This was absolutely hilarious.I'm certainly no security expert... I'm just a humble programmer who understands how security holes are made (heavens know I make them often enough).
Let's be 100% true to ourselves... the security crowd is generally full of shit. When I read the headline of an article (a month ago on Slashdot sometime) making some dumb-ass remark like "There have been more hacks already in 2017 than in any previous year". They whole article rambles on non-stop for frigging ages about how bad the attacks are... and it doesn't make the point of the absolute obvious... we are detecting more attacks this year than we had in the past. That means that we are probably responding to more attacks than we had in the past.
There's the issue of:
“This wasn't a credit card play," said one person familiar with the investigation. "This was a 'get as much data as you can on every American’ play.” But it probably won’t be known if state hackers—from China or another country—were involved until U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement complete their work.
If you read the full article, it goes on and on and on about two major things:
1) It absolutely has to be a government... almost absolutely certainly China!
2) It was a long game with lots of people and tiers involved.
I'll add something that concerned me a great deal...
3) "The company's suite of tools included Moloch, which works much like a black box after an airliner crash by keeping a record of a network's internal communications and data traffic. Using Moloch, investigators reconstructed every step."
Ok... let's address #1... if it's a government, then it's for warfare, military, etc... this was a huge investment for China to make to hack like this. In addition, this is 2017 and China has almost total free reign throughout America... and everywhere else. I was working in a highly secure environment the other day and befriended a lovely young Chinese girl who speaks English beautifully. She is a Chinese citizen... not dual anything, 100% Chinese and she loves China and wants to go back. While I'm 100% sure she's the real deal and there's nothing to worry about her... she is currently working in an environment where in less than 1 day of work, she could collapse the entire national economy of one of the world's richest countries. I'll leave the details at that... but this is absolutely not an exaggeration.
Economists will probably happily say that the value of an job this scale to attack and devastate Equifax would be extremely poorly thought out if they were to invest so heavily from operating from the outside. The inside would be far smarter and more effective. And given the resources of a government, Equifax would be a relatively easy target to place someone on the inside. I'm just speculating, but I'd imagine that they have more than their fair share of international workers like every other company over 5 employees.
Then we have #2... the long game. There is lot of noise about how this couldn't be about identity theft or credit card theft... but they also talk about how whoever is doing this seems to be well financed and well organized. Jesus you idiots... pick one or the other. You're suggesting that just because the data hasn't shown up en-mass on the black market (where... Craigslist?).... then it can't be credit card related.
Let's consider... why blow your entire was leaving enormous paper trails back to yourself by selling this stuff immediately? That would be just plain stupid. Instead 99% of the information Equifax has on people can be used to establish new lines of credit. For example, the quick loan websites for people with good or semi-good credit. It would be possible to slowly but surely use the information from Equifax to apply for loans from $1,000 to $50,000 using automated software. It would be possible to draw a few dollars here and there out and move it via PayPal, Western Unio
This is a US Government installation. They almost certainly are using Cisco or Aruba Wireless. Of course, they never buy the cheapest model either.
Let's talk Cisco for a moment. Cisco delivers a technology known as "CleanAir" which Aruba also has for the most part. It's designed for site survey and is able to scan large chunks of the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz spectrum.
Turn the feature on... then look at the map and see if there's microwave near by. It will assign pseudo MAC addresses to unknown signals and attempt to identify them by radio pattern.
Now, if CleanAir isn't picking it up, then install some spectrum analyzers.
As others had mentioned... you don't need to transmit audible signals into someones head to make them hear it. You simply need to transmit signals which trigger the mind to believe they are audible. Microwave and others are perfectly capable of having this effect. In fact, some people believe that the reason why some people claim to be susceptible to wireless networking is because it causes a ringing like tinnitus. Of course like Tinnitus (which I recently began suffering... Merry Christmas 2016) it's not possible to diagnose properly.
As for targeted signals.... all frequencies can be targeted. It's not as if there's something somewhere which says audio absolutely must be as close to isotropic as possible. Any frequency can quite easily be targeted.
As a cheap but effective example... sound showers are an example of this.
Can you prove that the brain damage is not a preexisting condition? I've worked in those places before and honestly, the only people who generally don't strike me as being severely mentally handicapped are the janitorial staff and maybe the soldiers.
I have never encountered a politician that doesn't struggle with basic verbal and memory skills.
Do you often hear one person talking, then a room full of people laughing and then you realize you're not?
This is commonly referred to as "Missing the joke". It is common among people who are told one thing and hear something else.
Of course, I don't have a good vocabulary entry regarding when it's about politics rather than jokes, but I believe you have just experienced it. There are actually therapists (not to be confused with "the rapists") who specialize in trying to help you with this disorder.
Trump is and always has been about monuments. I've seen many of his monuments. As a real-estate developer, he was generally willing to build things just about everywhere and anywhere so long as it would have his name on it. His gift has generally always been to gather business people and investors together to pool their money for a development project. He would then make provisions that said that he really didn't care whether he made money or not himself... it was only important his name was on it. He likes big shiny things with his name on it.
Watch every single thing he has done in D.C. so far... every deal, every negotiation. Consistently, it's been about gaining leverage for the "Trump Wall" or "Great Wall of Trump". No other topic causes him to become so impassioned as building a wall. He is backing off of dreamers now because he realized "I have to admit that there are some Mexicans that actually should be sent back"... he really doesn't care one way or the other. Hell, if he did, Trump would never have employed dreamers himself. What he does care about is that he will get one of the biggest monuments in the world with his name on it.
So... stop thinking about Trump in terms of politics. He will (as he has so far) do absolutely anything to gain support for his new monument. Congress could get tons of stuff out of him if all they did was use 1 mile of wall as a form of payment for him... like "Trump make this happen and we'll give you a mile of wall". He would pant and drool. He doesn't want love. He doesn't need money. He wants buildings and walls and golf courses with his name on it. He assumes that this would be his 5000 year competition for the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids. He knows that if the wall goes up, it will stay up and maintained in some form or another for at least several hundred years... dedicated to Trump.. If Hoover can get the damn, Trump can have the wall.
Then there's Cuba.
Cuba is an excellent opportunity for :
a) Land grabs. Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Mallorca, Malta, Gozo, etc... are covered with hotels... almost all sea front real-estate is owned by opportunist land grabbers from elsewhere. This is probably Greece's #1 financial problem. Their most valuable industry... tourism is completely owned by external entities.
b) Tax haven.... Trump has always loved a great tax haven... I'd bash him.. but he would be stupid if he didn't.
c) Monuments.... the cost of building in Cuba is low enough now that Trump could build and furnish the world's largest casino for pennies on the dollar. It's not about profit. It's about making a hotel with a sign so big you'd be able to read "Trump" from the Florida Keys.
Trump is done padding his bottom line. Even if he loses everything now, he will still get the presidential retirement package which is pretty good from what I hear. He doesn't have to make more money. He simply needs to relocate it to maximize the visibility of Trump for as long as possible.
He wants the monuments. Casinos come and go... but with some luck, we can keep his name on one... in neon for 200 years.
I haven't seen any case on any phones lately where performance has been an issue. I think by this point in time, I'm walking around with (an iPhone 6S Plus) and I would imagine that by now, it's quite slow. I of course can't tell. In fact, when I upgraded from the iPhone 5S I didn't see any difference in performance. I don't know whether I have 3D touch... I do know that I can tap the screen and watch movies, play games and do work.... oh and phone calls are reasonably good these days.
I have a Samsung Android phone which cost me about $75 at T-Mobile in the US while I was there that I use for internet connectivity. I think the battery life isn't very good and I think that it's a bit slower than my iPhone 6S Plus. But I was able to listen to audio books and play some driving games on it while providing internet to my kids. I would say it was pretty good.
What was the actual advantage of having a better CPU this time around?
I am considering switching to Android once Apple stops selling iPhone 6S Plus. I'll try to get something which has a good headphone jack. Unfortunately, I don't know of any Android providers which have a reasonable infrastructure for supporting their phones. I don't like using corner "Replace your screen for $99 using parts from ebay" kind of places. HTC, Samsung and Sony have no presence here.
You're so cute... it's like watching a little kid kick a soccer ball and trip over it and face plant.
Fools join teams. Democrats and Republicans are not governing organizations. They're sports teams trying to play a game which is mostly about sucker punching each other. If you support either team it's like a little child who isn't smart enough to think for themselves yet so you look to big people to hold your hand when crossing the street and cry for mommy to wipe your little booty for you.
Party politics and worse, people who think that one party is better than the other is destroying America. Let's make this easy... while Bernie Sanders isn't exactly terribly intelligent, he has always struck me as someone who seemed to try and make decisions based on right and wrong as he sees it vs. right or left party politics. But, when they republicans let their party destroy itself from the inside and all that was left was Donald Trump... a man who made absolutely no secret of living a life of preying on the weak and whoring and whatever else... the democrats eventually chose to put their own bottom feeder at the forefront as their candidate. They didn't think in terms of right and wrong. They chose the candidate they felt would be more successful at fighting a mud slinging campaign against Donald. We ended up with a true baby seal clubber in their corner.
Then we stuck them into the ring together and she walloped and pounded on him and he made a fool of himself and she made a jackass of herself. And she was so arrogant that she actually was so sure she'd win that while he found a small but loyal base of voters, she laughed and told the rest of the voters that they don't even need to show up to vote, how could she possibly lose?
This is what your childish antics gave us. It gave us a boxing match like Tyson vs. Sphinx (last match I watched) which lasted 91 seconds (or something like that) and then it was over. That fight was a perfect match... one guy was big and stupid and talked like an idiot.... the other guy was not quite as big but also stupid and couldn't spell his own name... the punched each other, one went down and the other ended up biting an ear off of someone in the ring because they hurt his wittle feelings.
Let's also say that while Bernie is unfortunately a politician... a disease which strikes people dumb as soon as they catch it, he seemed to at least be a little in touch with things like... "After I get this job, to be successful, I will need to work with other people to make good things happen"... so he plays nice with everyone if he can. He's like GWB but able to tie his own shoelaces.
Is this who you want as your governors, your presidents, your senators, your judges? Do you seriously want to play the two team thing and make a jackass of yourself and chose left or right as if either choice is actually intelligent?
Let a big person help you a little child.
When the government is discussing things... nearly every possible thing they discuss is wrapped in a question of "How can we best represent the people of this country". What this means is that if there's two teams debating the topic, they'll debate it based on who proposed it and what would it mean for their team's power struggle.
If you however were to vote for random people... meaning... maybe start a grass roots campaign which would offer "Democrat, Republican, Random taxpayer" and when people choose the last option, they would write a name on a piece of paper, place it in a bag and someone would shake the bag and a name would be picked... then you would have entropy.
Entropy in governmental selection is far more intelligent than party politics because it means that each decision made would require people to actually discuss it. People would be forced to hear things like "Where we live, it's like this...". It will require people to discuss the needs of their constituency as they see it. It will require them to meet and discuss with local people and business leaders the needs of the peo
Job targets probably don't need to be long term, can probably cover construction jobs while building the factory and very likely can include low paid jobs as well.
Foxconn will go from using cheap labor in China to people working like "Sure you can have a job, the government is actually paying your salary and a bonus to us for hiring you.
My guess will be that if Foxconn does it properly, they should be able to enter the state, and run operations for three years, eliminate sea shipping costs, establish an American trucking industry... preferably with cheap labor or self-driving trucks, run their factories with little regard to environmental issues (was in the deal) and then downsize operations and start moving out.
If they do it right, then they can play states off of each other and start negotiating a similar deal with another state and probably go 9-10 years being paid to operate in America and kill off as many jobs as possible in other sectors by gaining a strong foothold on American soil.
I hear you... honestly.... I chose something of a mix. I come from a background of being a key developer on 3 separate billion user products. I have been a real programmer for years. I've written compilers, operating systems, network stacks, web browsers, video codecs, audio codecs, protocol stacks, large scale state machine management systems, etc... honestly, I've managed to always have the absolute most fun jobs in programming most of my life.
Then I had a family and found out I needed more money to maintain my preferred life style... which is pretty much swipe the card, if there's money left good... if not... transfer from another account and be more careful for a few days. So I left being a programmer.j.. kinda.
I entered Cisco Networking and studied 18 hours a day 6 days a week and 10 hours a day on the 7th for 3 months straight. Videos, books, etc... I pretty much just memorized everything I would need to enter the networking industry as a senior level engineer with a senior level salary.
My salary doubled.
Since then I've been travelling the world working for the Bank of Spain, the US DHS, the US Navy, the Norwegian Prime Minister's office, Cisco themselves, NATO, Bank of Denmark, the Norwegian Stock Exchange, Telia Sonera, Telenor, Sainsbury UK... quite a few really.
I loved it... then I got bored. Been there done that. Filled up two passports in 5 years... saw the world. Even used my frequent flyer miles to travel around the entire world business class with the kids on summer.
Now I'm a programmer again. I'm taking what I learned from networking and being in key positions in some of the world largest networking projects and I'm writing code to automate it... in Powershell.
This is the funny thing. I'm actually writing code for Powershell. To be fair, I can be a real programmer in any language... I even wrote a proper recursive descent parser for a C like language in Powershell itself. It was absolutely entertaining.
The fact is, people were willing to pay EXTRA for Powershell because Powershell is a command line and people aren't scared of command lines. Everyone in IT looks at Powershell thinking "That's something I can do without becoming a programmer". Python scares the shit out of people.
Today, I'll do some grunt work with wrapping REST APIs in Powershell or C# and then later or tomorrow, I'll sit down and write an "AI algorithm" which will automatically draw as accurate of a network diagram as possible (guessing which switch should do what and how they should be configured) from just a net-list. I already figured out how to do it using old fashioned compiler optimization algorithms via AST reduction.
What's best is that being a Powershell programmer writing some scripts which does some networking apparently pays double or triple what a good operating system or web browser developer would make even though the OS/Browser developer has to be 10 times the programmer.:)
I somehow recall the number 42 having a certain significance as an answer to the wrong question. I can't possibly imagine how so many people who have read the books or seen the movie can't seem to figure out that 42 is the answer but don't realize that you're asking the wrong question.
I am 42... and I know the right question to ask... if you want to build me a massive super computer as a gift, I would gladly accept.
The question is:
Maybe I should simply leave it there and make you all build the computer and check back in a few million years:) Just kidding.
The question is : At what age do employers expect that you either know what you're doing or assume you'll never figure it out?
The answer is : 42 (well 40... but it doesn't quite fit the context of my description here).
When you're in your 20's it is assumed you don't know anything and you'll figure it out while you're going along. We'll take a gamble on you because you're cheap and you have more than enough energy to kick butt and take names.
When you're in your 30's, if you've managed to make the cut so far, then you have a job making stuff using the tools and methods you mastered in your 20's.
When you're in your 40's the tools have changed. Your education an experience is only relevant if you learn to use new tools to apply them to. For example, today, C or C++ developers aren't really interesting anymore in most jobs. Certainly not for application development. We will maintain the old code and we'll add features, but the number of projects which should be written in C or C++ is far less. We used those languages because they were really efficient and we could count clock cycles on them when that mattered. It doesn't anymore. Today, we're more interested in people who can code using more advanced languages which provide more portable and safer code.
To learn a new language to senior level proficiency takes a year or two of active use. It requires learning new libraries, ecosystems, management systems, build systems, etc... when we old-folk went to school in the 80's and 90's, multi-threaded programming was something for supercomputers and was a small topic in a single course. We were more focused on this being a future technology. We are now to the point where multi-threaded programming is a fact of life. We have established designed patterns, algorithms are understood and accepted for them. Of course, we are even moving past multi-threaded because language development has allowed far better solutions.
Consider this. Adding a compiler into your code in 1994 was not really an option. We might add a scripting language, but certainly not a compiler. This was because compilers were still very static tools built using painfully handcoded lexers and parsers and code generators. We had companies making entire livings by selling linkers like Blinker or RTLink. When I wrote a compiler back then, it was an agonizing process with poor programming patterns to support me. When I write compiler today, it may be an afternoon of work and it's a single class which I can embed in any project.
Why is this relevant? Because in the old days we were so focused on manual serialization of data, there was no language support and there was no accepted programming patterns for doing so. Even ten years ago, languages didn't offer good enough RTTI support for super-simple serialization of classes. These days, languages without those features are absolutely useless. This is because when we're performing IPC via REST, SOAP or otherwise, we want to simply pass a simple class instance to a RPC call method.
The main benefit of a modern tool/language is that when making use of lambdas in an advanced language (not C/C++), the lambda can be passed as code and then compiled in place to execute in-thread, across-threads, or across systems. This could only happen if we compiled the lambda in-place as needed. A single piece of code can have three (or more) ways of being executed. With good modern langu
Yep... and they did back in the 80's... I remember that... me and my friends used the movie theater as a 2 hour rental to talk and make out with out girlfriends.
As for the clapping and cheering thing... I knew you were going to make that comment before you even made it. It's like "I can't say I told them to be quiet" all by itself... it's REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT I make some dumb as comment about how everyone saw me as their hero. And now I no longer must stand upon the shoulders of giants because I am now one myself.
Listen... when someone is disrupting the movie, you could say "Excuse me ladies. I don't mean to disturb your conversation, but it is really important to me that I catch the details of this dancing peanut commercial before the movie starts. Can I please ask you to quiet down?"
Or maybe simply.... "Ladies the film has started. We old folk have hearing problems. Could you please be kind to a old wrinkle assed fart like me and quiet down please. I am on a fixed income now and this will be the only movie I'll see in the theaters this year".
"Young people today have no clue..."
You have to be like 100 years old to be so old that you don't remember that you and/or your friends were assholes too when you were young.
I know I am out of touch with costs of things... I lived in poverty in the late 90s, the.DOT boom happened and every year has gone up since. So after 17 years of not being in poverty.... I remember a few things.
The poorest people I knew had the best TVs... why? Easy, if you can't make ends meet anyway, why bother trying to budget for everything. Buy it, lease it, rent it, however you need to... just get it and hope you can make the payments.
The word afford is reserved for the middle class. People who make enough to make ends meet. The reason for this is that if you have enough to pay your cost of living (bills, food, car, etc...) and you like the ability to save for bigger things... even if saving really means just paying off your credit cards, you do it. People in the middle class tend to be in the middle class because of the word "afford". I means they can plan their budgets and live up to them. They know how much money they have and what they can spend without stress.
Poor people can't afford anything... hence poor. So if you can't afford anything... ever... you don't bother thinking about it. Instead, you find lay away (which is basically just paying for it before getting it), store credit cards with insane interest rates, pay check loans, etc... anything to get that TV... pay the rent? Uh... well, that's the benefits of the projects, they're used to making concessions for people who can't pay.
So... I would say where you're getting it wrong is believing that having the financial means to buy something has any impact on whether you have it or not.
Visit Florida sometime. You'll see an insanely large market of pawn shops and rent-to-owns, and an endless river of shops designed to exploit the poor by making it possible for them to have big shiny things once in a while. Once you get outside of Disney, Florida is one giant disgusting pit of the poor preying on the poorer.
Is there a special word for a female who believe it's :
- cool to be a girl
- doesn't believe the world is out to get her
- doesn't need every company in the world to prove how pro-woman they are by treating women as if they need to be told how special they are until it starts sounding like how we call disabled people "Special"
- doesn't think it's cool that she has to wonder whether she got the job because she's qualified... or worse...
- doesn't think it's cool that a lot of her colleagues around her believe she got the job to fill the quota
I think you get the point.
I was driving my 13 year old daughter and her friend home from kick-boxing practice the other day. No joke.,. cute little girls... big smiley faces... making all kinds of funny jokes.... home from kickboxing.
I asked "Did you two enjoy trying to cause each other physical injury today?" and they explained all the fun things they did like practicing punching each other in the stomach for half an hour for conditioning.
I asked "Don't you think hurting each other is maybe a little bit of a bad way to treat your friend. And they giggled and tittered as if they were playing with Barbies and explained that they do it to each other because they're friends".
I asked about their enemies. I was told "What enemies?"
They then continues to discuss a new elective class they chose for the new school year they're taking. It's about electronics and mechanical things. They will learn some electronics and how to make simple robots, some programming on Arduino, etc... it sounded great... then they started talking about friend from other schools and how those kids were able to take programming but they were upset that they weren't given the option.
Then they went home to play OverWatch with their friends.
Here are two girls... who are REALLY REALLY well suited for being in environments entirely outnumbered by men. Even by men who will think it's find to call them "Sweetheart" and it won't phase them at all. They do all the things guys do... they don't look around them and see guys and girls. They gravitate towards each other at kickboxing and such because they like hanging with girls better. They kill each other in Overwatch with friends of all types...
So instead of a girl who thinks there's a need to make a point out of being a girl. And being a girl who thinks she has to prove herself because she's a girl. What is a word that describes a girl who simply doesn't give a shit about that and simply fits in everywhere and makes people smile while she's around?
P.S. - As a father of a little girl... I have to admit I was quite pleased she and her friend decided that kickboxing would be their thing. We live near enough to a city that our main form of recreation is coffee shops downtown. And when she gets older, it's nice to know that she should be prepared to fight back against knuckle draggers.
Linux is absolutely community driven. What has changed if the definition of the community driving it.
Today, you can by a PC costing $35 and a case to put it in for $5 and power cable for $3 that will run Linux reasonably well. You would have to add storage and that can often be as expensive as $200, but it doesn't have to be. This is all possible due to wide community interest in Linux and open source and in many cases because of the grass-roots community surrounding it and driving it.
I personally don't use Linux anymore. I was 100% GNUish down to the hair, sandels and poor personal hygiene for some time. Then I grew up and realized I was spending all my time fixing Linux and not getting my actual work done. These days, I'm pretty much all Windows and Mac and I can't be bothered with Linux as there are far too many problems with it now (far too many to bother listing). I'm simply more interested in running and OS and development toolchain written for me than by me now.
Let's talk about intelligent though. 1) The Linux Kernel is 20,000,000 lines of code. As if this is something to brag about openly. It almost sounds like when I was 7 years old and excited I could write a program which used 3 whole pages of printer paper and I hung it on my wall. I added code and printed and reprinted until my dad yelled and told me to stop wasting the ink and paper. 20,000,000 lines of code means:
a) Someone doesn't know how to use libraries
b) Someone doesn't know how to make a good way of downloading external code.
c) Someone doesn't know how to make a modular system. And honestly people, we REALLY REALLY REALLY don't need every single driver to be in the Linux Kernel itself. Instead standardize a system for distributing kernel driver source across multiple sites. Then do something even smarter and make it so that if the system has the tools installed, it can connect online and download kernel module source for new device IDs if there is an available option. If Linus can make Git, I'm sure he or someone else can tackle that.
d) Code review is no longer possible. When Cisco managed to submit their changes for the Cisco VIC adapter to the kernel and then I looked at the source for VMware's VMXNET3 driver, I refused to consider either of those repositories as worth of inclusion in a controlled code base. It took seconds to see how bad the code in each of them are. So then I started digging elsewhere and realized that the quality of the Linux kernel has either severely decreased or my standards have increased.
2) SystemD is probably the best thing to ever happen to the Linux platform. There may have been better design choices that could have been made, but SystemD is absolutely frigging spectacular. As for talking about how you don't know how to use it and therefore can't troubleshoot or fix it. Sorry dude. That's clearly your fault for spending probably 10 times longer whining about having to learn a new thing rather than simply learning it. That is clearly your fault. If you're not smart enough to use SystemD, there are multiple forks already without SystemD and it's absolutely fact that no individual has ever forced you to use a distribution that runs SystemD. You have a choice.
3) Gnome 3... Gnome is a victim of the entire "Look at me, I'm going to write everything in C no matter how completely stupid that sounds because only C is pure enough to write everything in... so I'm going to write it in C and I'm going to dance like a little princess telling everyone how I made a whole desktop in C.... even if I have to re-implement the entire C++ language as a series of unreadable and undebuggable define systems and call it GObject. But my C++ will be far superior to your C++ because my C++ is written entirely in defines and headers!!!!". In other words, people were so hellbent on the tooling that design and implementation came second. GLib and GTK+ and GObject are a horrible evolution of Xt and Motif which should have died
I've notices that almost every single movie I've seen on 4K looks absolutely awful. It's horrifying. You see all the edges, you see all the mistakes, you see human features gigantic and up close which aren't even attractive in real life.
2k and lower is nice because you see what the movie looks like well enough to really enjoy it but you don't see your favorite actresses pours as if they were craters in her face. I don't want to see anyone in that detail.
4K is great if a movie was designed for it and if there's proper film grain applied to the pictures. But I've been enjoying the movies far less since watching them on 4K and TV shows that are produced in a week to rush out a whole season are just absolutely terrible in 4K.
If they box doesn't offer 2k downsampling, then I'll just watch SD instead.
Killing someone or popping off a minimart isn't cheating the government out of taxes.
Rigging the lottery could impact lotto ticket sales which could cost the government millions in lost revenue from taking advantage of the poor and the weak.
Publicly flailing this guy for messing with the system builds confidence in the people that the government is out to protect their interests and guarantee their 1 in 292,201,338 (powerball) or as they say "The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 17.22" which means that since the vast majority of prizes is the cost of your ticket back, you would have to spend $17.22 to win $1.
I can't find ANYPLACE that explains Iowa State's Megamillions game play or odds. If they are similar to most others, then it's probably something like 1 in 7.1 million odds. The break-even chances are probably in the ballpark of 1 in 15 overall.
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
The government will always punish harshly anyone who threatens their ability to tax the stupid.
I was thinking that too. He scammed a company who makes its business by taxing the weak and stupid. Then a government who taxes them gets pissy because even though they would still get their cut, it might hurt future earnings from their voluntary stupid tax.
These people glorify gambling in the eyes of children everywhere with billboards and commercials that look more like they're advertising Chuck'e Cheese than a addictive drug with almost zero (by almost zero, I mean zero... it's designed like that) chance of coming out ahead of where they started. The only reason there is a winner... ever is that they need to reel the suckers in.
Historically, whenever I've wanted to call someone stupid and embarrass them publicly, I ask them "What's your lotto numbers" and when they respond, I say "I don't know what's worse... that you're the type of person that plays lotto or that you think that by choosing your numbers it will increase your odds"
My kids were not allowed to watch Disney Channel or cartoon network (with rare exceptions) for most of their childhood. Toon Disney was ok because it was things like Gummibears and Ducktales. But things like Hanna Montana and Two Kings (I think that's the name) or Wasabi Dojo etc... were all off limits.
While this one rule wasn't enough to really shape their lives, my kids were almost famous among other parents for being the most well behaved and polite children in day care or school.
The Disney Channel itself has one show after the next which glorifies being stupid, arrogant, popular, bossy, etc... There are multiple shows back to back that show that the people everyone loves most are the people with the worst judgement and loudest mouths.
You would almost think that ESPN is paying Disney to make these shows to ensure they have a viewership later on.
To invent fire, there must be things like friction. So we can assume that Thag didn't invent that.
I'll assume also that Thag suffered from poor personal hygiene. It's common among knuckle draggers (visit any sporting event, you'll see)
I'm quite sure that either due to friction or because of layers of gooey filth, Thag didn't float because he was glued to earth.
The good news is that thanks to efforts by Disney, if Thag filled out the proper forms, his patent should still be valid and I imagine he and his descendants are owed quite a bit in royalties.
Ok... let before I dispute pretty much everything you believe in. Let me explain this.
I hate most of what Elon Musk does. I think if he and I were in the same room at a party, I wouldn't bother with him. I love having pictures taken with important people in tech. His dependence on lithium without a long-term cleanup plan. His cars that are inconsiderately large. Well, whatever... lots of stuff like that.
Now that I've bashed him, let me say what I like about him. NY Times, Washington Post, News.com, Slashdot, keep going and going and going. The news these days is so completely filled with negativity everywhere. I won't even watch the news anymore. When it comes to politics, it's one non-stop journey of who do we hate most today.
Then comes the story about an Elon Musk vision for an exciting and brighter future. We see something that lets us dream and we see something that makes us truly believe that if we reach for the stars... we might just touch one.
So while I have no use for him... I'd like to think that the energy and excitement he's bringing to at least the press is something special.
Now let's talk about your whole rant.
The United States Space Program is bought and paid for by the United States which whether through tax money or financial print your own money magic is paid for by the American people. In a capitalistic country, the government should NEVER compete with private industry. However it can develop the initial businesses and share that information with private industry once it is positioned to take it over.
ULA is made up of Lockheed and Boeing. Lockheed has never once in history wanted to run their own space program. They are a company which primarily specializes in consuming government money. Most projects given to Lockheed are designed to be cancelled to avoid a mess related to actually needing to deliver anything. Lockheed employs massive numbers of people so the US government can provide jobs. Oh... and sometimes they actually make something that actually works... and they sell those for a REALLY long time since manufacturing is something they are pretty good at.
Boeing is the company who wants to make the plane, not own the airline. They do lots of stuff, but they spend decades doing it and they also have mastered the art of doing things like getting government funding to build things which no one really needs but we see to not be able to live without. The 787 was great, but for how long it took to make, it should have been so much more. But, all that really mattered was that they eventually delivered. Now that the Chinese are getting into the game, they and Airbus are going to be totally screwed, but at least everyone responsible for their lack of agility will have retired by then.
So... since neither Lockheed or Boeing wanted to own their own launch company... here comes SpaceX and others who do. They make use of technology that was designed with help from NASA to provide the US with their own launch capabilities. SpaceX and BlueOrigin are working hard to take American technology and build American businesses out of them. In addition, Boeing and Lockheed were forced to modernize and become more agile otherwise they'd have lost out to SpaceX and BlueOrigin.
Now, after about 20 years, we have two launch capable American companies with a third one coming. We will soon have at least one launch company capable of flying manned missions. We have completely reinvented the space industry and moved from thinking in terms of billions of dollars to do anything new to thinking in terms of hundreds of millions or less.
Musk delivered on the reusable rocket. Blue Origin is going that way too. Armadillo did a lot of work that way too. There are rockets being built that will not just get us to the moon or Mars, but will allow us to do it over and over and actually consider leaving colonizing eventually.
Yes... none of the space companies would have been able to pull this off if the US and Russia space programs as well as the wea
Did anyone notice that this guy who used eliecerthoms as his github handle deleted his account and then also started deleting his entire online profile? He even has blocked his LinkedIn profile from being public.
I suppose he'll consider a name change next. It certainly might be a good idea at this point.
Ok, the button you clicked is called 'git discard'. VSCode calls git and git discards your changes.
This is 2017. What in the world are you doing writing code you consider important without knowing how to use git, subversion, mercurial, or a dozen other source control systems.
I have made a similar mistake to what this guy did. I've lost 2 hours of work because I WAS STUPID and clicked discard in frustration during a merge.
Let's start with some basics here :
1) You are a REALLY REALLY REALLY inexperienced programmer.
2) If you did a lot of work before using a revision control system, you're an idiot
3) If you knew about revision control and still didn't use it from the moment you created the project, you're a really really big idiot
4) If you coded for 2 days without using a revision control system, you are a moron
5) If you didn't create at least one full backup every single day of your code when not using a revision control system then you're not even useful in this world as cannon fodder. I'd recommend considering a long term career as fertilizer, but you'd fuck that up too.
6) You didn't run Windows Backup and Restore either. See, these are tools like Apple Time Machine. They are free and turned on in 5 clicks. But you're a cowboy right?
7) You didn't consider mapping the development folder to OneDrive, DropBox or any other place on earth which would make sure you had a backup? Are you seriously here blaming VS code for the loss of your data? Do you practice ballroom dancing in busy traffic intersections while blindfolded and then blame Henry Ford for inventing the internal combustion engine when you get hit by a bus?
Let's continue with some good stuff here.
1) You shouldn't be writing code and it's better that code is lost.
2) The code you wrote was absolute shit. I know this because if you don't know how to not lose code, then it was written by someone who has never written a single useful line of code worth not losing before.
3) You mention 5000 files. Great... most were documents or auto-generated in some form. I, as a developer who sucks less than you with A LOT of experience write 10,000 lines of code in a month during project startup in a language I'm competent in. That includes inline documentation, readme.md files, design documents and more. Following the first month, I'll probably add another 1-2000 lines a month until beta. So in three months, I may have if I really wrote TONS of rock star shit, about 15000 lines of code. That would be about 3 lines per file in your world. Of course, you are counting processed data or images or whatever as code.
I would recommend that if you ever plan on trying to code again... you do at least an hour of research, watch some videos on how experienced programmers work. There's a lot more to programming than just typing code.
I think there's been too much hype on this phone and based on the share price, that's quite clear.
There will likely be supply chain problems which are common among companies who hope to scale but are too small to demand devote resources to them. The company will probably play Elon Musk's game of trying to get more money to manufacture while spending it all faster than he can get it. The difference is, Elon had a big fat bank account to begin with from prior victories. He was selling visions... not phones. And frankly, every feature on this phone will be less than novelty in a month. Or there will be manufacturing problems because this is a lot of custom parts which almost certainly will have minor glitches. This will certainly cause a very expensive recall, and without a proper distributed service chain to manage that, this can be a disaster. Or there will be problems with the battery because, as we've seen, packing the biggest battery you can find into the tightest air-tight spaces possible has become quite an issue. Or there will be thermal issues which will become obvious from the choice of using titanium which while SUPER AWESOME sounds like a really bad idea. It's extremely similar to aluminum, but if I recall correctly, titanium is not an optimal sink as it stores too much heat. (don't shoot me if I'm wrong here) There will be support issues because even with a billion dollar market cap, a mass marketed device to be successful needs users. Users have problems. End of story. After market parts will be an issue. Without a clear supply of aftermarket screens that can be replaced for $100 at a mall on short notice, these phones will break and be replaced with something else in short order.
I love the phone. I think the advertisement for it was exciting enough that I was like "I might want to try that" and I've never once said that about a telephone from an advertisement. The power of suggestion in the advertisement effected me and I intentionally refuse to buy anything that tries to pick those nerves on me. So... these guys are absolutely spectacular... until you realize that this is likely the only phone they'll ever make and it will never be able to be repaired when it breaks.
I congratulate them on a fabulous job. It was amazing. But other than making the stock market boys have another high volume share with lots of buzz surrounding it, it was a dead project before it started. To make a successful phone today requires a company with a billion dollars in the bank and a clear international support infrastructure and parts distribution channel to succeed. It also requires a crazy insurance company/creditor willing to take the risk on a large scale recall from a somewhat unknown entity. Otherwise it's just a waste time and money.
Yes computers fail all the time.... especially airbus and boeing computers... they are both companies with amazing skills at things like mechanical, hydraulics, etc... they are horrible at things like electronics and software. This is true for companies like Ford, GM, BMW, etc... as well. I drive a BMW i3 and if I wrote software like that, I'd be unemployed. It sure is fast and comfortable though... of course every time I touch the breaks, I fear they will glitch again.
I'll assume that you take your job seriously and hopefully go beyond the minimum criteria for remaining certified. I will assume that you consider yourself to be good at what you do... I know I'm the frigging amazing at what I do... in fact I'm better than absolutely every single person that I'm not worse than.
But let me ask you something.
If you're skilled and competent at being a pilot... and you're hopefully above average at your job meaning that at least 50% of all pilots in the air are less than you. Wouldn't I want you on the ground in a virtual cockpit monitoring 10 different flights and being ready to come to the rescue as opposed to those lesser pilots?
Do I really want you on someone else's plane? Do you feel comfortable leaving me at the mercy of one of those other pilots?
What about my children? Shouldn't I want you or someone better than you ready to come to their rescue in case there's a computer problem?
Shouldn't you be able to override the computer on the plane and manually control it from a virtual cockpit and be there for other peoples children as well?
I would imagine that if there is something that needs to be physically altered or managed from someone on the plane, you are likely competent enough to communicate clearly and concisely to a flight attendant what needs to be done.
Wouldn't it be fair to suggest that more peoples lives are at risk by placing you in the air to manage one plane than if you were on the ground managing 10?
If the computer on the plane has an issue, the remote control computer should still be ok. If neither are working, I'd guess that whether you're in the cockpit physically or not would make little difference as it would probably be a problem not correctable from within the cabin.
I know there are minimum requirements to operate a passenger commercial aircraft, but I don't think that those standards are particularly high. I've met a few certified pilots that meet those requirements that in my opinion should never be in a circumstance where peoples lives depend on their intellect.
P.S. - I've been a developer writing code for systems that controlled whether large numbers of people lived or died and I often hijacked projects from less diligent developers to make sure that someone interested in more than just the minimum requirements was doing the job.
Computers on the plane I think was a point of my comment. The communicates is for if there's a real problem on the plane. This is similar to how having a radio link if your pilor and copilot suffocate from a gas in the cockpit so ground control can assist someone else to land the plane.... or simply inform the plane to route itself to a runway and land.
Flying is dangerous too depending on your definition of dangerous. Multiple engine failure, failed landing gear, computer errors, etc... all kinda nasty things. Having a link just in case or maybe to receive things like landing instructuctions...
Slashdot Mirror
This was absolutely hilarious.I'm certainly no security expert... I'm just a humble programmer who understands how security holes are made (heavens know I make them often enough).
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Let's be 100% true to ourselves... the security crowd is generally full of shit. When I read the headline of an article (a month ago on Slashdot sometime) making some dumb-ass remark like "There have been more hacks already in 2017 than in any previous year". They whole article rambles on non-stop for frigging ages about how bad the attacks are... and it doesn't make the point of the absolute obvious... we are detecting more attacks this year than we had in the past. That means that we are probably responding to more attacks than we had in the past.
There's the issue of
“This wasn't a credit card play," said one person familiar with the investigation. "This was a 'get as much data as you can on every American’ play.” But it probably won’t be known if state hackers—from China or another country—were involved until U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement complete their work.
If you read the full article, it goes on and on and on about two major things
1) It absolutely has to be a government... almost absolutely certainly China!
2) It was a long game with lots of people and tiers involved.
I'll add something that concerned me a great deal...
3) "The company's suite of tools included Moloch, which works much like a black box after an airliner crash by keeping a record of a network's internal communications and data traffic. Using Moloch, investigators reconstructed every step."
Ok... let's address #1... if it's a government, then it's for warfare, military, etc... this was a huge investment for China to make to hack like this. In addition, this is 2017 and China has almost total free reign throughout America... and everywhere else. I was working in a highly secure environment the other day and befriended a lovely young Chinese girl who speaks English beautifully. She is a Chinese citizen... not dual anything, 100% Chinese and she loves China and wants to go back. While I'm 100% sure she's the real deal and there's nothing to worry about her... she is currently working in an environment where in less than 1 day of work, she could collapse the entire national economy of one of the world's richest countries. I'll leave the details at that... but this is absolutely not an exaggeration.
Economists will probably happily say that the value of an job this scale to attack and devastate Equifax would be extremely poorly thought out if they were to invest so heavily from operating from the outside. The inside would be far smarter and more effective. And given the resources of a government, Equifax would be a relatively easy target to place someone on the inside. I'm just speculating, but I'd imagine that they have more than their fair share of international workers like every other company over 5 employees.
Then we have #2... the long game. There is lot of noise about how this couldn't be about identity theft or credit card theft... but they also talk about how whoever is doing this seems to be well financed and well organized. Jesus you idiots... pick one or the other. You're suggesting that just because the data hasn't shown up en-mass on the black market (where... Craigslist?).... then it can't be credit card related.
Let's consider... why blow your entire was leaving enormous paper trails back to yourself by selling this stuff immediately? That would be just plain stupid. Instead 99% of the information Equifax has on people can be used to establish new lines of credit. For example, the quick loan websites for people with good or semi-good credit. It would be possible to slowly but surely use the information from Equifax to apply for loans from $1,000 to $50,000 using automated software. It would be possible to draw a few dollars here and there out and move it via PayPal, Western Unio
This is a US Government installation. They almost certainly are using Cisco or Aruba Wireless. Of course, they never buy the cheapest model either.
Let's talk Cisco for a moment. Cisco delivers a technology known as "CleanAir" which Aruba also has for the most part. It's designed for site survey and is able to scan large chunks of the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz spectrum.
Turn the feature on... then look at the map and see if there's microwave near by. It will assign pseudo MAC addresses to unknown signals and attempt to identify them by radio pattern.
Now, if CleanAir isn't picking it up, then install some spectrum analyzers.
As others had mentioned... you don't need to transmit audible signals into someones head to make them hear it. You simply need to transmit signals which trigger the mind to believe they are audible. Microwave and others are perfectly capable of having this effect. In fact, some people believe that the reason why some people claim to be susceptible to wireless networking is because it causes a ringing like tinnitus. Of course like Tinnitus (which I recently began suffering... Merry Christmas 2016) it's not possible to diagnose properly.
As for targeted signals.... all frequencies can be targeted. It's not as if there's something somewhere which says audio absolutely must be as close to isotropic as possible. Any frequency can quite easily be targeted.
As a cheap but effective example... sound showers are an example of this.
They are working at an American Embassy...
Can you prove that the brain damage is not a preexisting condition? I've worked in those places before and honestly, the only people who generally don't strike me as being severely mentally handicapped are the janitorial staff and maybe the soldiers.
I have never encountered a politician that doesn't struggle with basic verbal and memory skills.
Do you often hear one person talking, then a room full of people laughing and then you realize you're not?
... like "Trump make this happen and we'll give you a mile of wall". He would pant and drool. He doesn't want love. He doesn't need money. He wants buildings and walls and golf courses with his name on it. He assumes that this would be his 5000 year competition for the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids. He knows that if the wall goes up, it will stay up and maintained in some form or another for at least several hundred years... dedicated to Trump.. If Hoover can get the damn, Trump can have the wall.
... in neon for 200 years.
This is commonly referred to as "Missing the joke". It is common among people who are told one thing and hear something else.
Of course, I don't have a good vocabulary entry regarding when it's about politics rather than jokes, but I believe you have just experienced it. There are actually therapists (not to be confused with "the rapists") who specialize in trying to help you with this disorder.
Trump is and always has been about monuments. I've seen many of his monuments. As a real-estate developer, he was generally willing to build things just about everywhere and anywhere so long as it would have his name on it. His gift has generally always been to gather business people and investors together to pool their money for a development project. He would then make provisions that said that he really didn't care whether he made money or not himself... it was only important his name was on it. He likes big shiny things with his name on it.
Watch every single thing he has done in D.C. so far... every deal, every negotiation. Consistently, it's been about gaining leverage for the "Trump Wall" or "Great Wall of Trump". No other topic causes him to become so impassioned as building a wall. He is backing off of dreamers now because he realized "I have to admit that there are some Mexicans that actually should be sent back"... he really doesn't care one way or the other. Hell, if he did, Trump would never have employed dreamers himself. What he does care about is that he will get one of the biggest monuments in the world with his name on it.
So... stop thinking about Trump in terms of politics. He will (as he has so far) do absolutely anything to gain support for his new monument. Congress could get tons of stuff out of him if all they did was use 1 mile of wall as a form of payment for him
Then there's Cuba.
Cuba is an excellent opportunity for :
a) Land grabs. Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Mallorca, Malta, Gozo, etc... are covered with hotels... almost all sea front real-estate is owned by opportunist land grabbers from elsewhere. This is probably Greece's #1 financial problem. Their most valuable industry... tourism is completely owned by external entities.
b) Tax haven.... Trump has always loved a great tax haven... I'd bash him.. but he would be stupid if he didn't.
c) Monuments.... the cost of building in Cuba is low enough now that Trump could build and furnish the world's largest casino for pennies on the dollar. It's not about profit. It's about making a hotel with a sign so big you'd be able to read "Trump" from the Florida Keys.
Trump is done padding his bottom line. Even if he loses everything now, he will still get the presidential retirement package which is pretty good from what I hear. He doesn't have to make more money. He simply needs to relocate it to maximize the visibility of Trump for as long as possible.
He wants the monuments. Casinos come and go... but with some luck, we can keep his name on one
I haven't seen any case on any phones lately where performance has been an issue. I think by this point in time, I'm walking around with (an iPhone 6S Plus) and I would imagine that by now, it's quite slow. I of course can't tell. In fact, when I upgraded from the iPhone 5S I didn't see any difference in performance. I don't know whether I have 3D touch... I do know that I can tap the screen and watch movies, play games and do work.... oh and phone calls are reasonably good these days.
I have a Samsung Android phone which cost me about $75 at T-Mobile in the US while I was there that I use for internet connectivity. I think the battery life isn't very good and I think that it's a bit slower than my iPhone 6S Plus. But I was able to listen to audio books and play some driving games on it while providing internet to my kids. I would say it was pretty good.
What was the actual advantage of having a better CPU this time around?
I am considering switching to Android once Apple stops selling iPhone 6S Plus. I'll try to get something which has a good headphone jack. Unfortunately, I don't know of any Android providers which have a reasonable infrastructure for supporting their phones. I don't like using corner "Replace your screen for $99 using parts from ebay" kind of places. HTC, Samsung and Sony have no presence here.
I am kinda more of a buffoon... does this count?
You're so cute... it's like watching a little kid kick a soccer ball and trip over it and face plant.
Fools join teams. Democrats and Republicans are not governing organizations. They're sports teams trying to play a game which is mostly about sucker punching each other. If you support either team it's like a little child who isn't smart enough to think for themselves yet so you look to big people to hold your hand when crossing the street and cry for mommy to wipe your little booty for you.
Party politics and worse, people who think that one party is better than the other is destroying America. Let's make this easy... while Bernie Sanders isn't exactly terribly intelligent, he has always struck me as someone who seemed to try and make decisions based on right and wrong as he sees it vs. right or left party politics. But, when they republicans let their party destroy itself from the inside and all that was left was Donald Trump... a man who made absolutely no secret of living a life of preying on the weak and whoring and whatever else... the democrats eventually chose to put their own bottom feeder at the forefront as their candidate. They didn't think in terms of right and wrong. They chose the candidate they felt would be more successful at fighting a mud slinging campaign against Donald. We ended up with a true baby seal clubber in their corner.
Then we stuck them into the ring together and she walloped and pounded on him and he made a fool of himself and she made a jackass of herself. And she was so arrogant that she actually was so sure she'd win that while he found a small but loyal base of voters, she laughed and told the rest of the voters that they don't even need to show up to vote, how could she possibly lose?
This is what your childish antics gave us. It gave us a boxing match like Tyson vs. Sphinx (last match I watched) which lasted 91 seconds (or something like that) and then it was over. That fight was a perfect match... one guy was big and stupid and talked like an idiot.... the other guy was not quite as big but also stupid and couldn't spell his own name... the punched each other, one went down and the other ended up biting an ear off of someone in the ring because they hurt his wittle feelings.
Let's also say that while Bernie is unfortunately a politician... a disease which strikes people dumb as soon as they catch it, he seemed to at least be a little in touch with things like... "After I get this job, to be successful, I will need to work with other people to make good things happen"... so he plays nice with everyone if he can. He's like GWB but able to tie his own shoelaces.
Is this who you want as your governors, your presidents, your senators, your judges? Do you seriously want to play the two team thing and make a jackass of yourself and chose left or right as if either choice is actually intelligent?
Let a big person help you a little child.
When the government is discussing things... nearly every possible thing they discuss is wrapped in a question of "How can we best represent the people of this country". What this means is that if there's two teams debating the topic, they'll debate it based on who proposed it and what would it mean for their team's power struggle.
If you however were to vote for random people... meaning... maybe start a grass roots campaign which would offer "Democrat, Republican, Random taxpayer" and when people choose the last option, they would write a name on a piece of paper, place it in a bag and someone would shake the bag and a name would be picked... then you would have entropy.
Entropy in governmental selection is far more intelligent than party politics because it means that each decision made would require people to actually discuss it. People would be forced to hear things like "Where we live, it's like this...". It will require people to discuss the needs of their constituency as they see it. It will require them to meet and discuss with local people and business leaders the needs of the peo
Job targets probably don't need to be long term, can probably cover construction jobs while building the factory and very likely can include low paid jobs as well.
Foxconn will go from using cheap labor in China to people working like "Sure you can have a job, the government is actually paying your salary and a bonus to us for hiring you.
My guess will be that if Foxconn does it properly, they should be able to enter the state, and run operations for three years, eliminate sea shipping costs, establish an American trucking industry... preferably with cheap labor or self-driving trucks, run their factories with little regard to environmental issues (was in the deal) and then downsize operations and start moving out.
If they do it right, then they can play states off of each other and start negotiating a similar deal with another state and probably go 9-10 years being paid to operate in America and kill off as many jobs as possible in other sectors by gaining a strong foothold on American soil.
I hear you... honestly.... I chose something of a mix. I come from a background of being a key developer on 3 separate billion user products. I have been a real programmer for years. I've written compilers, operating systems, network stacks, web browsers, video codecs, audio codecs, protocol stacks, large scale state machine management systems, etc... honestly, I've managed to always have the absolute most fun jobs in programming most of my life.
:)
Then I had a family and found out I needed more money to maintain my preferred life style... which is pretty much swipe the card, if there's money left good... if not... transfer from another account and be more careful for a few days. So I left being a programmer.j.. kinda.
I entered Cisco Networking and studied 18 hours a day 6 days a week and 10 hours a day on the 7th for 3 months straight. Videos, books, etc... I pretty much just memorized everything I would need to enter the networking industry as a senior level engineer with a senior level salary.
My salary doubled.
Since then I've been travelling the world working for the Bank of Spain, the US DHS, the US Navy, the Norwegian Prime Minister's office, Cisco themselves, NATO, Bank of Denmark, the Norwegian Stock Exchange, Telia Sonera, Telenor, Sainsbury UK... quite a few really.
I loved it... then I got bored. Been there done that. Filled up two passports in 5 years... saw the world. Even used my frequent flyer miles to travel around the entire world business class with the kids on summer.
Now I'm a programmer again. I'm taking what I learned from networking and being in key positions in some of the world largest networking projects and I'm writing code to automate it... in Powershell.
This is the funny thing. I'm actually writing code for Powershell. To be fair, I can be a real programmer in any language... I even wrote a proper recursive descent parser for a C like language in Powershell itself. It was absolutely entertaining.
The fact is, people were willing to pay EXTRA for Powershell because Powershell is a command line and people aren't scared of command lines. Everyone in IT looks at Powershell thinking "That's something I can do without becoming a programmer". Python scares the shit out of people.
Today, I'll do some grunt work with wrapping REST APIs in Powershell or C# and then later or tomorrow, I'll sit down and write an "AI algorithm" which will automatically draw as accurate of a network diagram as possible (guessing which switch should do what and how they should be configured) from just a net-list. I already figured out how to do it using old fashioned compiler optimization algorithms via AST reduction.
What's best is that being a Powershell programmer writing some scripts which does some networking apparently pays double or triple what a good operating system or web browser developer would make even though the OS/Browser developer has to be 10 times the programmer.
I somehow recall the number 42 having a certain significance as an answer to the wrong question. I can't possibly imagine how so many people who have read the books or seen the movie can't seem to figure out that 42 is the answer but don't realize that you're asking the wrong question.
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:) Just kidding.
I am 42... and I know the right question to ask... if you want to build me a massive super computer as a gift, I would gladly accept.
The question is
Maybe I should simply leave it there and make you all build the computer and check back in a few million years
The question is : At what age do employers expect that you either know what you're doing or assume you'll never figure it out?
The answer is : 42 (well 40... but it doesn't quite fit the context of my description here).
When you're in your 20's it is assumed you don't know anything and you'll figure it out while you're going along. We'll take a gamble on you because you're cheap and you have more than enough energy to kick butt and take names.
When you're in your 30's, if you've managed to make the cut so far, then you have a job making stuff using the tools and methods you mastered in your 20's.
When you're in your 40's the tools have changed. Your education an experience is only relevant if you learn to use new tools to apply them to. For example, today, C or C++ developers aren't really interesting anymore in most jobs. Certainly not for application development. We will maintain the old code and we'll add features, but the number of projects which should be written in C or C++ is far less. We used those languages because they were really efficient and we could count clock cycles on them when that mattered. It doesn't anymore. Today, we're more interested in people who can code using more advanced languages which provide more portable and safer code.
To learn a new language to senior level proficiency takes a year or two of active use. It requires learning new libraries, ecosystems, management systems, build systems, etc... when we old-folk went to school in the 80's and 90's, multi-threaded programming was something for supercomputers and was a small topic in a single course. We were more focused on this being a future technology. We are now to the point where multi-threaded programming is a fact of life. We have established designed patterns, algorithms are understood and accepted for them. Of course, we are even moving past multi-threaded because language development has allowed far better solutions.
Consider this. Adding a compiler into your code in 1994 was not really an option. We might add a scripting language, but certainly not a compiler. This was because compilers were still very static tools built using painfully handcoded lexers and parsers and code generators. We had companies making entire livings by selling linkers like Blinker or RTLink. When I wrote a compiler back then, it was an agonizing process with poor programming patterns to support me. When I write compiler today, it may be an afternoon of work and it's a single class which I can embed in any project.
Why is this relevant? Because in the old days we were so focused on manual serialization of data, there was no language support and there was no accepted programming patterns for doing so. Even ten years ago, languages didn't offer good enough RTTI support for super-simple serialization of classes. These days, languages without those features are absolutely useless. This is because when we're performing IPC via REST, SOAP or otherwise, we want to simply pass a simple class instance to a RPC call method.
The main benefit of a modern tool/language is that when making use of lambdas in an advanced language (not C/C++), the lambda can be passed as code and then compiled in place to execute in-thread, across-threads, or across systems. This could only happen if we compiled the lambda in-place as needed. A single piece of code can have three (or more) ways of being executed. With good modern langu
Yep... and they did back in the 80's... I remember that... me and my friends used the movie theater as a 2 hour rental to talk and make out with out girlfriends.
As for the clapping and cheering thing... I knew you were going to make that comment before you even made it. It's like "I can't say I told them to be quiet" all by itself... it's REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT I make some dumb as comment about how everyone saw me as their hero. And now I no longer must stand upon the shoulders of giants because I am now one myself.
Listen... when someone is disrupting the movie, you could say "Excuse me ladies. I don't mean to disturb your conversation, but it is really important to me that I catch the details of this dancing peanut commercial before the movie starts. Can I please ask you to quiet down?"
Or maybe simply.... "Ladies the film has started. We old folk have hearing problems. Could you please be kind to a old wrinkle assed fart like me and quiet down please. I am on a fixed income now and this will be the only movie I'll see in the theaters this year".
"Young people today have no clue..."
You have to be like 100 years old to be so old that you don't remember that you and/or your friends were assholes too when you were young.
I know I am out of touch with costs of things... I lived in poverty in the late 90s, the .DOT boom happened and every year has gone up since. So after 17 years of not being in poverty.... I remember a few things.
The poorest people I knew had the best TVs... why? Easy, if you can't make ends meet anyway, why bother trying to budget for everything. Buy it, lease it, rent it, however you need to... just get it and hope you can make the payments.
The word afford is reserved for the middle class. People who make enough to make ends meet. The reason for this is that if you have enough to pay your cost of living (bills, food, car, etc...) and you like the ability to save for bigger things... even if saving really means just paying off your credit cards, you do it. People in the middle class tend to be in the middle class because of the word "afford". I means they can plan their budgets and live up to them. They know how much money they have and what they can spend without stress.
Poor people can't afford anything... hence poor. So if you can't afford anything... ever... you don't bother thinking about it. Instead, you find lay away (which is basically just paying for it before getting it), store credit cards with insane interest rates, pay check loans, etc... anything to get that TV... pay the rent? Uh... well, that's the benefits of the projects, they're used to making concessions for people who can't pay.
So... I would say where you're getting it wrong is believing that having the financial means to buy something has any impact on whether you have it or not.
Visit Florida sometime. You'll see an insanely large market of pawn shops and rent-to-owns, and an endless river of shops designed to exploit the poor by making it possible for them to have big shiny things once in a while. Once you get outside of Disney, Florida is one giant disgusting pit of the poor preying on the poorer.
Is there a special word for a female who believe it's :
... then they started talking about friend from other schools and how those kids were able to take programming but they were upset that they weren't given the option.
- cool to be a girl
- doesn't believe the world is out to get her
- doesn't need every company in the world to prove how pro-woman they are by treating women as if they need to be told how special they are until it starts sounding like how we call disabled people "Special"
- doesn't think it's cool that she has to wonder whether she got the job because she's qualified... or worse...
- doesn't think it's cool that a lot of her colleagues around her believe she got the job to fill the quota
I think you get the point.
I was driving my 13 year old daughter and her friend home from kick-boxing practice the other day. No joke.,. cute little girls... big smiley faces... making all kinds of funny jokes.... home from kickboxing.
I asked "Did you two enjoy trying to cause each other physical injury today?" and they explained all the fun things they did like practicing punching each other in the stomach for half an hour for conditioning.
I asked "Don't you think hurting each other is maybe a little bit of a bad way to treat your friend. And they giggled and tittered as if they were playing with Barbies and explained that they do it to each other because they're friends".
I asked about their enemies. I was told "What enemies?"
They then continues to discuss a new elective class they chose for the new school year they're taking. It's about electronics and mechanical things. They will learn some electronics and how to make simple robots, some programming on Arduino, etc... it sounded great
Then they went home to play OverWatch with their friends.
Here are two girls... who are REALLY REALLY well suited for being in environments entirely outnumbered by men. Even by men who will think it's find to call them "Sweetheart" and it won't phase them at all. They do all the things guys do... they don't look around them and see guys and girls. They gravitate towards each other at kickboxing and such because they like hanging with girls better. They kill each other in Overwatch with friends of all types...
So instead of a girl who thinks there's a need to make a point out of being a girl. And being a girl who thinks she has to prove herself because she's a girl. What is a word that describes a girl who simply doesn't give a shit about that and simply fits in everywhere and makes people smile while she's around?
P.S. - As a father of a little girl... I have to admit I was quite pleased she and her friend decided that kickboxing would be their thing. We live near enough to a city that our main form of recreation is coffee shops downtown. And when she gets older, it's nice to know that she should be prepared to fight back against knuckle draggers.
Linux is absolutely community driven. What has changed if the definition of the community driving it.
:
Today, you can by a PC costing $35 and a case to put it in for $5 and power cable for $3 that will run Linux reasonably well. You would have to add storage and that can often be as expensive as $200, but it doesn't have to be. This is all possible due to wide community interest in Linux and open source and in many cases because of the grass-roots community surrounding it and driving it.
I personally don't use Linux anymore. I was 100% GNUish down to the hair, sandels and poor personal hygiene for some time. Then I grew up and realized I was spending all my time fixing Linux and not getting my actual work done. These days, I'm pretty much all Windows and Mac and I can't be bothered with Linux as there are far too many problems with it now (far too many to bother listing). I'm simply more interested in running and OS and development toolchain written for me than by me now.
Let's talk about intelligent though.
1) The Linux Kernel is 20,000,000 lines of code. As if this is something to brag about openly. It almost sounds like when I was 7 years old and excited I could write a program which used 3 whole pages of printer paper and I hung it on my wall. I added code and printed and reprinted until my dad yelled and told me to stop wasting the ink and paper. 20,000,000 lines of code means
a) Someone doesn't know how to use libraries
b) Someone doesn't know how to make a good way of downloading external code.
c) Someone doesn't know how to make a modular system. And honestly people, we REALLY REALLY REALLY don't need every single driver to be in the Linux Kernel itself. Instead standardize a system for distributing kernel driver source across multiple sites. Then do something even smarter and make it so that if the system has the tools installed, it can connect online and download kernel module source for new device IDs if there is an available option. If Linus can make Git, I'm sure he or someone else can tackle that.
d) Code review is no longer possible. When Cisco managed to submit their changes for the Cisco VIC adapter to the kernel and then I looked at the source for VMware's VMXNET3 driver, I refused to consider either of those repositories as worth of inclusion in a controlled code base. It took seconds to see how bad the code in each of them are. So then I started digging elsewhere and realized that the quality of the Linux kernel has either severely decreased or my standards have increased.
2) SystemD is probably the best thing to ever happen to the Linux platform. There may have been better design choices that could have been made, but SystemD is absolutely frigging spectacular. As for talking about how you don't know how to use it and therefore can't troubleshoot or fix it. Sorry dude. That's clearly your fault for spending probably 10 times longer whining about having to learn a new thing rather than simply learning it. That is clearly your fault. If you're not smart enough to use SystemD, there are multiple forks already without SystemD and it's absolutely fact that no individual has ever forced you to use a distribution that runs SystemD. You have a choice.
3) Gnome 3... Gnome is a victim of the entire "Look at me, I'm going to write everything in C no matter how completely stupid that sounds because only C is pure enough to write everything in... so I'm going to write it in C and I'm going to dance like a little princess telling everyone how I made a whole desktop in C.... even if I have to re-implement the entire C++ language as a series of unreadable and undebuggable define systems and call it GObject. But my C++ will be far superior to your C++ because my C++ is written entirely in defines and headers!!!!". In other words, people were so hellbent on the tooling that design and implementation came second. GLib and GTK+ and GObject are a horrible evolution of Xt and Motif which should have died
I've notices that almost every single movie I've seen on 4K looks absolutely awful. It's horrifying. You see all the edges, you see all the mistakes, you see human features gigantic and up close which aren't even attractive in real life.
2k and lower is nice because you see what the movie looks like well enough to really enjoy it but you don't see your favorite actresses pours as if they were craters in her face. I don't want to see anyone in that detail.
4K is great if a movie was designed for it and if there's proper film grain applied to the pictures. But I've been enjoying the movies far less since watching them on 4K and TV shows that are produced in a week to rush out a whole season are just absolutely terrible in 4K.
If they box doesn't offer 2k downsampling, then I'll just watch SD instead.
There's a difference.
Killing someone or popping off a minimart isn't cheating the government out of taxes.
Rigging the lottery could impact lotto ticket sales which could cost the government millions in lost revenue from taking advantage of the poor and the weak.
Publicly flailing this guy for messing with the system builds confidence in the people that the government is out to protect their interests and guarantee their 1 in 292,201,338 (powerball) or as they say "The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 17.22" which means that since the vast majority of prizes is the cost of your ticket back, you would have to spend $17.22 to win $1.
I can't find ANYPLACE that explains Iowa State's Megamillions game play or odds. If they are similar to most others, then it's probably something like 1 in 7.1 million odds. The break-even chances are probably in the ballpark of 1 in 15 overall.
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
The government will always punish harshly anyone who threatens their ability to tax the stupid.
I was thinking that too. He scammed a company who makes its business by taxing the weak and stupid. Then a government who taxes them gets pissy because even though they would still get their cut, it might hurt future earnings from their voluntary stupid tax.
These people glorify gambling in the eyes of children everywhere with billboards and commercials that look more like they're advertising Chuck'e Cheese than a addictive drug with almost zero (by almost zero, I mean zero... it's designed like that) chance of coming out ahead of where they started. The only reason there is a winner... ever is that they need to reel the suckers in.
Historically, whenever I've wanted to call someone stupid and embarrass them publicly, I ask them "What's your lotto numbers" and when they respond, I say "I don't know what's worse... that you're the type of person that plays lotto or that you think that by choosing your numbers it will increase your odds"
My kids were not allowed to watch Disney Channel or cartoon network (with rare exceptions) for most of their childhood. Toon Disney was ok because it was things like Gummibears and Ducktales. But things like Hanna Montana and Two Kings (I think that's the name) or Wasabi Dojo etc... were all off limits.
While this one rule wasn't enough to really shape their lives, my kids were almost famous among other parents for being the most well behaved and polite children in day care or school.
The Disney Channel itself has one show after the next which glorifies being stupid, arrogant, popular, bossy, etc... There are multiple shows back to back that show that the people everyone loves most are the people with the worst judgement and loudest mouths.
You would almost think that ESPN is paying Disney to make these shows to ensure they have a viewership later on.
To invent fire, there must be things like friction. So we can assume that Thag didn't invent that.
I'll assume also that Thag suffered from poor personal hygiene. It's common among knuckle draggers (visit any sporting event, you'll see)
I'm quite sure that either due to friction or because of layers of gooey filth, Thag didn't float because he was glued to earth.
The good news is that thanks to efforts by Disney, if Thag filled out the proper forms, his patent should still be valid and I imagine he and his descendants are owed quite a bit in royalties.
Ok... let before I dispute pretty much everything you believe in. Let me explain this.
I hate most of what Elon Musk does. I think if he and I were in the same room at a party, I wouldn't bother with him. I love having pictures taken with important people in tech. His dependence on lithium without a long-term cleanup plan. His cars that are inconsiderately large. Well, whatever... lots of stuff like that.
Now that I've bashed him, let me say what I like about him. NY Times, Washington Post, News.com, Slashdot, keep going and going and going. The news these days is so completely filled with negativity everywhere. I won't even watch the news anymore. When it comes to politics, it's one non-stop journey of who do we hate most today.
Then comes the story about an Elon Musk vision for an exciting and brighter future. We see something that lets us dream and we see something that makes us truly believe that if we reach for the stars... we might just touch one.
So while I have no use for him... I'd like to think that the energy and excitement he's bringing to at least the press is something special.
Now let's talk about your whole rant.
The United States Space Program is bought and paid for by the United States which whether through tax money or financial print your own money magic is paid for by the American people. In a capitalistic country, the government should NEVER compete with private industry. However it can develop the initial businesses and share that information with private industry once it is positioned to take it over.
ULA is made up of Lockheed and Boeing. Lockheed has never once in history wanted to run their own space program. They are a company which primarily specializes in consuming government money. Most projects given to Lockheed are designed to be cancelled to avoid a mess related to actually needing to deliver anything. Lockheed employs massive numbers of people so the US government can provide jobs. Oh... and sometimes they actually make something that actually works... and they sell those for a REALLY long time since manufacturing is something they are pretty good at.
Boeing is the company who wants to make the plane, not own the airline. They do lots of stuff, but they spend decades doing it and they also have mastered the art of doing things like getting government funding to build things which no one really needs but we see to not be able to live without. The 787 was great, but for how long it took to make, it should have been so much more. But, all that really mattered was that they eventually delivered. Now that the Chinese are getting into the game, they and Airbus are going to be totally screwed, but at least everyone responsible for their lack of agility will have retired by then.
So... since neither Lockheed or Boeing wanted to own their own launch company... here comes SpaceX and others who do. They make use of technology that was designed with help from NASA to provide the US with their own launch capabilities. SpaceX and BlueOrigin are working hard to take American technology and build American businesses out of them. In addition, Boeing and Lockheed were forced to modernize and become more agile otherwise they'd have lost out to SpaceX and BlueOrigin.
Now, after about 20 years, we have two launch capable American companies with a third one coming. We will soon have at least one launch company capable of flying manned missions. We have completely reinvented the space industry and moved from thinking in terms of billions of dollars to do anything new to thinking in terms of hundreds of millions or less.
Musk delivered on the reusable rocket. Blue Origin is going that way too. Armadillo did a lot of work that way too. There are rockets being built that will not just get us to the moon or Mars, but will allow us to do it over and over and actually consider leaving colonizing eventually.
Yes... none of the space companies would have been able to pull this off if the US and Russia space programs as well as the wea
Did anyone notice that this guy who used eliecerthoms as his github handle deleted his account and then also started deleting his entire online profile? He even has blocked his LinkedIn profile from being public.
I suppose he'll consider a name change next. It certainly might be a good idea at this point.
Ok, the button you clicked is called 'git discard'. VSCode calls git and git discards your changes.
This is 2017. What in the world are you doing writing code you consider important without knowing how to use git, subversion, mercurial, or a dozen other source control systems.
I have made a similar mistake to what this guy did. I've lost 2 hours of work because I WAS STUPID and clicked discard in frustration during a merge.
Let's start with some basics here :
1) You are a REALLY REALLY REALLY inexperienced programmer.
2) If you did a lot of work before using a revision control system, you're an idiot
3) If you knew about revision control and still didn't use it from the moment you created the project, you're a really really big idiot
4) If you coded for 2 days without using a revision control system, you are a moron
5) If you didn't create at least one full backup every single day of your code when not using a revision control system then you're not even useful in this world as cannon fodder. I'd recommend considering a long term career as fertilizer, but you'd fuck that up too.
6) You didn't run Windows Backup and Restore either. See, these are tools like Apple Time Machine. They are free and turned on in 5 clicks. But you're a cowboy right?
7) You didn't consider mapping the development folder to OneDrive, DropBox or any other place on earth which would make sure you had a backup? Are you seriously here blaming VS code for the loss of your data? Do you practice ballroom dancing in busy traffic intersections while blindfolded and then blame Henry Ford for inventing the internal combustion engine when you get hit by a bus?
Let's continue with some good stuff here.
1) You shouldn't be writing code and it's better that code is lost.
2) The code you wrote was absolute shit. I know this because if you don't know how to not lose code, then it was written by someone who has never written a single useful line of code worth not losing before.
3) You mention 5000 files. Great... most were documents or auto-generated in some form. I, as a developer who sucks less than you with A LOT of experience write 10,000 lines of code in a month during project startup in a language I'm competent in. That includes inline documentation, readme.md files, design documents and more. Following the first month, I'll probably add another 1-2000 lines a month until beta. So in three months, I may have if I really wrote TONS of rock star shit, about 15000 lines of code. That would be about 3 lines per file in your world. Of course, you are counting processed data or images or whatever as code.
I would recommend that if you ever plan on trying to code again... you do at least an hour of research, watch some videos on how experienced programmers work. There's a lot more to programming than just typing code.
I think there's been too much hype on this phone and based on the share price, that's quite clear.
There will likely be supply chain problems which are common among companies who hope to scale but are too small to demand devote resources to them.
The company will probably play Elon Musk's game of trying to get more money to manufacture while spending it all faster than he can get it. The difference is, Elon had a big fat bank account to begin with from prior victories. He was selling visions... not phones. And frankly, every feature on this phone will be less than novelty in a month.
Or there will be manufacturing problems because this is a lot of custom parts which almost certainly will have minor glitches. This will certainly cause a very expensive recall, and without a proper distributed service chain to manage that, this can be a disaster.
Or there will be problems with the battery because, as we've seen, packing the biggest battery you can find into the tightest air-tight spaces possible has become quite an issue.
Or there will be thermal issues which will become obvious from the choice of using titanium which while SUPER AWESOME sounds like a really bad idea. It's extremely similar to aluminum, but if I recall correctly, titanium is not an optimal sink as it stores too much heat. (don't shoot me if I'm wrong here)
There will be support issues because even with a billion dollar market cap, a mass marketed device to be successful needs users. Users have problems. End of story.
After market parts will be an issue. Without a clear supply of aftermarket screens that can be replaced for $100 at a mall on short notice, these phones will break and be replaced with something else in short order.
I love the phone. I think the advertisement for it was exciting enough that I was like "I might want to try that" and I've never once said that about a telephone from an advertisement. The power of suggestion in the advertisement effected me and I intentionally refuse to buy anything that tries to pick those nerves on me. So... these guys are absolutely spectacular... until you realize that this is likely the only phone they'll ever make and it will never be able to be repaired when it breaks.
I congratulate them on a fabulous job. It was amazing. But other than making the stock market boys have another high volume share with lots of buzz surrounding it, it was a dead project before it started. To make a successful phone today requires a company with a billion dollars in the bank and a clear international support infrastructure and parts distribution channel to succeed. It also requires a crazy insurance company/creditor willing to take the risk on a large scale recall from a somewhat unknown entity. Otherwise it's just a waste time and money.
Yes computers fail all the time.... especially airbus and boeing computers... they are both companies with amazing skills at things like mechanical, hydraulics, etc... they are horrible at things like electronics and software. This is true for companies like Ford, GM, BMW, etc... as well. I drive a BMW i3 and if I wrote software like that, I'd be unemployed. It sure is fast and comfortable though... of course every time I touch the breaks, I fear they will glitch again.
... and you're hopefully above average at your job meaning that at least 50% of all pilots in the air are less than you. Wouldn't I want you on the ground in a virtual cockpit monitoring 10 different flights and being ready to come to the rescue as opposed to those lesser pilots?
I'll assume that you take your job seriously and hopefully go beyond the minimum criteria for remaining certified. I will assume that you consider yourself to be good at what you do... I know I'm the frigging amazing at what I do... in fact I'm better than absolutely every single person that I'm not worse than.
But let me ask you something.
If you're skilled and competent at being a pilot
Do I really want you on someone else's plane? Do you feel comfortable leaving me at the mercy of one of those other pilots?
What about my children? Shouldn't I want you or someone better than you ready to come to their rescue in case there's a computer problem?
Shouldn't you be able to override the computer on the plane and manually control it from a virtual cockpit and be there for other peoples children as well?
I would imagine that if there is something that needs to be physically altered or managed from someone on the plane, you are likely competent enough to communicate clearly and concisely to a flight attendant what needs to be done.
Wouldn't it be fair to suggest that more peoples lives are at risk by placing you in the air to manage one plane than if you were on the ground managing 10?
If the computer on the plane has an issue, the remote control computer should still be ok. If neither are working, I'd guess that whether you're in the cockpit physically or not would make little difference as it would probably be a problem not correctable from within the cabin.
I know there are minimum requirements to operate a passenger commercial aircraft, but I don't think that those standards are particularly high. I've met a few certified pilots that meet those requirements that in my opinion should never be in a circumstance where peoples lives depend on their intellect.
P.S. - I've been a developer writing code for systems that controlled whether large numbers of people lived or died and I often hijacked projects from less diligent developers to make sure that someone interested in more than just the minimum requirements was doing the job.
Computers on the plane I think was a point of my comment. The communicates is for if there's a real problem on the plane. This is similar to how having a radio link if your pilor and copilot suffocate from a gas in the cockpit so ground control can assist someone else to land the plane.... or simply inform the plane to route itself to a runway and land.
Flying is dangerous too depending on your definition of dangerous. Multiple engine failure, failed landing gear, computer errors, etc... all kinda nasty things. Having a link just in case or maybe to receive things like landing instructuctions...