Posts by John Savard 2460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
I'd be more happy about this news story if I didn't remember about how people in the UK were prevented from learning about the dangers posed by Thalidomide after Americans had already been warned, so that only a few children were deformed by it in the United States, while many suffered in the UK. So the British authorities can't really be trusted to warn the people of health dangers.
Unfortunately, the icon I wanted was only available to anonymous cowards.
The expensive Mac Pro just illustrates even more sharply the greed of Apple for not making all its computers, even the least expensive models, the same way, as repairable and upgradeable as possible.
But it no longer matters. It's not as if one is missing out on the ability to use any good software because of having Windows instead of a Mac, since Apple's behavior has sent its market share down to very low levels. They're now only hurting themselves.
If the Chinese government is behind a DDoS attack, surely that's a violation of the Internet's terms of service. Shouldn't their country's links to the Internet be cut off?
Of course, that might be difficult. China no doubt has some direct connections to the world Internet that go through Russia.
I suppose the penalty is so mild only because there's no way to prove that the company actually condoned the practice. It could have been done in violation of the rules by "lazy" employees trying to meet an impossible sales quota.
Just enough deniability to prevent what should happen in cases like this: the company is confiscated from its owners, so that it ceases to exist while service continues to be provided to its customers.
But still, at least there could have been laws on the books that would send the call center employee who switched their services over without authorization to prison for up to 14 years. This wouldn't be as good as putting those in charge of the company in prison, but it would still have the effect of preventing this from happening again - as they would find no employees willing to do that kind of thing, if it is what they wanted.
While it's true the first lecture of the century was in 2001 and not 2000, since we're in the twenty-first century and not the "two thousands", since decades are described by their leading digits - i.e. we had the "nineteen-sixties", and not the "197th Decade", 2020 will be the first year of the twenty-twenties. 2021 will be the first year of the Two-Hundred and Third Decade, but no one will pay attention to that.
Well, it is true that they recently opened a discussion with their players about how microtransactions, although people tend to dislike them, are necessary to produce additional revenue, over and above membership fees, to keep the game running. So there is some issue about the staff to player ratio, even if it is not as severe as what you have identified.
They say that their broadcasts contain "more information" due to using a "super-fast short wavelength". It is true that higher-frequency radio signals tend to also have a wider bandwidth, so there's nothing here about the speed of light. Compare FM radio to AM radio (or MW, Medium Wave, as I believe you call it).
China and Russia are nuclear superpowers. So if they don't want to extradite the person who stole your code, the U.S. government can't just respond with regime change.
China is a totalitarian dictatorship. They say they have freedom of religion, but Catholics there can't go to actual Catholic churches, but instead to churches run by a government-controlled body, the Patriotic Catholic Association. (I realise some people in Britain may not understand how bad this is, because they had the Church of England palmed off on them by Henry VIII as just as good.)
Russia's political system is not particularly inspiring either.
Yes, a lot of countries have hackers, but Russia and China are the places where the government can just order people to engage in espionage or their families will be harmed. Under such a condition, no one from those countries can be trusted, and it's not their fault. Turkey, Brazil, and other countries noted are not on that level.
Well, yes. How are we to get to the point where no company, ever, takes a single action that violates the law, unless every single one of their employees is absolutely terrified of what happens to people who participate in breaking the law - and so they won't hesitate a second to refuse any attempt to have them do anything legally prohibited, because going to jail for the rest of your life (presumably under unpleasant conditions too) is worse than being fired?
I mean, it's unfortunate that this means employees will be caught in the middle, and sometimes they'll be fired and it won't be possible to prove why, but how else is crime going to be eradicated from the face of the Earth?
A human has died.
The cost of the medical care she requires to stop being dead, and resume living, is greater than the market capitalization of Uber.
Goodbye Uber.
That's how it should work; then businesses would exert themselves mightily to do whatever is necessary to eliminate any risk whatsoever of people being killed or injured by their activities.
I suppose there was no point in adding Iran and North Korea to the list, as people from those countries would have no opportunity to work for GitLab. However, they should have been more specific about China, since people from Taiwan don't pose a risk, from the viewpoint I'm assuming they're using.
And here I was told that the market for desktop computers was dead, the market for laptop computers was in-between, and smartphones and tablets were where all the action was! Of course, that might still be true; just because the smartphone market isn't growing, its sales volume could still be higher than for those other computing devices.
Myself, I buck the trend; I'm doing a Ryzen 9 3900X build at the moment.
It's a good thing that Intel has been trying to get smartphone makers to use x86 chips instead of ARM chips. That way, it will still be possible for smartphone makers to stay in business after ARM gets added to the Entity List for daring to sell to Huawei, and companies that trade with the U.S. are no longer able to buy things from ARM.
So instead of the end result being that China can't use ARM, it will be that everyone else, or at least the U.S., can't use ARM.
I know that many people believe this, but while Bernie Sanders may have energized the Democratic base, he would have been anathema to nearly all middle-of-the-road voters in the United States, and thus his candidacy would instead have eliminated the Electoral College as a factor in what would have been Donald J. Trump's landslide win. He applied the word "socialist" to himself in a public place, after all.
I know when I was taught to drive, I was taught in a residential neighborhood where people had cars parked right up to the corner, so at the stop signs I could not see oncoming traffic. Since I could see the road in front through gaps in the parked cars, being allowed to do a California roll would actually have been safer, as I could have gone through the road when I new there were no cars in it, instead of having to stick the nose of the car out when a car might be zooming past for all I knew.
Here in Canada, red goes straight to green; I hadn't even been aware traffic lights anywhere worked in any other way. Among other things, green requires that your car is capable of moving before you go through the intersection. And of course you should not proceed if it is unsafe to do so at any time, but green indicates that it is likely to be safe if the other drivers are following the rules.
I live in Canada, where we largely use the form of English spoken by our cousins to the south, even if we occasionally spell the language in writing in the proper fashion rather than in the simplified manner prescribed by Noah Webster. (Of course, he wasn't a patch on James Murray, but that's another question.)
I reat that famous book about IBM, from cover to cover.
The facts it recounted - with one minor exception - showed that IBM had done everything in its power to prevent misuse of its equipment and technology by the Nazis.
The way the book tried to spin the things, of course, told a different story, but because apparently the writer was careful to ensure his facts were accurate, the spin didn't conceal the truth, which was obvious from the book's very own pages.
The exception? Apparently IBM did take steps to cover up the use of punched cards of the IBM style - illegally - by the Nazis in the operation of the concentration camps, to avoid an undeserved hit to its image. That was the only thing in that whole book that IBM did that could be construed as anything but exemplary corporate conduct.
Read the book, but while you're reading, pay attention to the facts, not the emotions the writer is trying to stimulate.
"Oracle first, SQL Server second and AWS third"? I can't believe I'm hearing this. Where's DB2? And I guess that's not counting all the people who are using Postgres, Maria, MySQL, or whatever and not having to pay money to anyone, except for hardware. That Oracle - and IBM, for that matter - might have capabilities that are far ahead of anything either Amazon or open-source software can provide, though, is quite possible, but not everyone who needs a database needs those capabilities.
I thought that the UK had quite some time ago, made it a requirement for ISPs to filter porn out of the Internet as they fed it to people's homes, although people could choose to opt out of this.
So if they just required ISPs to verify the age of subscribers who ask to have porn filtering turned off, instead of asking the porn sites to verify the age of visitors, wouldn't that achieve the goal, while avoiding the problem of having huge numbers of British citizens' credit cards on porn sites just waiting to be stolen by hackers?
It is not, in any way whatsoever, questionable that two astronauts landed on the Moon in each of the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions. This is recognized and accepted as a fact of history, confirmed by the hundreds of scientists who studied the Apollo lunar samples. The notion that the Apollo landings were faked is a fantasy of deranged conspiracy theorists, and nothing more.
If one holds, as a basic principle, that the government may not inflict any injustices directly, then the fact that there are pre-existing injustices in the real world, while unfortunate, can only be remediated by measures that cannot possibly inflict any injustices themselves (and it must be possible to prove that). Of course, that principle slows the progress of disadvantaged groups to full equality, which is why there's currently an acrimonious debate around whether or not it should continue to be observed.
The ideal situation, of course, is when the economy is working so well that there are good jobs for all qualified applicants, so that ensuring those from a previously discriminated-against group have opportunities doesn't shut anyone else out. Governments have not been doing their job to restore normal economic conditions (those of the 1948-1968 post-war boom), and so they shouldn't be surprised the electorate is now rancorous and is putting demagogues in office. They should have prevented that by doing their job in the first place.
It's not as if any laws of physics would have to be violated to achieve this; we can first go on a binge building a vast number of breeder reactors, and then we will be able to produce enough energy to sustain any level of economic activity likely to be desired.
They should be made to provide free security updates forever. They should not have written it with bugs in the first place. But taking the people who write viruses and making them work to make money to pay Microsoft to re-imburse it for its expenses in making its operating system secure is fair too. As well as all other operating system vendors or producers, of course.
Huawei "holds about two-thirds of 5G-related patents"? In that case, I suppose the United States should simply skip 5G and go straight to 6G after it is developed entirely by trustworthy companies well within the Western world. It is rather hard to keep Huawei out of something it basically owns, even if there are restrictions on licensing standards-related patents.
I read that book. From cover to cover. And as far as I could see, from the facts recounted in that book, IBM had taken every step in its power to prevent misuse of their technology by the Nazis. As a private company, they couldn't blow up their factories in Germany, particularly before the war started.
The only thing that could be criticized in IBM's conduct was that it took steps to avoid an association between punched cards and the Holocaust, due to the illegal unlicensed misuse of IBM's punched card technology by the Nazis, from entering the public mind - they covered up the historical record of some events that were not under their control to prevent damage to their brand image.
Every step of the way, they withdrew their technology from Germany to the extent they were able, and they contributed to the Allied war effort as a public-spirited business.
While I strongly disapprove of Seth Vargo's gesture, which affects innocent third parties, and I agree that the United States government has a right and a duty to control immigration at its borders, the fact remains that there are people in Central America who, due to an ongoing situation of armed violence there, do not have any good legal alternatives for themselves and their families.
If the United States doesn't want to accept them as refugees - and their refugee claim is valid under international laws and treaties the United States has signed - it can use its armed might to bring peace and order to the area from which these people came.
Compassion and empathy for all innocent human beings is not a failing.
Of course there should be severe penalties for such crimes. But how could any compromise of a single point in the network deprive people of Internet service? Evidently new quality standards will have to be imposed by the government, since ISPs are not providing adequately reliable service on their own. Triple redundancy. So that whatever happens, there is time to fix the broken part before the two remaining parts in parallel both fail. Of course, more basic and important things than Internet service, such as electrical power and telephone service need to be brought up to this standard as well.
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