Slashdot Mirror


User: HiThere

HiThere's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
17,789
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 17,789

  1. Re:Never doubted it on Chinese Hackers Targeted IoT During Trump-Putin Summit (defenseone.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but I don't think that would suffice. So far Trump has shown no embarrassment even to things that would cause just about everyone in the country to turn red with shame.

    My guess is that Putin threatened him physically. He is known to be a physical coward (see "cadet bone spurs") and that this is being hidden behind a facade that he's being blackmailed over kinky sex. This might even explain a couple of KGB assassinations in Britain, though that's a bit of a stretch.

  2. Re:Last time china was accused it was the USA on Chinese Hackers Targeted IoT During Trump-Putin Summit (defenseone.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm always dubious about attributions of web activity, but this actually makes sense. China would definitely want to know what Russia and the US were planning when they got together, and certainly they couldn't trust what either side would tell them.

    Note that activity by Germany was also up, which makes sense for the same reason. The odd thing is that US activity was down, but perhaps that's just in proportion.

  3. Re:Nah, he apponted Ivan Muellersky on Chinese Hackers Targeted IoT During Trump-Putin Summit (defenseone.com) · · Score: 1

    Treason is defined in the US Constitution, and Trump does not appear to have committed treason. Malfeasance in office, violation of his oath of office, probably lots of other things, but not treason.

    Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

    So for that to be even theoretically possible I think the US has to have declared war. And it's been a long time since the US Senate declared war on anyone. 1942 according to Wikipedia.

  4. Re:Stuff underground gets wet already on Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure at Risk as Sea Levels Rise (eurekalert.org) · · Score: 1

    Did you read the words you quoted? "Most likely" doesn't imply knowledge, it implies a "best guess".

  5. Re:Stuff underground gets wet already on Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure at Risk as Sea Levels Rise (eurekalert.org) · · Score: 1

    No, we don't know how quickly the water will rise. We've got decent guesses. This is one of them.

    I agree that upgrades of the infrastructure are an on-going need, but this is a statement that the upgrades in certain areas need to be designed differently, and may need to be done on an accelerated schedule.

    It's fine to disagree with what they say is going to happen, but it would be better to not misstate what they are saying. They aren't saying "This is the worst that will happen", they're saying "This is something that will probably happen". One thing happening doesn't exclude other things happening.

    That said, I haven't read the report, and even if I did I couldn't properly assess its validity. Summaries often misstate the articles. E.g., I don't know whether they're talking about more frequent flooding (i.e. storm surges, etc.), or whether they're talking about the results of an expected sea level rise. Or, more probably, whether they discuss both cases in different sections.

  6. Re: Because OF COURSE it is! on Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing In Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1

    Previous reports have been suggesting that Seattle is subsidizing Amazon by providing services at considerably below cost. (Where cost to Amazon is figured based on the taxes that they pay, and services include things like transit, garbage collection, road maintenance, law enforcement, etc.)

    Now it's true I didn't verify that those reports are correct, so in a sense you are correct. OTOH, I'm not making Seattle's decisions for them, so I'm not about to invest the kind of effort that validation would require.

  7. Re:Advertisers getting smarter? Doubt it. on Digital Ads Are Starting To Feel Psychic (theoutline.com) · · Score: 1

    FWIW, cows don't like to be branded either.

  8. Re:Not Psychic, Stalker . on Digital Ads Are Starting To Feel Psychic (theoutline.com) · · Score: 1

    But Lewis Carroll always makes sense, if you follow it through in detail. You don't always need to agree with him, e.g. a "rath", which Humpty Dumpty defines as a small green pig, was the title of an Irish hill tribe chieftain, but he always makes sense.

    I'll admit, though, that I haven't successfully traced down the roots of "Jabberwockery". Jabber is pretty clear, but I'm uncertain about "wockery". I'm guessing the poem was inspired by someone blathering at him when he was trying to work on a math problem, but it's a guess.

  9. Nope. It's just a default, and evidence can quickly change it, but it currently seems to be the proper default.

  10. Re: Because OF COURSE it is! on Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing In Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1

    Before the 1980's, possibly the 1960's, a longer time view was common is business. Then the Harvard Business School started pushing a short time horizon.

    There have been lots of groups building large projects with a time horizon in the multiple decades. Many of them failed due to changed circumstances (a long horizon has its problems), but large projects pretty much demand a long horizon to pay for themselves. But part of the reason the US Senate was designed with overlapping six year terms was to foster a longer time horizon. You can argue that it wasn't effective, but the intent was there. The Communists got the idea for their "5 year plans" from the west. When they got it, it was cutting down the normal cycle of business planning, not extending it.

  11. It's gotten to the point that where someone accuses a woman of something, my default assumption is that they're lying...but it looks like I may need to alter that to "my default assumption is that they're a lying bot".

    This doesn't mean that I trust women in position of power and authority. They are often worse than men. But the worst accusations seem to be directed at those who are minimally bad. It's true that women in positions of power tend to be those that are driven to seek power by their animus (see C.G.Jung), but the men who seek power are also usually driven be unsane motivations. Just ones that are a bit less abrasive (not necessarily less harmful). And this isn't true of jobs that are only peripherally concerned with power.

  12. Re: I can't steal a pencil on Wells Fargo's Scandals Finally Hurt Its Bottom Line (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but that's wrong. They probably work a bit harder than the average programmer, though a lot less than a guy on an assembly line.

    The thing is, a lot of their work is "social engineering". And setting up the mark, etc.

  13. Re: Because ... Addendum on Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing In Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry about the garbled quote, but that was a cut and paste form Wikipedia. The translation is reasonable. (I originally heard reported as said in the first person singular by Louis, and Wikipedia says "attributed to", so don't believe the attribution unreservedly.)

  14. Re: Because OF COURSE it is! on Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing In Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1

    The thing is, what's "yours" is a matter of social contract. When you break one part of the social contract, the rest becomes weaker.

    That means that if you aren't taking care of the relatively helpless, the social contract has become weaker, and those who have been abandoned feel, justly, that they have little obligation to obey the rules of the social contract that don't favor them.

    Title to property, and rights of any sort, depend on the social contract. Those who are wise prefer to strengthen it, even if only for their own selfish reasons. When Madame de Pompadour said "AprÃs nous, le déluge" ("After us, the flood"), it was likely not a statement of egotism, but of helplessness. She probably saw no way to prevent the revolution. Well, she wasn't notably insightful, but I don't see any way she could have prevented it either. The social contract had been too weakened to endure.

    Seattle should respond by making emergency plans for Amazon's leaving, and pass a tax 10 times as high. Or 20 times. Any place that subsidizes a "large employer" at well above value should prepare for a disaster, because sooner or later it will arrive. The problem is that most politicians, and also most businessmen, have a very short time horizon.

  15. Re:The best filter... on Researchers Find That Filters Don't Prevent Porn (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    re paragraph1: Sometimes that's clearly true, other times it depends on what you read into it.

    re paragraph2: Yes. But no more so than movie stars, TV reporters, etc.

    re paragraph3: Yes, but... Your personal relationships should be based mainly around personalities and secondarily around other reasons to be attracted, or you will be disappointed in life, not just in the bedroom.

  16. Re:Maybe At Last It Can Have a Non Whitespace deli on Python Language Founder Steps Down (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Well, with a modest preprocessor you can already do so. Just pick an appropriate unicode character, say U+00B7, to use as your spacing character, and have the preprocessor change it to tab (or spaces, your choice).

  17. Re: Questions and observations on Python Language Founder Steps Down (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    You could also add a macro preprocessor. I've considered doing this for documentation purposes, but actually Doxygen is good enough. Sphinx, however, was a terrible choice, and pydoc generates eye-tearingly horrible html. (This is a pity as it's ancestor for Python 2, Epydoc, was my favorite documentation tool for Python. )

  18. Re: We'll lose the first generation on Python Language Founder Steps Down (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    No. Open source is rather old, but Free Software didn't happen before the revision of the copyright laws that made essentially everything copyright. And Open Source happened in reaction to Free Software.

    Things happen in time at a time for a reason...even if it isn't always clear what the reason is.

  19. Re:Sounds like the truth may be in the middle on No, the FCC is Not Forcing Consumers To Pay $225 To File Complaints (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 2

    Except that the informal complaint may not be either seen or evaluated by the FCC staff. So it sounds like what they're doing is changing the informal complaint into a marketing tool for companies.

    So the truth isn't in the middle, but much more to "The Democrat complaints were accurate" side, even though they clearly misstated the process. What's really happening is that the FCC is going to "worse than ignore" informal complaints, and you'll need to pay $225 and file a formal complaint if you want them to even say "tough!".

    That said, this is a "maybe" kind of thing, because the rule change hasn't been passed or voted on. So we can't know what the actual form will be. But that's what it looks like is going to happen.

  20. Is anyone surprised? on Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Opposes Net Neutrality (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I didn't know in exactly what ways he would be against individual rights, but did anyone expect Trump to nominate someone who wasn't abominable? The question is, does he have any good points? If so, what are they.

    Every Supreme Court Justice pick I've ever studied has had abominable points. Some have had a number of decent points also. So what are his good points?

  21. Personally, I disable remote logon entirely. ssh is not without occasional flaws of its own. Possibly the current version is safe, but IIRC there've been extensive flaws revealed within the last couple of years. (I don't follow it, because I generally refuse to do anything requiring trust over the net.)

    I had not heard that salting the password hashes meant that you weren't vulnerable to a rainbow tables attack. (And yes, for login.) Again, however, I don't follow this because I just don't allow remote loggin in.

  22. Re:Until they don't on China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP (tomshardware.com) · · Score: 1

    I think you are misremembering the prior argument. And I'm rather certain you are misunderstanding the current one.

    The argument that Intel and AMD will both regret this action isn't talking about legalities, or proprietaries. It's talking about expectable consequences. Unless you're a stockholder in AMD or Intel, this particular action will have no direct influence on you. Indirect, yes, but no more than many other such "deals". As a programmer, I would expect no observable change in using a Chinese sourced processor. Perhaps it would have fewer bugs exploitable by the NSA, and more exploitable by the equivalent Chinese agency...but I suspect that they have "cross-licensing agreements".

  23. I don't think greed is the answer here, or only indirectly. I think the answer is power. Adler wasn't totally wrong about people. But just like not everything is sex, not everything is power. But in *this* case I think power is more the answer than greed. And that's definitely not limited to capitalists.

  24. Or BSD. Liinux isn't the only holdout, and perhaps not as trustworthy as some believe. I'd still dubious about what systemd is doing, e.g., and I sure haven't studied the Red Hat modifications in detail.

    Still, there are other flavors of Linux. I generally trust that the non-systemd ones are safe against passive penetration. But the password system is reportedly breakable with rainbow tables. So active penetration is something else again. (Well, that's several years old, but I didn't hear of that being changed. And I wouldn't know about the BSDs.)

  25. I don't know kcra, but a Google search confirms this story. (Well, the winds. I didn't check about visitor limitations, but that's normal for a military base anyway.)