Is there a reason that the autocomplete should ever ever ever ever autocomplete "sex" at all? How complicated is this?
You wouldn't finish your wife's sentences in public that way either. This isn't advanced AI. If you want to search for "sex", you get to type "sex" yourself.
It's not about something "tangible". It's about value-in-motion. That's what the word "currency" means. It comes from "current", meaning in-motion.
So something needs to be motionable -- moveable -- for it to be value in society's currency. We don't tax property. We tax property when it moves. (well, property tax we just keep taxing, so I guess that's the exception that proves the rule).
So some things get transferred, and they get taxed. But unless there is something being "transferred" between individuals, there isn't anything to be taxed.
So, in this scenario, the question is simply: "what's being transferred"? Knowledge doesn't get transferred, it gets copied, or instilled, or just plain learnt. Degrees get transferred. Money gets transferred. But in this case, neither is true right? There's no "degree" being given to a graduate student for tuition. They simply earn their degree through actual work right? That's how it works in my country (different from yours).
So, if the tuition is nothing more than money for access to a campus, then the campus is certainly able to waive an admissions fee. There's nothing wrong with that.
But, in this case, it really doesn't matter. The overall effect is undesirable. A little more tax money, a lot more tax enforcement cost, and fewer scientists. If that's what you want, then great. But I didn't think that's what your country wanted.
Actually, while I agree with you in principle, the "value" in "something of value" isn't value-to-you, it's value-to-others. That is to say it needs to be something that you could, in theory, sell/transfer/profit-from or otherwise be able to spend.
If I paint your walls, it ain't income because there's no way for you to create money from that paint. (with myriad exceptions of course, but most of the time there ain't).
So "value", in this case, would need to be the work experience, or the degree, or the work product. But it likely can't be the general education itself, which is a good example of something that has a lot of worth, but no value.
And really, here's a better example. A library is a sheltered comfortable place where you can read a book. If I let you come into my building, even my office building, so you can read a book in piece, every day during lunch, it ain't "value" in terms of rent, income, or otherwise, Neither is my free wifi.
All of my opinions being what they are, I think your country and this bill is a whole lot of craziness. It clearly doesn't support the actual objectives that you seem to have, nor does it accomplish anything of significance. It doesn't create more STEM people for sure. And just how many of these $10K taxes are you actually going to get out of this? Is it at all worthwhile?
And you need to enforce it. And you need to collect it. And you need to track it. And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition. Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone. So what's the point?
"anyone within Bluetooth range..." can always disable the device. Isn't Bluetooth range ~30 feet?
So someone in my kitchen is going to disable my device (not that I'd have one) with a Bluetooth exploit? They could disable it with a glass of orange juice, a tennis ball, or by simply pulling the power.
Bluetooth exploit is a long way to go to cover a few steps.
Here's the thing. On a mac, apple has made decisions as to how things will be paired, work together, and generally function as a whole. There's user-level customization, of course, but the inner workings are pretty well configured for you.
On a Linux box, it's a good bet that nothing works at all until you configure it from scratch. Whether it's "make"ing / compiling programs, or just weeding through conf files, there's a world to learn.
Windows is neither.
By default, windows is configured to work in a certain way, but you're able to, easily within the GUI, change the way it works.
If mac is the independent consultant that knows what it's doing from the start, and Linux is the in-house employee that you can train to do anything, then windows is the independent contractor that will do, very well, what you tell it to do. And if you don't provide any direction, it'll only do what it thinks might work.
With a windows machine, you're expected (by me) to spend a half-day clicking through every setting and making a decision for each checkbox. There are about four hundred tiny decisions to make. It's a process, not a puzzle, and it's totally worth doing.
We're talking about settings like disabling Bluetooth because you don't use it. Removing permissions that you don't want apps to have. Choosing default behaviours at every turn. This is true for major software too -- generally takes me an hour to configure something like photoshop, or open office, or ultraedit. Ok, two hours for ultraedit, but that's my primary tool.
And don't think it starts with the control panel. It starts way sooner. Even if you aren't selecting the hardware (balancing bottlenecks, as I like to say), you'll still want to decide which storage device houses which files. OS files, temp files, swap files, work files, media files, personal files.
Do it right and the system speeds along smoothly forever. Do it wrong, and it can certainly eat itself alive. But I've done well. My '98 machine lasted 9 years as my primary work machine, my vista machine lasted 10 years, and would have kept going had IE9 not been its limit.
Funny story. I just built a windows 10 machine. With the OS and all background-accessed files (and triple-a games) on the m.2 drive, user-triggered access to my work and applications (and normal games) on the sata ssd, and the directly-accessed files like media and backups on the large spinning hdd, I routinely (three-ish time a day) wind up waiting about 12 seconds to save a text file to my sata ssd!
It's a six thousand dollar workstation, and I'm waiting 12 seconds to save a 10KB text file to an SSD drive. It reminds me of thirty years ago with a floppy drive, so it makes me nostalgic.
If you haven't followed along closely, my issue is actually by design. I've configured my three storage systems based on access, and so if I don't access work files for a while, the drive goes to sleep, and I get to wait 12 seconds for it to wake up.
This is the perfect example of going through the settings that I mentioned before. This is easily changed by adjusting the sleep behaviour of the storage systems in windows. I could make the drive not sleep so quickly, or at all -- which is really fine for a desktop ssd especially -- but I like it this way. I like knowing that most of the time most of my machine is asleep doing nothing.
So, that's the lesson. With windows, it's your choice, for everything, and every choice is easily specified if you spend the hours going through every "properties" and "settings" menu. Do it once, then never again. You'll be able to quickly disable all of the stuff that windows does by default that simply doesn't apply to you. You can always change your mind later.
Now that is actually a brilliant idea -- the network to communicate to other owners. Don't know how that would work without giving the bad guys yet another channel, would probably need to be offline communication, but brilliant none-the-less.
"an agency tasked with this type of work" and "government agency" are two very different things. The latter is already paid for. That's the difference.
By your definitions, I am being hacked -- I'm just successfully defending against it. That doesn't change what they are doing. It's the "attempted" version. And it very much counts.
You're saying that I need to spend thousands of dollars before I can go to the FBI. That's useless. For thousands of dollars, I can attack back too. For thousands of dollars, I can increase my defenses instead -- which is the easiest option.
The point is, I shouldn't need to spend any money. It's criminal. My focus ought to be on commercial. That's why we have a government.
Pro-tip for readers: "attacked" is spelled differently than "shot". A gunman can attack without shooting. And you're an idiot for walking around with a loaded gun in my house or almost anywhere else.
Of course I am. When the traffic spike is such that it slows my servers to even think about responding to the request, or when I can't run anti-spam or greylisting on e-mail because there's an infinite amount of splash back, or when I get tens of thousands of ssh login requests per minute, it most certainly is. Ultimately, if I need to charge my legitimate clients because of traffic that isn't theirs, then it's an attack. It's an attack because I need to defend against it, otherwise I'll lose my business.
And no, the FBI won't do a damned thing if I give them an IP address in China, and a 3GB daily access log.
it is very illegal for communication transmissions to be altered, in any way, especially by a carrier. We're big on trusting communication up here. Industry Canada. It all revolves around fire fighters being able to use their radios, always, no matter what, anywhere.
So your cable company can't alter content along the way. Of course, with myriad reasonable exceptions. I would imagine that your television altering the streaming movie would count as altering communication.
I can't tell you how many times I read a magazine, a book, or watched a tv show or a movie growing up that my parents didn't authorize in-advance. I don't think children are expected to have free-reign over all of youtube kids. Any parent that thinks someone else can censor content for their own children is just a terrible parent. Your child has specifics. Your family has specifics. Your own parenting style has specifics. They are your children, and your specifics.
If I'm attacked by a gunman, I can call police, who will then call military as needed, and my government will defend me. So give me the number of the person I'm to call when my company is being hacked. I'll happily call it. ..a few thousand times a day.
There have always been two kinds of perl. There's perl that you've written, and there's perl that someone else has written.
Perl that you've written is probably the greatest programming language to have ever lived. It looks like you, it feels like you, it smells like you. It's super-easy to follow because it follows your brain perfectly. That's its power -- it shapes itself to your way of thinking. The syntax changes shape, the logic changes shape, it becomes a perfect fit.
Perl that someone else has written is likely the absolute worst programming language that will ever exist. Not only is it as cryptic as that someone-else's brain, but reading it dedicates at least 50% of your brain to nothing but the words: "why'd he write it this way, I'd have written it the other way" for every line of code, every time, always.
The article shows a very simple block of perl code, and, as discussed, each and every single line is not the way that I'd write it. I've been programming in perl for 20 years. It's been my livelihood for 18 years. It's ultimately paid for everything I own.
It's very rare that I get to deal with other people's perl code. Not that other people's php code is fun to deal with either, and certainly other people's C++ code can be equally brutal, but at least in those cases, I have my full brain to help me read their code. Alas, as discussed, when I'm reading other people's perl code, I only get half of my brain, while the other half just sits there complaining.
Perl's awesome, when it's your own. Maybe it's like an attack-dog that way. Yours is an asset, someone else's is a threat.
People were never commuting because they needed to work with others. You could have had small teams of people working anywhere long before computers. People worked with others in an office because a boss needed to control those people, to ensure that they would do as they were told.
Whether that's because employees are dumb and just don't understand the risks involved at the boss's level, or because the boss doesn't understand how to manage employees effectively, is, quite frankly, irrelevant.
Telecommuting, by necessity, destroys a big chunk of supervision. That's enough on its own. Add to that the reality that your home-office is likely not a dedicated and distraction-free atmosphere, and that you likely don't spend enough on your home office for it to be as effective as it could be, and you've got a debate to last for decades.
But there's always been a very easy way to telecommute. Build your own team, and be a contractor. As a contractor, that supervision isn't present at all. It isn't even desired by the boss/client. And then you get to take-on all of the risks that a contractor takes every day.
For the record, that's what I did. And then I also built-out my home office into a distraction-free, dedicated environment. It wasn't cheap.
I wasn't talking about risk aversion, per se, more knowing the difference between an everyday reality and a solvable anomaly.
If you think that car brakes squeal normally, then you don't replace your brakes until they stop working. If you know that brakes squeal as an early-indicator, then you replace your brakes well-in-advance of them failing.
Ask a few thousand people if there is anything wrong with their brakes, and the group with understanding of brake squealing will say yes, and the ignorant group will say no. It's that simple. They all have the problem, but the dummies just don't know enough to report it.
"Do you have a mental problem" is exactly like "do your brakes work". You need to know how to diagnose yourself in order to answer the question correctly. You need to know to get routine check-ups so others can diagnose you too. If you don't know to check, and you don't know how to check, then you don't know anything. But dummies still answer "no, I don't have it".
So people smart enough to know what they might have, and smart enough to get tested for things, and smart enough to ask for help, report problems more often than the average dumb person who needs to be convinced to go to a doctor once in a while, wear a seatbelt in a car, get vaccinated for major illnesses, and not fall for Nigerian scams?
I think it's safe to say that smart people identify more problems than dumb people -- independent of how many problems either group has.
I also get my car repaired more often than the average car owner -- and my car's more reliable than the average car too. But I'm willing/able to repair non-essential parts, where the average car owner would just let it go, and drive with a cracked windshield, a squeaky bushing, a rusty dent, a less-than-perfect oxygen sensor, et cetera. There's a reason why routine emissions tests are now mandated.
We're doing it again -- measuring people via an obviously biased subset of people. Twitter isn't everybody, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is certainly the more "socially-dependent" subset of people. Add uneven distribution to the list of considerations, and what you've actually discovered is that people whose daily routine is dependent on socializing with other people (via twitter at the very least) cycles with the work week.
Big surprise: people who use social networking to fulfil their mood have a mood that is based on that very same social networking..
Through a client referral, I was introduced to a company that was in sudden need of a new web host. Their current Australian host was shutting down, and they had two weeks (by the time I was referred) to move their small Canadian site elsewhere.
When I say "small Canadian site", I mean the site was a small, promotional, site, with little more than five pages and a signup form.
Little did I know...
This was ultimately the consumer-brand of a large telecom provider -- a very large, national, telecom provider. This "small" site, was a mass-market allowing consumers to sign-up, and to also pay their monthly long-distance bill. This was circa 2010.
We shook hands, I said: "sure, I can move your site in the two weeks, just give me the credentials to it, and I'll figure it out."
Wow was that a mistake. Anyone heard of CakePHP?. I had to figure it out pretty fast.
It was late one evening, when I discovered the page that allowed customers to pay their bill online -- something no one had told me was a part of this tiny site. There was no https/ssl to even hint at it. And then I saw the MySQL insert statement, and the variable "card_number". And I was scared.
I said, to myself, "no, it can't be!" There must be some part of the platform wrapping the database call that must mask-out the card number. Or this must not be the actual card number. Or maybe it's not used anymore. Or something.
Then I logged into the phpMyAdmin, with the credentials given to me.
So, this is when you need to understand something. I'm a small independent web developer. At the time, I was teeny tiny. I had no written contract. The e-mailed and in-person job discussions said nothing of sensitive information of any kind. No money would be transferred until the job was done. So at this point, there is effectively zero legal agreement between us.
I looked at the table, I saw over forty-thousand records, each with real, live, credit card numbers. ..and expiry dates, and card holder names, and purchase amounts, and confirmation/approval codes.
I was stunned.
Obviously, being the non-criminal that I was at the time, I told them. I told them that I was appalled. I told them that it can't stay this way. I told them that I was going to charge them a few hundred dollars to encrypt the field, and the very least -- I was too young to know that I should have been charging way more.
They said they didn't care, I should just leave it as-is.
That was over a decade ago. Ever since then, I've learned that there are very few clients who will pay five cents towards security, backup, or encryption of any kind. In my entire 25-year career (so far), I've met only two clients who'll invest in that kind of safety.
So I no longer bother even suggesting that security or backup is a good idea. My legal contracts ensure that I'm not legally liable for the consequences of doing anything that they've explicitly told me to do, and that's good enough for me, I guess.
So to all those youngin's not yet jaded for failed efforts to be good, enjoy having the hero-skills to save people; but if your career is anything like mine, you'll quickly learn that those skills carry a perfectly zero-dollar value.
In the days of Equifax, riddle me this: where's the law that says you can't store millions of archived data all in one place, forever, online? Some of these 40'000 records hadn't been charged in over a year -- clearly old/former customers. And aside from those from the current day, all of them were old records that were no longer needed at all. Equifax had e-mails from ten years ago. How about a very simple law saying that things get taken offline eventually? Your ten-year-old e-mail can be accessible from that machine in the corner of the office, or through a request for the tape backup, and that's good enough 99% of the time.
But hey, where's the law that says one model of gun is illegal.
It's not about spending another $800 on the phone. $800 isn't $800. $800 is just a number. $800 is what else you can do with the same $800. If you don't spend it on the phone, what else can you do with it.
There are an incredibly large number of people in this world who have nothing else to do with those $800. For example, there's someone in my household. Our mortgage is already covered. Our food and entertainment already covered. Insurance and car already covered. We already travel 45 days each year. We already have bikes and kayas.
When those $800 have no other use, then those $800 have the same value as $0.
For me, I spend $60 on a tiny phone, and I'm happy. I'd rather spend my $940 on a day off of work. Or two. But there's someone else in my household who has nothing else to do with her $800.
Yup, she's buying it. She thinks it's money well-spent. She thinks it's fun.
The huge portions that I haven't needed in thirty years, and don't expect to need in the next thirty? I seem to be doing pretty well with Slashdot, techreport, duckduckgo, Wikipedia, amazon, ebay, all of my clients, all of my suppliers, and garfield. I block facebook, twitter, and google at the network level, I block ads at the network level, and I don't click on stupid things. I think you're making "scary" sound more complicated than "don't go there". It's not.
blocker? hosts file have 10'000 entries of domain names to block. That kills 99% of all ads -- image and video. blocking third-party cookies blocks most of the rest.
ask me how many times I go to Slashdot.org, and expect to receive content from superads.com? About as many times as I walk into best buy, and expect to receive products from bed bath and beyond. If the sales guy in best buy told you to first go next door and look at bed bath and beyond's mattress sale before shopping for your sd card, would you do it? It's ridiculous.
I can block any content that isn't coming from the domain name that you typed into the address bar. And, I come very close to doing exactly that. Quite frankly, typing this, maybe a quick pac-file would be a very easy answer. Does windows still support pac files? I just remembered building a pac file to log stuff fifteen years ago. It may actually have run for ten years -- long after I'd forgotten about it. I should delete that log file!
one day, someone will tell me why my browser needs an add-on in the first place. It's been 30 years, and as long as my browser shows the web page, I don't see what else it needs to do. One plug in to open a PDF, but not any other type of file? What good is that?
Maybe edge needs an add-on to be able to print a selection. That'd be swell. PrintScreen & Paint will do just fine though.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a reason that the autocomplete should ever ever ever ever autocomplete "sex" at all? How complicated is this?
You wouldn't finish your wife's sentences in public that way either. This isn't advanced AI. If you want to search for "sex", you get to type "sex" yourself.
Very complicated.
It's not about something "tangible". It's about value-in-motion. That's what the word "currency" means. It comes from "current", meaning in-motion.
So something needs to be motionable -- moveable -- for it to be value in society's currency. We don't tax property. We tax property when it moves. (well, property tax we just keep taxing, so I guess that's the exception that proves the rule).
So some things get transferred, and they get taxed. But unless there is something being "transferred" between individuals, there isn't anything to be taxed.
So, in this scenario, the question is simply: "what's being transferred"? Knowledge doesn't get transferred, it gets copied, or instilled, or just plain learnt. Degrees get transferred. Money gets transferred. But in this case, neither is true right? There's no "degree" being given to a graduate student for tuition. They simply earn their degree through actual work right? That's how it works in my country (different from yours).
So, if the tuition is nothing more than money for access to a campus, then the campus is certainly able to waive an admissions fee. There's nothing wrong with that.
But, in this case, it really doesn't matter. The overall effect is undesirable. A little more tax money, a lot more tax enforcement cost, and fewer scientists. If that's what you want, then great. But I didn't think that's what your country wanted.
Actually, while I agree with you in principle, the "value" in "something of value" isn't value-to-you, it's value-to-others. That is to say it needs to be something that you could, in theory, sell/transfer/profit-from or otherwise be able to spend.
If I paint your walls, it ain't income because there's no way for you to create money from that paint. (with myriad exceptions of course, but most of the time there ain't).
So "value", in this case, would need to be the work experience, or the degree, or the work product. But it likely can't be the general education itself, which is a good example of something that has a lot of worth, but no value.
And really, here's a better example. A library is a sheltered comfortable place where you can read a book. If I let you come into my building, even my office building, so you can read a book in piece, every day during lunch, it ain't "value" in terms of rent, income, or otherwise, Neither is my free wifi.
All of my opinions being what they are, I think your country and this bill is a whole lot of craziness. It clearly doesn't support the actual objectives that you seem to have, nor does it accomplish anything of significance. It doesn't create more STEM people for sure. And just how many of these $10K taxes are you actually going to get out of this? Is it at all worthwhile?
And you need to enforce it. And you need to collect it. And you need to track it. And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition. Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone. So what's the point?
Anonymous = without names. Location, dates, homes, family connections, and times of day aren't names.
Congrats on shitty laws.
"anyone within Bluetooth range..." can always disable the device. Isn't Bluetooth range ~30 feet?
So someone in my kitchen is going to disable my device (not that I'd have one) with a Bluetooth exploit? They could disable it with a glass of orange juice, a tennis ball, or by simply pulling the power.
Bluetooth exploit is a long way to go to cover a few steps.
Here's the thing. On a mac, apple has made decisions as to how things will be paired, work together, and generally function as a whole. There's user-level customization, of course, but the inner workings are pretty well configured for you.
On a Linux box, it's a good bet that nothing works at all until you configure it from scratch. Whether it's "make"ing / compiling programs, or just weeding through conf files, there's a world to learn.
Windows is neither.
By default, windows is configured to work in a certain way, but you're able to, easily within the GUI, change the way it works.
If mac is the independent consultant that knows what it's doing from the start, and Linux is the in-house employee that you can train to do anything, then windows is the independent contractor that will do, very well, what you tell it to do. And if you don't provide any direction, it'll only do what it thinks might work.
With a windows machine, you're expected (by me) to spend a half-day clicking through every setting and making a decision for each checkbox. There are about four hundred tiny decisions to make. It's a process, not a puzzle, and it's totally worth doing.
We're talking about settings like disabling Bluetooth because you don't use it. Removing permissions that you don't want apps to have. Choosing default behaviours at every turn. This is true for major software too -- generally takes me an hour to configure something like photoshop, or open office, or ultraedit. Ok, two hours for ultraedit, but that's my primary tool.
And don't think it starts with the control panel. It starts way sooner. Even if you aren't selecting the hardware (balancing bottlenecks, as I like to say), you'll still want to decide which storage device houses which files. OS files, temp files, swap files, work files, media files, personal files.
Do it right and the system speeds along smoothly forever. Do it wrong, and it can certainly eat itself alive. But I've done well. My '98 machine lasted 9 years as my primary work machine, my vista machine lasted 10 years, and would have kept going had IE9 not been its limit.
Funny story. I just built a windows 10 machine. With the OS and all background-accessed files (and triple-a games) on the m.2 drive, user-triggered access to my work and applications (and normal games) on the sata ssd, and the directly-accessed files like media and backups on the large spinning hdd, I routinely (three-ish time a day) wind up waiting about 12 seconds to save a text file to my sata ssd!
It's a six thousand dollar workstation, and I'm waiting 12 seconds to save a 10KB text file to an SSD drive. It reminds me of thirty years ago with a floppy drive, so it makes me nostalgic.
If you haven't followed along closely, my issue is actually by design. I've configured my three storage systems based on access, and so if I don't access work files for a while, the drive goes to sleep, and I get to wait 12 seconds for it to wake up.
This is the perfect example of going through the settings that I mentioned before. This is easily changed by adjusting the sleep behaviour of the storage systems in windows. I could make the drive not sleep so quickly, or at all -- which is really fine for a desktop ssd especially -- but I like it this way. I like knowing that most of the time most of my machine is asleep doing nothing.
So, that's the lesson. With windows, it's your choice, for everything, and every choice is easily specified if you spend the hours going through every "properties" and "settings" menu. Do it once, then never again. You'll be able to quickly disable all of the stuff that windows does by default that simply doesn't apply to you. You can always change your mind later.
Now that is actually a brilliant idea -- the network to communicate to other owners. Don't know how that would work without giving the bad guys yet another channel, would probably need to be offline communication, but brilliant none-the-less.
"an agency tasked with this type of work" and "government agency" are two very different things. The latter is already paid for. That's the difference.
By your definitions, I am being hacked -- I'm just successfully defending against it. That doesn't change what they are doing. It's the "attempted" version. And it very much counts.
You're saying that I need to spend thousands of dollars before I can go to the FBI. That's useless. For thousands of dollars, I can attack back too. For thousands of dollars, I can increase my defenses instead -- which is the easiest option.
The point is, I shouldn't need to spend any money. It's criminal. My focus ought to be on commercial. That's why we have a government.
Pro-tip for readers: "attacked" is spelled differently than "shot". A gunman can attack without shooting. And you're an idiot for walking around with a loaded gun in my house or almost anywhere else.
Of course I am. When the traffic spike is such that it slows my servers to even think about responding to the request, or when I can't run anti-spam or greylisting on e-mail because there's an infinite amount of splash back, or when I get tens of thousands of ssh login requests per minute, it most certainly is. Ultimately, if I need to charge my legitimate clients because of traffic that isn't theirs, then it's an attack. It's an attack because I need to defend against it, otherwise I'll lose my business.
And no, the FBI won't do a damned thing if I give them an IP address in China, and a 3GB daily access log.
it is very illegal for communication transmissions to be altered, in any way, especially by a carrier. We're big on trusting communication up here. Industry Canada. It all revolves around fire fighters being able to use their radios, always, no matter what, anywhere.
So your cable company can't alter content along the way. Of course, with myriad reasonable exceptions. I would imagine that your television altering the streaming movie would count as altering communication.
I can't tell you how many times I read a magazine, a book, or watched a tv show or a movie growing up that my parents didn't authorize in-advance. I don't think children are expected to have free-reign over all of youtube kids. Any parent that thinks someone else can censor content for their own children is just a terrible parent. Your child has specifics. Your family has specifics. Your own parenting style has specifics. They are your children, and your specifics.
If I'm attacked by a gunman, I can call police, who will then call military as needed, and my government will defend me. So give me the number of the person I'm to call when my company is being hacked. I'll happily call it. . .a few thousand times a day.
There have always been two kinds of perl. There's perl that you've written, and there's perl that someone else has written.
Perl that you've written is probably the greatest programming language to have ever lived. It looks like you, it feels like you, it smells like you. It's super-easy to follow because it follows your brain perfectly. That's its power -- it shapes itself to your way of thinking. The syntax changes shape, the logic changes shape, it becomes a perfect fit.
Perl that someone else has written is likely the absolute worst programming language that will ever exist. Not only is it as cryptic as that someone-else's brain, but reading it dedicates at least 50% of your brain to nothing but the words: "why'd he write it this way, I'd have written it the other way" for every line of code, every time, always.
The article shows a very simple block of perl code, and, as discussed, each and every single line is not the way that I'd write it. I've been programming in perl for 20 years. It's been my livelihood for 18 years. It's ultimately paid for everything I own.
It's very rare that I get to deal with other people's perl code. Not that other people's php code is fun to deal with either, and certainly other people's C++ code can be equally brutal, but at least in those cases, I have my full brain to help me read their code. Alas, as discussed, when I'm reading other people's perl code, I only get half of my brain, while the other half just sits there complaining.
Perl's awesome, when it's your own. Maybe it's like an attack-dog that way. Yours is an asset, someone else's is a threat.
People were never commuting because they needed to work with others. You could have had small teams of people working anywhere long before computers. People worked with others in an office because a boss needed to control those people, to ensure that they would do as they were told.
Whether that's because employees are dumb and just don't understand the risks involved at the boss's level, or because the boss doesn't understand how to manage employees effectively, is, quite frankly, irrelevant.
Telecommuting, by necessity, destroys a big chunk of supervision. That's enough on its own. Add to that the reality that your home-office is likely not a dedicated and distraction-free atmosphere, and that you likely don't spend enough on your home office for it to be as effective as it could be, and you've got a debate to last for decades.
But there's always been a very easy way to telecommute. Build your own team, and be a contractor. As a contractor, that supervision isn't present at all. It isn't even desired by the boss/client. And then you get to take-on all of the risks that a contractor takes every day.
For the record, that's what I did. And then I also built-out my home office into a distraction-free, dedicated environment. It wasn't cheap.
I did give four non-car analogies too.
I wasn't talking about risk aversion, per se, more knowing the difference between an everyday reality and a solvable anomaly.
If you think that car brakes squeal normally, then you don't replace your brakes until they stop working. If you know that brakes squeal as an early-indicator, then you replace your brakes well-in-advance of them failing.
Ask a few thousand people if there is anything wrong with their brakes, and the group with understanding of brake squealing will say yes, and the ignorant group will say no. It's that simple. They all have the problem, but the dummies just don't know enough to report it.
"Do you have a mental problem" is exactly like "do your brakes work". You need to know how to diagnose yourself in order to answer the question correctly. You need to know to get routine check-ups so others can diagnose you too. If you don't know to check, and you don't know how to check, then you don't know anything. But dummies still answer "no, I don't have it".
So people smart enough to know what they might have, and smart enough to get tested for things, and smart enough to ask for help, report problems more often than the average dumb person who needs to be convinced to go to a doctor once in a while, wear a seatbelt in a car, get vaccinated for major illnesses, and not fall for Nigerian scams?
I think it's safe to say that smart people identify more problems than dumb people -- independent of how many problems either group has.
I also get my car repaired more often than the average car owner -- and my car's more reliable than the average car too. But I'm willing/able to repair non-essential parts, where the average car owner would just let it go, and drive with a cracked windshield, a squeaky bushing, a rusty dent, a less-than-perfect oxygen sensor, et cetera. There's a reason why routine emissions tests are now mandated.
We're doing it again -- measuring people via an obviously biased subset of people. Twitter isn't everybody, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is certainly the more "socially-dependent" subset of people. Add uneven distribution to the list of considerations, and what you've actually discovered is that people whose daily routine is dependent on socializing with other people (via twitter at the very least) cycles with the work week.
Big surprise: people who use social networking to fulfil their mood have a mood that is based on that very same social networking..
Through a client referral, I was introduced to a company that was in sudden need of a new web host. Their current Australian host was shutting down, and they had two weeks (by the time I was referred) to move their small Canadian site elsewhere.
When I say "small Canadian site", I mean the site was a small, promotional, site, with little more than five pages and a signup form.
Little did I know...
This was ultimately the consumer-brand of a large telecom provider -- a very large, national, telecom provider. This "small" site, was a mass-market allowing consumers to sign-up, and to also pay their monthly long-distance bill. This was circa 2010.
We shook hands, I said: "sure, I can move your site in the two weeks, just give me the credentials to it, and I'll figure it out."
Wow was that a mistake. Anyone heard of CakePHP?. I had to figure it out pretty fast.
It was late one evening, when I discovered the page that allowed customers to pay their bill online -- something no one had told me was a part of this tiny site. There was no https/ssl to even hint at it. And then I saw the MySQL insert statement, and the variable "card_number". And I was scared.
I said, to myself, "no, it can't be!" There must be some part of the platform wrapping the database call that must mask-out the card number. Or this must not be the actual card number. Or maybe it's not used anymore. Or something.
Then I logged into the phpMyAdmin, with the credentials given to me.
So, this is when you need to understand something. I'm a small independent web developer. At the time, I was teeny tiny. I had no written contract. The e-mailed and in-person job discussions said nothing of sensitive information of any kind. No money would be transferred until the job was done. So at this point, there is effectively zero legal agreement between us.
I looked at the table, I saw over forty-thousand records, each with real, live, credit card numbers. . .and expiry dates, and card holder names, and purchase amounts, and confirmation/approval codes.
I was stunned.
Obviously, being the non-criminal that I was at the time, I told them. I told them that I was appalled. I told them that it can't stay this way. I told them that I was going to charge them a few hundred dollars to encrypt the field, and the very least -- I was too young to know that I should have been charging way more.
They said they didn't care, I should just leave it as-is.
That was over a decade ago. Ever since then, I've learned that there are very few clients who will pay five cents towards security, backup, or encryption of any kind. In my entire 25-year career (so far), I've met only two clients who'll invest in that kind of safety.
So I no longer bother even suggesting that security or backup is a good idea. My legal contracts ensure that I'm not legally liable for the consequences of doing anything that they've explicitly told me to do, and that's good enough for me, I guess.
So to all those youngin's not yet jaded for failed efforts to be good, enjoy having the hero-skills to save people; but if your career is anything like mine, you'll quickly learn that those skills carry a perfectly zero-dollar value.
In the days of Equifax, riddle me this: where's the law that says you can't store millions of archived data all in one place, forever, online? Some of these 40'000 records hadn't been charged in over a year -- clearly old/former customers. And aside from those from the current day, all of them were old records that were no longer needed at all. Equifax had e-mails from ten years ago. How about a very simple law saying that things get taken offline eventually? Your ten-year-old e-mail can be accessible from that machine in the corner of the office, or through a request for the tape backup, and that's good enough 99% of the time.
But hey, where's the law that says one model of gun is illegal.
Thanks for the freedom.
It's not about spending another $800 on the phone. $800 isn't $800. $800 is just a number. $800 is what else you can do with the same $800. If you don't spend it on the phone, what else can you do with it.
There are an incredibly large number of people in this world who have nothing else to do with those $800. For example, there's someone in my household. Our mortgage is already covered. Our food and entertainment already covered. Insurance and car already covered. We already travel 45 days each year. We already have bikes and kayas.
When those $800 have no other use, then those $800 have the same value as $0.
For me, I spend $60 on a tiny phone, and I'm happy. I'd rather spend my $940 on a day off of work. Or two. But there's someone else in my household who has nothing else to do with her $800.
Yup, she's buying it. She thinks it's money well-spent. She thinks it's fun.
The huge portions that I haven't needed in thirty years, and don't expect to need in the next thirty? I seem to be doing pretty well with Slashdot, techreport, duckduckgo, Wikipedia, amazon, ebay, all of my clients, all of my suppliers, and garfield. I block facebook, twitter, and google at the network level, I block ads at the network level, and I don't click on stupid things. I think you're making "scary" sound more complicated than "don't go there". It's not.
No you don't. You can block ads at the network level, and you can change default backgrounds with a user-defined stylesheet.
Maybe you need extensions because you don't know what your browser already has?
blocker? hosts file have 10'000 entries of domain names to block. That kills 99% of all ads -- image and video. blocking third-party cookies blocks most of the rest.
ask me how many times I go to Slashdot.org, and expect to receive content from superads.com? About as many times as I walk into best buy, and expect to receive products from bed bath and beyond. If the sales guy in best buy told you to first go next door and look at bed bath and beyond's mattress sale before shopping for your sd card, would you do it? It's ridiculous.
I can block any content that isn't coming from the domain name that you typed into the address bar. And, I come very close to doing exactly that. Quite frankly, typing this, maybe a quick pac-file would be a very easy answer. Does windows still support pac files? I just remembered building a pac file to log stuff fifteen years ago. It may actually have run for ten years -- long after I'd forgotten about it. I should delete that log file!
one day, someone will tell me why my browser needs an add-on in the first place. It's been 30 years, and as long as my browser shows the web page, I don't see what else it needs to do. One plug in to open a PDF, but not any other type of file? What good is that?
Maybe edge needs an add-on to be able to print a selection. That'd be swell. PrintScreen & Paint will do just fine though.