Let's start with, I'm very pro-vaccine. However, pro-vaccine people always make the arguments based on the incredibly small risk of taking vaccines versus the potential side effects and the small (but much bigger) risk of the associate diseases. This is a correct, rational assumption. What I don't understand is how so many people in the pro-vaccine camp lose their goddamn minds over the incredibly tiny risk to people who can't get vaccinated. We're talking about an incredibly small number of people, facing an incredibly unlikely disease, and facing an incredibly small added risk due to a small number of unvaccinated people. This incredibly small number, whatever it is, is some how good enough to justify people to be forceably injected with a foreign substance that has an incredibly tiny, but existent risk associated with it. That math doesn't seem very rational to me.
Seriously, who cares? People are going to pick and choose their sources to support their views. The implication of this "story" is more "wrong think" suppression, and that is far more dangerous than a few idiots not vaccinating.
For the last 12 years I've been a diehard ATI/AMD fan. There products have always been "good enough" and far cheaper than Nvidia. I just purchased the Nvidia 1080ti, because "ray-tracing" is garbage and the new 2070+ lines are way too expensive. None of the new features are really that ground breaking or likely to be widely necessary before these new cards will be obsolete. The only good thing about Nvidia's new line is that they caused the 1080ti card pricing to plummet and now I can have near top-of-the-line graphic power for very reasonable pricing. Who knows where we will be in three to four years, but unless a major upset happens, once this card is no longer cutting it, I'll go back to AMD and get a great card for a great price.
I'd recommend looking at the Lenovo business class laptops. We've been pretty happy with them for our small shop. They are very good quality, and decently priced. Most of the Lenovo haters out there are talking about their consumer grade laptops, which aren't even manufactured by the same division of location.
He posted this under the video. I believe him, as I've been watching his channel for years and he produces a lot of great content.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Note about 2 missing the reactions in the video- I was presented with information that caused me to doubt the veracity of 2 of the 5 reactions in the video. These were reactions that were captured during a two week period while the device was at house 2 hours away from where I live. I put a feeler out for people willing to put a package on their porch and this person (who is a friend of a friend) volunteered to help. To compensate them for their time and willingness to risk putting a package on their porch I offered financial compensation for any successful recoveries of the package. It appears (and I've since confirmed) in these two cases, the “thieves" were actually acquaintances of the person helping me. From the footage I received from the phones which intentionally only record at specific times, this wasn’t clear to me. I have since removed those reactions from the original video (originally 6:26-7:59). I’m really sorry about this. Ultimately, I am responsible for the content that goes on my channel and I should have done more here. I can vouch for that the reactions were genuine when the package was taken from my house. Having said that, I know my credibly is sort of shot but I encourage you to look at the types of videos I’ve been making for the past 7 years. This is my first ever video with some kind of “prank" and like I mentioned in the video it’s pretty removed from my comfort zone and I should have done more. I’m especially gutted because so much thought, time, money and effort went into building the device and I hope this doesn’t just taint the entire effort as “fake". It genuinely works (like all the other things I’ve built on my channel) and we’ve made all the code and build info public. Again, I’m sorry for putting something up on my channel that was misleading. That is totally on me and I will take all necessary steps to make sure it won’t happen again.
I'm trying to keep this as neutrally worded as possible but this angers me a lot. Words have multiple definitions and mean different things in different contexts. Anyone who can't understand that, is literally too incompetent to survive by themselves and they need a grown-up to explain this concept to them as soon as possible. Definitions for words are not a value judgement. There is no end to this madness. Do we get rid of "kill" because in some definitions and contexts it might mean the violent murder of a person, God forbid, even a historically oppressed minority? What about "mount"? In some context that could be a term meaning the forcible action of sex upon someone who might not be consenting. It is insane to ignore the obvious context of words and try to be offended by the worst possible context. Master/Slave makes perfect sense in many of these cases, as it implies one item is controlling another. Same as parent/child describes a certain hierarchy in some contexts. It is not making a judgement call about human interpersonal relationships, just because that's another definition/context.
People make this claim all the time, but it's nonsense. People some how manage to get an id to get welfare or to apply for most jobs. You don't even have to get a license to get State ID, you literally go to the DMV, and pay less money that a driver's license costs, and they ship you one that's usually good for between 5-10 years. If you can ride a bus, you can get to the DMV. Considering you can't buy alcohol, open a bank account, get most jobs, or get government assistance, it is not an unreasonable ask that you get photo ID to vote.
How would this coercive third party know this value unless the voter gave it to him? It's randomly generated when he walks in to vote. It is not tied to him in any way. If say, I were a person where I suspected this might happen, I'd just "lose" my random ID after checking my ballot on the other side. I can't validate my vote further on down the road, but no one else can force me to turn over my result.
Blockchains are obviously a terrible solution to election fraud. The only thing that prevents blockchain tampering is a ton of neutral third party machines checking the transactions (typically miners). We've already seen that this is a non-trivial problem when there is plenty of incentive for random people to fulfill that role (mining of crypto currency). National elections have very little incentive for people to invest thousands in hardware and electricity, and a ton of incentive for nation states like China or Russia with the funds and technology to manipulate the results.
If you instead make it a closed system with government machines validating the results, you've not solved anything (or at least nothing that couldn't be solved with more traditional cryptographic techniques like public/private key encryption, signing, and progressive cryptographic hashing). You still haven't solved the issues of patching, of the public's trust in the machines and people involved in securing the infrastructure, or prevented a malicious third party from compromising that infrastructure and altering the results. Blockchain only provides any type of verification, when you can trust that the majority of the verifying machines are not working in league to forge results, and in a voting infrastructure of relatively well secured machines you can do a lot better. Block chain introduces a ton of extra complexity which leads to a ton of additional attack surface while again not providing a lot of value.
Finally, BlockChain does nothing to solve the issue of machines registering one vote and writing a separate vote to the ledger, or even registering multiple votes that are fraudulent. In other words, it is simply a highly inefficient tool that exists to solve an entirely different problem.
Things that would vastly improve voting security:
1) When the user comes in, check their ID to validate they are who they claim to be, and that they are allowed to vote.
2) Give them a randomly generated, complex, unguessable ID number (voteid) in the form of a QR code. This should not be tied to their identity in any way
3) Have user scan said voteid to begain voting and then store with their vote results, and give them the progressive hash of the chain of votes before and after their votes are tallied.
4) Allow the user to swipe their voteid before leaving the voting area, and view how their vote was tallied, on a separate machine (thus increasing the complexity and size of the hack required to hoodwink a cautious user).
5) Allow all users to go online and view their votes as they were recorded (and will be tallied) by entering their voteid on a public website. As well as the aforementioned progressive hashes
6) Have a process by which a user can, upon presenting their voteid contest how their votes were recorded (both at the voting place, and after the election).
Of course the progressive hash idea is someone simplistic, public/private key signing or other more complex solutions could be implemented with different risk profiles. Yes there are still ways that such a system can be hacked and manipulated, but the skill and breadth of the hack would need to be significantly increased to pull it off unnoticed. More importantly, users would be empowered to a fair degree of confidence that their vote was recorded as they intended.
If Trump were smart, he'd pardon her, possibly at the same time as he does Manafort. Would help his PR a lot. She's harmless and not particularly bright. The PR would help cover the shitstorm of Trump pardoning Manafort.
Considering the recent USENIX talk on exploiting most mainstream IKE implementations via a Bleichenbacher attack, this seems most probable. Related paper: https://www.ei.rub.de/media/nd...
Latest gen flagship phones are having trouble differentiating themselves. Cameras have reached the point where the newest and best features are mostly marketing ploys and not that valuable. The processors are fast enough for the kinds of things one would want to use a phone for. The screens have high enough pixel density. The phones are relatively robust and the battery life is acceptable. The new flagships are trying to race to the bottom with thinner bezels and thinner phones, but phones are already thin enough and many new phones are going for thinner at the cost of battery life, and ports. So at the end of the day, there will always be fools that will buy the latest and greatest because it is the latest and greatest. The rest of us, will pick mid-tier phones or previous gen flag ships, and have great phones, for half or less of the price. I predict that the increase in flag ship pricing, will result in a greater interest in bootloader unlocking and replacement OSes like LineageOS.
I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.
In 2018 we should be putting a bullet through the head of unencrypted SMTP and insecure protocols like STARTTLS. I've been running my mail server only allowing secure SMTP over TLS with medium grade ciphers or better, and IMAPS (and only allowing email sending if over secure connection). I've yet to run into issues in the last two years. The only problem is that some people's mail servers keep groping my box for port 25 first, instead of just trying SMTP/TLS and then failing if it can't. For the few devices I have that can't handle SMTP over TLS, I either replace them, or when I can't, I run them over a VPN, and whitelist their IP.
Bitcoin should be lauded for what it is/was. It was the first crypto-currency. It created a paradigm. It has too many problems to remain the crypto-currency of the future. It is not truly anonymous, something that Monero and to a lesser extent, ZCash have solved. It chokes under large transaction volumes and has high transaction costs. It has no way to easily be converted to proof-of-stake in the future, once enough mining has been completed. For all of these reasons, it is unlikely to remain king. All of these problems have either been solved, or at least significantly improved upon by more recent crypto-currencies. To the extent that I'm betting, I'm betting on Monero. Ethereum also has a lot of positives, but I think the combination of the community not honoring all transactions and the fact that the programming mechanism has proven to be devilishly hard to implement without major mistakes means that it too will be replaced with a better iteration at some point.
I know a dude that was apparently an shit-hot COBOL programmer back in the day. He retired, but gave the company a lot of notice and was generally not a dick (unlike a lot of the idiots in this comments thread). He told them they could hire him as a consultant/SME from time to time if they needed it. He's been retired for 15+ years, and they still call him up every couple years. He charges 3 to 4 times his former salary, does one or two month gigs for them, every couple of years, and makes a killing.
In my experience (and I do not like dogs), certain breeds of dogs have the capacity to far exceed cats in terms of intelligence, but on average, I'd say the average cat is smarter than the average dog. There is also a huge range of intelligence across both cats and dogs. I think cats tend to innately exercise the full capacity of their intelligence a lot more than dogs. Dogs, often tend to be fairly lazy about using their problem solving skills unless they are trained to. I believe this is mostly due to domestic cats descending from solitary animals and needing to use their whits a lot more to survive.
I work remotely, but I think most of the reasons have been given above, why this is not so common:
1) Many (Most?) people are incapable of working remotely, without slacking off.
2) Even if you don't slack off, it's harder to demonstrate value, remotely. You have to be much more active about calling attention to the work you are doing, as your boss can't just drop by your desk and see you working.
3) Remoting technology, especially in the Windows world, is still not great if you need a full, remote Windows session, over the internets. It is painfully slow and hard to configure to by multi-monitor in a reasonable fashion.
4) Lots of employees have crappy internet, which makes them highly unproductive.
5) Corporate inertia against change.
Add all that up, and it's hard to make the case for full remote work. There are certain workers in certain locations which could easily make the hop, but then companies are worried about getting sued by offering those users, special privileges of working remotely, so they play it safe and force everyone to show up.
I don't trust Facebook to curate my news for me. I use tools to block all Facebook News, so hopefully this just means my ad-blocking tools won't have to work overtime. Seems like a lot of hysteria over nothing.
Don't you understand? Having an eating disorder or being overweight, means you must also have broken legs. How are you condoning Google's insensitive and mean feature that makes fun of the fact that you don't have legs? Wait, what that? You have legs and they work just fine? You can walk? Uh...carry on then...
Slashdot Mirror
Filed under things no one ever wanted...
Let's start with, I'm very pro-vaccine. However, pro-vaccine people always make the arguments based on the incredibly small risk of taking vaccines versus the potential side effects and the small (but much bigger) risk of the associate diseases. This is a correct, rational assumption. What I don't understand is how so many people in the pro-vaccine camp lose their goddamn minds over the incredibly tiny risk to people who can't get vaccinated. We're talking about an incredibly small number of people, facing an incredibly unlikely disease, and facing an incredibly small added risk due to a small number of unvaccinated people. This incredibly small number, whatever it is, is some how good enough to justify people to be forceably injected with a foreign substance that has an incredibly tiny, but existent risk associated with it. That math doesn't seem very rational to me.
Seriously, who cares? People are going to pick and choose their sources to support their views. The implication of this "story" is more "wrong think" suppression, and that is far more dangerous than a few idiots not vaccinating.
In the exact same position. Ex and I still share a profile because it it tuned to our preferences.
For the last 12 years I've been a diehard ATI/AMD fan. There products have always been "good enough" and far cheaper than Nvidia. I just purchased the Nvidia 1080ti, because "ray-tracing" is garbage and the new 2070+ lines are way too expensive. None of the new features are really that ground breaking or likely to be widely necessary before these new cards will be obsolete. The only good thing about Nvidia's new line is that they caused the 1080ti card pricing to plummet and now I can have near top-of-the-line graphic power for very reasonable pricing. Who knows where we will be in three to four years, but unless a major upset happens, once this card is no longer cutting it, I'll go back to AMD and get a great card for a great price.
I'd recommend looking at the Lenovo business class laptops. We've been pretty happy with them for our small shop. They are very good quality, and decently priced. Most of the Lenovo haters out there are talking about their consumer grade laptops, which aren't even manufactured by the same division of location.
He posted this under the video. I believe him, as I've been watching his channel for years and he produces a lot of great content.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Note about 2 missing the reactions in the video- I was presented with information that caused me to doubt the veracity of 2 of the 5 reactions in the video. These were reactions that were captured during a two week period while the device was at house 2 hours away from where I live. I put a feeler out for people willing to put a package on their porch and this person (who is a friend of a friend) volunteered to help. To compensate them for their time and willingness to risk putting a package on their porch I offered financial compensation for any successful recoveries of the package. It appears (and I've since confirmed) in these two cases, the “thieves" were actually acquaintances of the person helping me. From the footage I received from the phones which intentionally only record at specific times, this wasn’t clear to me. I have since removed those reactions from the original video (originally 6:26-7:59). I’m really sorry about this. Ultimately, I am responsible for the content that goes on my channel and I should have done more here. I can vouch for that the reactions were genuine when the package was taken from my house. Having said that, I know my credibly is sort of shot but I encourage you to look at the types of videos I’ve been making for the past 7 years. This is my first ever video with some kind of “prank" and like I mentioned in the video it’s pretty removed from my comfort zone and I should have done more. I’m especially gutted because so much thought, time, money and effort went into building the device and I hope this doesn’t just taint the entire effort as “fake". It genuinely works (like all the other things I’ve built on my channel) and we’ve made all the code and build info public. Again, I’m sorry for putting something up on my channel that was misleading. That is totally on me and I will take all necessary steps to make sure it won’t happen again.
I'm trying to keep this as neutrally worded as possible but this angers me a lot. Words have multiple definitions and mean different things in different contexts. Anyone who can't understand that, is literally too incompetent to survive by themselves and they need a grown-up to explain this concept to them as soon as possible. Definitions for words are not a value judgement. There is no end to this madness. Do we get rid of "kill" because in some definitions and contexts it might mean the violent murder of a person, God forbid, even a historically oppressed minority? What about "mount"? In some context that could be a term meaning the forcible action of sex upon someone who might not be consenting. It is insane to ignore the obvious context of words and try to be offended by the worst possible context. Master/Slave makes perfect sense in many of these cases, as it implies one item is controlling another. Same as parent/child describes a certain hierarchy in some contexts. It is not making a judgement call about human interpersonal relationships, just because that's another definition/context.
People make this claim all the time, but it's nonsense. People some how manage to get an id to get welfare or to apply for most jobs. You don't even have to get a license to get State ID, you literally go to the DMV, and pay less money that a driver's license costs, and they ship you one that's usually good for between 5-10 years. If you can ride a bus, you can get to the DMV. Considering you can't buy alcohol, open a bank account, get most jobs, or get government assistance, it is not an unreasonable ask that you get photo ID to vote.
How would this coercive third party know this value unless the voter gave it to him? It's randomly generated when he walks in to vote. It is not tied to him in any way. If say, I were a person where I suspected this might happen, I'd just "lose" my random ID after checking my ballot on the other side. I can't validate my vote further on down the road, but no one else can force me to turn over my result.
Blockchains are obviously a terrible solution to election fraud. The only thing that prevents blockchain tampering is a ton of neutral third party machines checking the transactions (typically miners). We've already seen that this is a non-trivial problem when there is plenty of incentive for random people to fulfill that role (mining of crypto currency). National elections have very little incentive for people to invest thousands in hardware and electricity, and a ton of incentive for nation states like China or Russia with the funds and technology to manipulate the results.
If you instead make it a closed system with government machines validating the results, you've not solved anything (or at least nothing that couldn't be solved with more traditional cryptographic techniques like public/private key encryption, signing, and progressive cryptographic hashing). You still haven't solved the issues of patching, of the public's trust in the machines and people involved in securing the infrastructure, or prevented a malicious third party from compromising that infrastructure and altering the results. Blockchain only provides any type of verification, when you can trust that the majority of the verifying machines are not working in league to forge results, and in a voting infrastructure of relatively well secured machines you can do a lot better. Block chain introduces a ton of extra complexity which leads to a ton of additional attack surface while again not providing a lot of value.
Finally, BlockChain does nothing to solve the issue of machines registering one vote and writing a separate vote to the ledger, or even registering multiple votes that are fraudulent. In other words, it is simply a highly inefficient tool that exists to solve an entirely different problem.
Things that would vastly improve voting security:
1) When the user comes in, check their ID to validate they are who they claim to be, and that they are allowed to vote.
2) Give them a randomly generated, complex, unguessable ID number (voteid) in the form of a QR code. This should not be tied to their identity in any way
3) Have user scan said voteid to begain voting and then store with their vote results, and give them the progressive hash of the chain of votes before and after their votes are tallied.
4) Allow the user to swipe their voteid before leaving the voting area, and view how their vote was tallied, on a separate machine (thus increasing the complexity and size of the hack required to hoodwink a cautious user).
5) Allow all users to go online and view their votes as they were recorded (and will be tallied) by entering their voteid on a public website. As well as the aforementioned progressive hashes
6) Have a process by which a user can, upon presenting their voteid contest how their votes were recorded (both at the voting place, and after the election).
Of course the progressive hash idea is someone simplistic, public/private key signing or other more complex solutions could be implemented with different risk profiles. Yes there are still ways that such a system can be hacked and manipulated, but the skill and breadth of the hack would need to be significantly increased to pull it off unnoticed. More importantly, users would be empowered to a fair degree of confidence that their vote was recorded as they intended.
The CFAA was deliberately designed and had been used to prosecute literally anything. This is a bullshit argument.
If Trump were smart, he'd pardon her, possibly at the same time as he does Manafort. Would help his PR a lot. She's harmless and not particularly bright. The PR would help cover the shitstorm of Trump pardoning Manafort.
Considering the recent USENIX talk on exploiting most mainstream IKE implementations via a Bleichenbacher attack, this seems most probable. Related paper: https://www.ei.rub.de/media/nd...
Latest gen flagship phones are having trouble differentiating themselves. Cameras have reached the point where the newest and best features are mostly marketing ploys and not that valuable. The processors are fast enough for the kinds of things one would want to use a phone for. The screens have high enough pixel density. The phones are relatively robust and the battery life is acceptable. The new flagships are trying to race to the bottom with thinner bezels and thinner phones, but phones are already thin enough and many new phones are going for thinner at the cost of battery life, and ports. So at the end of the day, there will always be fools that will buy the latest and greatest because it is the latest and greatest. The rest of us, will pick mid-tier phones or previous gen flag ships, and have great phones, for half or less of the price. I predict that the increase in flag ship pricing, will result in a greater interest in bootloader unlocking and replacement OSes like LineageOS.
I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.
In 2018 we should be putting a bullet through the head of unencrypted SMTP and insecure protocols like STARTTLS. I've been running my mail server only allowing secure SMTP over TLS with medium grade ciphers or better, and IMAPS (and only allowing email sending if over secure connection). I've yet to run into issues in the last two years. The only problem is that some people's mail servers keep groping my box for port 25 first, instead of just trying SMTP/TLS and then failing if it can't. For the few devices I have that can't handle SMTP over TLS, I either replace them, or when I can't, I run them over a VPN, and whitelist their IP.
If only Apple provided some way to side-load applications...
Bitcoin should be lauded for what it is/was. It was the first crypto-currency. It created a paradigm. It has too many problems to remain the crypto-currency of the future. It is not truly anonymous, something that Monero and to a lesser extent, ZCash have solved. It chokes under large transaction volumes and has high transaction costs. It has no way to easily be converted to proof-of-stake in the future, once enough mining has been completed. For all of these reasons, it is unlikely to remain king. All of these problems have either been solved, or at least significantly improved upon by more recent crypto-currencies. To the extent that I'm betting, I'm betting on Monero. Ethereum also has a lot of positives, but I think the combination of the community not honoring all transactions and the fact that the programming mechanism has proven to be devilishly hard to implement without major mistakes means that it too will be replaced with a better iteration at some point.
This might be a way to bring in Puerto Rico, which would bring us to 52 states and also restore the balance of red vs blue states.
I know a dude that was apparently an shit-hot COBOL programmer back in the day. He retired, but gave the company a lot of notice and was generally not a dick (unlike a lot of the idiots in this comments thread). He told them they could hire him as a consultant/SME from time to time if they needed it. He's been retired for 15+ years, and they still call him up every couple years. He charges 3 to 4 times his former salary, does one or two month gigs for them, every couple of years, and makes a killing.
In my experience (and I do not like dogs), certain breeds of dogs have the capacity to far exceed cats in terms of intelligence, but on average, I'd say the average cat is smarter than the average dog. There is also a huge range of intelligence across both cats and dogs. I think cats tend to innately exercise the full capacity of their intelligence a lot more than dogs. Dogs, often tend to be fairly lazy about using their problem solving skills unless they are trained to. I believe this is mostly due to domestic cats descending from solitary animals and needing to use their whits a lot more to survive.
I work remotely, but I think most of the reasons have been given above, why this is not so common: 1) Many (Most?) people are incapable of working remotely, without slacking off.
2) Even if you don't slack off, it's harder to demonstrate value, remotely. You have to be much more active about calling attention to the work you are doing, as your boss can't just drop by your desk and see you working.
3) Remoting technology, especially in the Windows world, is still not great if you need a full, remote Windows session, over the internets. It is painfully slow and hard to configure to by multi-monitor in a reasonable fashion.
4) Lots of employees have crappy internet, which makes them highly unproductive.
5) Corporate inertia against change.
Add all that up, and it's hard to make the case for full remote work. There are certain workers in certain locations which could easily make the hop, but then companies are worried about getting sued by offering those users, special privileges of working remotely, so they play it safe and force everyone to show up.
I don't trust Facebook to curate my news for me. I use tools to block all Facebook News, so hopefully this just means my ad-blocking tools won't have to work overtime. Seems like a lot of hysteria over nothing.
Don't you understand? Having an eating disorder or being overweight, means you must also have broken legs. How are you condoning Google's insensitive and mean feature that makes fun of the fact that you don't have legs? Wait, what that? You have legs and they work just fine? You can walk? Uh...carry on then...