups stored offsite (all as the 3-2-1 Rule of Backups suggest) with a near absolute certainty that they do not possess a single backup, let alone three of them with the various redundancies of storage medium/separate systems, and onsite/offsite backup availability.
I do not do this to be cruel or out of any sense of schadenfreude; quite the opposite, in fact. I empathize with their pain because I, too was burned by a hard drive failure many, many moons ago in my PFY days and lost a few years of stuff because I hadn't bothered to consider having at least a basic backup plan as a failsafe. What I did obtain in place of all of my lost files was a profound sense of the urgency and importance of backing up anything and everything which has any value at all to me. As they say, "If you don't have a backup of it, it doesn't exist".
We ask these questions already knowing the answer to teach that unfortunate soul who just lost 20 years of family photos what questions they need to ask and answer to and for themselves. I usually suggest they begin by ensuring anything of any importance "lives" in a cloud storage folder such as Google Drive/One Drive/iCloud on their local machine as a simple Poor Man's Backup solution which is (marginally) better than having no backups at all.
Absolutely agreed! I recall reading warnings from antivirus software prior to running a scan which explicitly stated that any other anti-virus/malware tool(s) installed on the system *might* be labeled as a PUP just due to the nature of the software. (I'm guessing primarily due to the presence of internal databases containing numerous definitions/hashes of various trackers, viruses, and other malware - but that is just a guess and likely a poor one at that).
Barring intentional poisoning if that can be proven, under exactly what law(s) do you expect such a case would be prosecuted? Health department regulations don't tend to apply to individuals cooking in their own kitchens for non-commercial purposes.
Agreed. It would be better to lock the H1B visa holder to a specific industry or profession and provide a reasonable time period in which a terminated H1B employee can find other employment within their field. There would need to be some guardrails in place to prevent abuse, such as the new position also needing to be H1B-eligible (without having to restart the entire process), but requiring someone to leave the country because they get laid off or ask for pay comparable to their peers is inhumane.
Allowing a legal market for kiddie smut in any form incentivises perverts to risk creating more of it for profit motives beyond their existing sick compulsions. Setting aside for the moment the idea of the minor(s) in a given pornographic image not "minding" (with great difficulty), the poor kids depicted in subsequent batches of child porn will certainly mind!
But it's not as if the monsters creating this filth are out there asking for consent in the first place, are they? The Squick Factor of your thinking on this is off the charts.
> If a state wants to pass such a law, what would happen if all the sites affected by such a law just blocked all the IP's from inside that state from accessing their resources?
The Texas state law also attempts to prohibit social media companies from not allowing Texas-based users to access their sites.
Good luck with that one!
Indeed. For extra measure, they encrypted the data with the highly complex and ever-so-secure Base64 encoding. Our own El Reg covered the whole kerfuffle in a recent (15 Feb 22) article:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/missouri_html_hacking/
Stay tuned for the possibility of aspiring dictators who didn't figure out how to subvert the democracy and got voted out before they could entrench themselves, but yet somehow managed to secure reelection so that they might have another go at it.
Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen.
Clients: Good morning.
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...
Client 1: Excuse me.
Mr. Wiggin: Yes?
Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?
Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.
Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?
Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses.
Clients: Ah.
Mr. Wiggin: Pity.
Clients: Yes.
Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially) My life has been leading up to this.
Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.
Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.
Clients: Well...
Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.
Client 1: I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.
I am reminded of the old trope in (usually comedic) film where a news presenter from a communist bloc nation is shown reading news of some event in the film as filtered through propaganda censors while an arm holding a pistol pointed directly at the presenter's head is clearly visible on-camera.