One version of TurboTax a couple of years ago transmitted every entry I did on my machine in this software package to some outside entity. Add a number - firewall comes up asking for permission to connect. Move around - same thing. May have been some debugging feature but who the hell needs to see every move I do in some debug-log, if this was the case.
Do I trust the Co? Sure no, their attempts to tie you in and milk $$'s out of you are disgusting.
I hadn't heard that they'd changed. One reason why I file my returns on paper. I figure that yeah, TT is probably tattling all my financial details back to Intuit where they can sell them to whoever they can get away with selling them to (plus, of course the NSA), but actually filing via TT is apt to pull in additional parties. If I can't stop it, at least, I'll try to limit it.
Interesting. Back in July they were talking like a special production run would be made (no cables in inventory for months), but come July, nothing. Apparently they did it and didn't say anything - I had a pre-order in for all the good it did.
If you plug in a stock micro USB connector, even if it's jacked into a 2A power converter, the Nook will say "Not Charging". But come back in an hour or 2 and it will be back up to full power.
I don't think the trickle rate's enough to charge it while in use - especially with the Wi-Fi running, but it does work.
... USB ports have to supply (and USB devices may draw)? Drawing more power is outside the spec.
Also, don't USB devices usually have to request the high power mode explicitly? Some USB power supplies are "dumb" and only supply power, but don't speak USB. Some devices are curteous enough not to draw 500mA if they haven't received permission from the USB host to do so. In this case, they'll slowly load with 100mA...
There are several generations of specs. The original was hard-wired for 500ma max. Later versions can negotiate.
One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.
Interesting. My wife has a Nexus 7 (2012 edition). It charges just fine (albeit relatively slowly) from 500mA USB chargers. It charges faster with the 2A charger that comes with it, but I've never had issues with it losing charge while plugged in to a standard charger.
How weak is your "weakly charging" USB port? Is it one on a keyboard or some other low-power accessory, or is it a port on the computer itself?
The Color and Tablet Nook devices have two different charge rates. If you use the official "USB" cable with the LED indicator in it, it charges at a 1A (2A?) rate. If you use a stock micro USB cable, it charges at the official 500ma rate. The decision is made by the Nook itself, based on info from extra pins that are in the custom cable.
Which (blankety-blank-censored-blank) is no longer available. And since the cables are no longer made or sold and since they were notoriously prone to fail means that I've been trickle-charging my unit for about a year now.
Moral of story: always check new toys for screwball cables before buying.
Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver.
It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no.
I got it from my job writing printer drivers for Windows, where it was my code providing the support.
One of the apps that did this was Quattro Pro which had an extremely brain-dead (or pessimistic) on the differences between the page widths of "0", "00", "000", etc.. I likened my view of the app to the view from the bottom of the toilet bowl.
And don't even get me started on what WordPerfect for Windows did!
Why does the blood always have to come from a finger? That's where all the nerves are. Why can't you get the drop of blood from your elbow or some other place?
I had to stick myself in high school as part of a biology experiment to determine my blood type. Couldn't do my finger. Ended up stabbing myself in the lower leg.
It hurt a lot less, but unfortunately, there's not as much blood on tap there.
I'm not sure where this breathless PR piece is leading to. We've been using 'micro' samples in automatic lab analyzers for years. Just because you can get the results from Walgreen's doesn't change things.
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody. Tests where the FDA has approved patient education for point of care testing. I don't think you can order a whole lot more without 'practicing medicine' and for that you need some sort of license. Perhaps they will limit the testing to places where they have a mini clinic with a PA (physician's assistant) or NP (nurse practitioner).
Ordering tests without knowledge of some important things (like pretest probability / accuracy and sensitivity of the tests) is basically worthless.
But what the hell, it will make somebody some money. That's what counts.
Pharmacists have locally been granted the ability to make certain prescriptions directly without doctors orders for certain drugs. It's not a big step to integrating that with having them able to do certain tests as well.
There are certain advantages to having this ability. Walgreens is generally a lot closer and more convenient than the local testing facility and the waits are almost guaranteed to be a lot shorter.
I look at it as "distributed testing". You can test more often and more casually and offload some of the grunt work from the more elaborate facilities. And probably pull in some people who could be persuaded to get a finger-stick while shopping for Xmas supplies who might not go for a full-blown needle in the arm. Better yet, since Walgreens can be found in places where GPs are hard to come by, it's a good first-line outpost for early detection and prevention.
For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.
So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.
This whole "Nothing else formats like Genuine Microsoft" thing is pure garbage.
I have never depended on a word processor to maintain constant pixel-by-pixel formatting. That's not what they're for. The only reason that Word documents don't routinely re-arrange themselves (the way they used to) every time you transport a document to a machine with a different printer/set of fonts is because virtually all word processing today is done with a standard set of scalable fonts. Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver. When most fonts were hardware fonts, that meant some serious re-arranging was commonplace.
If you want precise placement of text, don't use a word processor, use a page layout program. And create a PDF.
And if you want basic formatting to be preserved but pixel-precise isn't important, don't use a word processor like it's a typewriter and jam in manual spaces and carriage returns by dumb brute force, use styles. No, it won't be as immutable as PDF, but at least what re-arranging does happen won't look like crap.
How exactly do you boot a pi without the binary blob videocore bootloader? Oh right, you don't.
I boot a pi by applying power to it.
Nothing says I have to use the closed-source video. This is not a machine you'd pick for stunning video graphics anyway. I use ssh or run completely headless.
Back when I first started, compilers were pretty stupid and basically did a 1-to-1 translation of source code to sequences of assembly language. It didn't take much to do better simply coding assembler by hand.
Somewhere about the mid 1980s that stopped being true. The IBM mainframe Pascal/VS compiler generated heavily-optimized code. It was sufficiently clever in its use of machine resources that it was on par with hand optimization.
The clincher, however, was that it could do this job in seconds, whereas hand-coding would take hours. And if you made significant changes to the algorithms you were coding, it would re-optimize each time. It would have been a total rewrite to get code that tight by hand. And even though we didn't have the insane time constraints that modern-day projects typically have, we didn't have enough time to make it worth doing that even to save expensive mainframe CPU cycles.
When you get to frame the issue the way you want, you can try to convince the people that it was for their own good. Snowden may likely say show that it was used abused in practice, and the NSA likely wants to say that they prevented a suspected domestic terrorist.
That's the classic comeback. "If the enemy knows, we cannot do our job and you're endangering our interests."
Yeah. In many cases, the enemy already knew, or at least strongly suspected. That's why bin Laden's safe house didn't keep phones or Internet links in it.
What endangered US interests more than anything else was that they were doing this at all. We've squandered more trust and goodwill off this debacle than anything we've ever done since invading Iran using 9/11 as an excuse. Nobody wants to keep data on US servers any more. Nobody wants their communications routed anywhere near US servers. Nobody wants to use US services. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have done as much harm.
It really doesn't matter whether the NSA outs what they are doing, however. What matters is that they are doing it at all. The Greek word is "hubris". When overreach yourself, you destroy yourself.
Forming a well-regulated militia is easy, as long as you don't mind it being ~20% FBI moles building a case against you... Just ask all those pathetic 'domestic terrorists', who basically had to have their hands held through even the simplest steps of their terrorist plots by the feds.
I thought the usual makeup was something like 67% FBI moles, 32% CIA operatives and 6% actual militia members.
You think it's "rather funny" that they might think you have an interest in beating polygraph examinations if you bought a book on beating polygraph examinations?
What, I can't read something for my own edification anymore? If I read a book by Ann Coulter, does that mean I'm a liberal-hating conservative? Or if I read the Communist Manifest that I'm a Marxist? If I read a book on RFID, does that make me a hacker? What about a book on alarm systems? Am I now a burglar? I like to learn about things that interest me. I like to know how things work. I'm interested in diverse ideas. I guess that makes me suspicious.
You're expecting that quaint old concept of "Innocent until Proven Guilty". We got rid of that years ago. Back in the 1980s when every employment applicant became a suspected drug addict and illegal alien.
Strangely enough, however, showing "my papers" when applying for jobs doesn't seem to have actually put a dent in the whole "illegal-aliens-are-taking-our-jerbs" thing.
That is pretty shady that they seize his materials, use it to their advantage, but then don't charge him with any crime. That's basically tyranny.
Commies like you have no faith in America. It's not like he had any reasonable expectation of security in his person, papers, and effects or anything, now is it?
Well we have the right to Keep and Bear Arms.
Of course, if you've let things go to the point where you're not secure in your papers and where who you assemble with is under minute scrutiny, it's not going to be easy to form a well-regulated militia.
When will they realize that their entire polygraph system is flawed in principle? It's mumbo jumbo! Might as well be reading tea leaves. It only works if the person being "tested" believes that it works.
I think we should skip the scientific mumbo-jumbo entirely and go back to the old tried and true ways: hot irons applied to the subject's tongue and body.
If it was good enough for great-great-great-grandad...
It's quite possible someone could 'react' to sensitive questions just out of fear. There's a lot at stake.
False positives, not so good--trash a probably innocent person. I think FMRI has a chance of determining truthfulness, but polygraphs, not so much.
--PM
It's also more than possible that someone like myself would over-think the questions to the point where everything comes up false positive, if for no other reason that so much of life and the events in it are uncertain.
And in the end, it has been proven over and over again. NO device can determine what is the absolute truth. The absolute best you could do is determine whether the subject THINKS something is true. Unless I'm wrong. Maybe.
Try again. He's shed a large chunk of his wealth into charity.
Tax write-offs are beautiful things, ain't they?
I'll believe the philanthropy when he puts all but a maybe one or two million bucks into charity (and even then only to live off that as a pension).
I thought that was his original stated goal way back when he first started raking in the billions.
I'm not going to deplore his charitable actions, but there are a couple of alarms that go off. For example: " I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems." No, and as such, he's also admitting he doesn't have a magic formula for solving the world's problems.
Which is honest of him. but the corollary to that is that while he may not have the perfect (or even best) answer, he has a lot more influence over priorities and solutions than all but a few people on this Earth.
Monopolies aren't just businesses. It's possible that because he has so much more cash to throw at problems than everyone else, he could even be doing harm by overwhelming other possible solutions.
over the last 20 years i've used almost every brand of hard drive and have had all the brands fail at least once. every single brand has had quality issues at one time or another
Sooner or later all drives wear out. I usually lose 1 or 2 drives a year. I mostly buy Seagate. I liked them best when 7-year guarantees were common, but I've only had one Seagate actually fail within warranty.
Western Digital, on the other hand, is something I avoid. One project I worked on was seeing a 30% infant mortality rate. And that included the drive the sysadmins installed in my development system and then didn't bother to keep up the backup schedule on. Lost 2 weeks of work that way.
More recently, got a laptop where the WD drive was flaky from Day 1. Ordered a replacement, and the replacement (still factory-wrapped) was worse than the original. Bad sectors all over the place. Gigabytes of them. Had to swap it out for yet another drive before finally getting one that worked reliably.
There are bad models and bad runs, but I've just had overall better results with Seagate.
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One version of TurboTax a couple of years ago transmitted every entry I did on my machine in this software package to some outside entity.
Add a number - firewall comes up asking for permission to connect. Move around - same thing.
May have been some debugging feature but who the hell needs to see every move I do in some debug-log, if this was the case.
Do I trust the Co? Sure no, their attempts to tie you in and milk $$'s out of you are disgusting.
I hadn't heard that they'd changed. One reason why I file my returns on paper. I figure that yeah, TT is probably tattling all my financial details back to Intuit where they can sell them to whoever they can get away with selling them to (plus, of course the NSA), but actually filing via TT is apt to pull in additional parties. If I can't stop it, at least, I'll try to limit it.
Interesting. Back in July they were talking like a special production run would be made (no cables in inventory for months), but come July, nothing. Apparently they did it and didn't say anything - I had a pre-order in for all the good it did.
If you plug in a stock micro USB connector, even if it's jacked into a 2A power converter, the Nook will say "Not Charging". But come back in an hour or 2 and it will be back up to full power.
I don't think the trickle rate's enough to charge it while in use - especially with the Wi-Fi running, but it does work.
... USB ports have to supply (and USB devices may draw)? Drawing more power is outside the spec.
Also, don't USB devices usually have to request the high power mode explicitly? Some USB power supplies are "dumb" and only supply power, but don't speak USB. Some devices are curteous enough not to draw 500mA if they haven't received permission from the USB host to do so. In this case, they'll slowly load with 100mA ...
There are several generations of specs. The original was hard-wired for 500ma max. Later versions can negotiate.
One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.
Interesting. My wife has a Nexus 7 (2012 edition). It charges just fine (albeit relatively slowly) from 500mA USB chargers. It charges faster with the 2A charger that comes with it, but I've never had issues with it losing charge while plugged in to a standard charger.
How weak is your "weakly charging" USB port? Is it one on a keyboard or some other low-power accessory, or is it a port on the computer itself?
The Color and Tablet Nook devices have two different charge rates. If you use the official "USB" cable with the LED indicator in it, it charges at a 1A (2A?) rate. If you use a stock micro USB cable, it charges at the official 500ma rate. The decision is made by the Nook itself, based on info from extra pins that are in the custom cable.
Which (blankety-blank-censored-blank) is no longer available. And since the cables are no longer made or sold and since they were notoriously prone to fail means that I've been trickle-charging my unit for about a year now.
Moral of story: always check new toys for screwball cables before buying.
Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver.
It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no .
I got it from my job writing printer drivers for Windows, where it was my code providing the support.
One of the apps that did this was Quattro Pro which had an extremely brain-dead (or pessimistic) on the differences between the page widths of "0", "00", "000", etc.. I likened my view of the app to the view from the bottom of the toilet bowl.
And don't even get me started on what WordPerfect for Windows did!
A pinprick of blood from a finger
Why does the blood always have to come from a finger? That's where all the nerves are. Why can't you get the drop of blood from your elbow or some other place?
I had to stick myself in high school as part of a biology experiment to determine my blood type. Couldn't do my finger. Ended up stabbing myself in the lower leg.
It hurt a lot less, but unfortunately, there's not as much blood on tap there.
I'm not sure where this breathless PR piece is leading to. We've been using 'micro' samples in automatic lab analyzers for years. Just because you can get the results from Walgreen's doesn't change things.
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody. Tests where the FDA has approved patient education for point of care testing. I don't think you can order a whole lot more without 'practicing medicine' and for that you need some sort of license. Perhaps they will limit the testing to places where they have a mini clinic with a PA (physician's assistant) or NP (nurse practitioner).
Ordering tests without knowledge of some important things (like pretest probability / accuracy and sensitivity of the tests) is basically worthless.
But what the hell, it will make somebody some money. That's what counts.
Pharmacists have locally been granted the ability to make certain prescriptions directly without doctors orders for certain drugs. It's not a big step to integrating that with having them able to do certain tests as well.
There are certain advantages to having this ability. Walgreens is generally a lot closer and more convenient than the local testing facility and the waits are almost guaranteed to be a lot shorter.
I look at it as "distributed testing". You can test more often and more casually and offload some of the grunt work from the more elaborate facilities. And probably pull in some people who could be persuaded to get a finger-stick while shopping for Xmas supplies who might not go for a full-blown needle in the arm. Better yet, since Walgreens can be found in places where GPs are hard to come by, it's a good first-line outpost for early detection and prevention.
For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.
So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.
This whole "Nothing else formats like Genuine Microsoft" thing is pure garbage.
I have never depended on a word processor to maintain constant pixel-by-pixel formatting. That's not what they're for. The only reason that Word documents don't routinely re-arrange themselves (the way they used to) every time you transport a document to a machine with a different printer/set of fonts is because virtually all word processing today is done with a standard set of scalable fonts. Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver. When most fonts were hardware fonts, that meant some serious re-arranging was commonplace.
If you want precise placement of text, don't use a word processor, use a page layout program. And create a PDF.
And if you want basic formatting to be preserved but pixel-precise isn't important, don't use a word processor like it's a typewriter and jam in manual spaces and carriage returns by dumb brute force, use styles. No, it won't be as immutable as PDF, but at least what re-arranging does happen won't look like crap.
They will shit their pants when they see the open office suite completely messing the layout of the documents.
If it takes nearly a decade, they must be pretty constipated.
IIRC, the "lower level" was a Republican governor and a Republican-stacked State Supreme Court.
How exactly do you boot a pi without the binary blob videocore bootloader?
Oh right, you don't.
I boot a pi by applying power to it.
Nothing says I have to use the closed-source video. This is not a machine you'd pick for stunning video graphics anyway. I use ssh or run completely headless.
Back when I first started, compilers were pretty stupid and basically did a 1-to-1 translation of source code to sequences of assembly language. It didn't take much to do better simply coding assembler by hand.
Somewhere about the mid 1980s that stopped being true. The IBM mainframe Pascal/VS compiler generated heavily-optimized code. It was sufficiently clever in its use of machine resources that it was on par with hand optimization.
The clincher, however, was that it could do this job in seconds, whereas hand-coding would take hours. And if you made significant changes to the algorithms you were coding, it would re-optimize each time. It would have been a total rewrite to get code that tight by hand. And even though we didn't have the insane time constraints that modern-day projects typically have, we didn't have enough time to make it worth doing that even to save expensive mainframe CPU cycles.
When you get to frame the issue the way you want, you can try to convince the people that it was for their own good. Snowden may likely say show that it was used abused in practice, and the NSA likely wants to say that they prevented a suspected domestic terrorist.
That's the classic comeback. "If the enemy knows, we cannot do our job and you're endangering our interests."
Yeah. In many cases, the enemy already knew, or at least strongly suspected. That's why bin Laden's safe house didn't keep phones or Internet links in it.
What endangered US interests more than anything else was that they were doing this at all. We've squandered more trust and goodwill off this debacle than anything we've ever done since invading Iran using 9/11 as an excuse. Nobody wants to keep data on US servers any more. Nobody wants their communications routed anywhere near US servers. Nobody wants to use US services. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have done as much harm.
It really doesn't matter whether the NSA outs what they are doing, however. What matters is that they are doing it at all. The Greek word is "hubris". When overreach yourself, you destroy yourself.
The president is supposed to be boring, honest, and careful; instead, we got an activist and a liar.
Been living in a cave the last 225 years or so, eh?
Soon you can print your own prosthetics when you blow your fingers off!
Captcha: weeper
Where have you been? Bespoke prosthetics is all the rage in 3-D printing these days!
So it's a 105% terrorist group. Is that part of the 99%, or the 1%, then?
Dang! I KNEW I shouldn't have used numbers from the Government Accounting Office!
Forming a well-regulated militia is easy, as long as you don't mind it being ~20% FBI moles building a case against you... Just ask all those pathetic 'domestic terrorists', who basically had to have their hands held through even the simplest steps of their terrorist plots by the feds.
I thought the usual makeup was something like 67% FBI moles, 32% CIA operatives and 6% actual militia members.
I thought this country was secured by constitutional right to privacy from registering individual book reading/buying.
Well the FBI didn't, as shown by the way they attempted to pressure the nation's librarians into releasing that information to them.
You think it's "rather funny" that they might think you have an interest in beating polygraph examinations if you bought a book on beating polygraph examinations?
What, I can't read something for my own edification anymore? If I read a book by Ann Coulter, does that mean I'm a liberal-hating conservative? Or if I read the Communist Manifest that I'm a Marxist? If I read a book on RFID, does that make me a hacker? What about a book on alarm systems? Am I now a burglar? I like to learn about things that interest me. I like to know how things work. I'm interested in diverse ideas. I guess that makes me suspicious.
You're expecting that quaint old concept of "Innocent until Proven Guilty". We got rid of that years ago. Back in the 1980s when every employment applicant became a suspected drug addict and illegal alien.
Strangely enough, however, showing "my papers" when applying for jobs doesn't seem to have actually put a dent in the whole "illegal-aliens-are-taking-our-jerbs" thing.
That is pretty shady that they seize his materials, use it to their advantage, but then don't charge him with any crime. That's basically tyranny.
Commies like you have no faith in America. It's not like he had any reasonable expectation of security in his person, papers, and effects or anything, now is it?
Well we have the right to Keep and Bear Arms.
Of course, if you've let things go to the point where you're not secure in your papers and where who you assemble with is under minute scrutiny, it's not going to be easy to form a well-regulated militia.
When will they realize that their entire polygraph system is flawed in principle? It's mumbo jumbo! Might as well be reading tea leaves. It only works if the person being "tested" believes that it works.
I think we should skip the scientific mumbo-jumbo entirely and go back to the old tried and true ways: hot irons applied to the subject's tongue and body.
If it was good enough for great-great-great-grandad...
It's quite possible someone could 'react' to sensitive questions just out of fear. There's a lot at stake.
False positives, not so good--trash a probably innocent person. I think FMRI has a chance of determining truthfulness, but polygraphs, not so much.
--PM
It's also more than possible that someone like myself would over-think the questions to the point where everything comes up false positive, if for no other reason that so much of life and the events in it are uncertain.
And in the end, it has been proven over and over again. NO device can determine what is the absolute truth. The absolute best you could do is determine whether the subject THINKS something is true. Unless I'm wrong. Maybe.
Try again. He's shed a large chunk of his wealth into charity.
Tax write-offs are beautiful things, ain't they?
I'll believe the philanthropy when he puts all but a maybe one or two million bucks into charity (and even then only to live off that as a pension).
I thought that was his original stated goal way back when he first started raking in the billions.
I'm not going to deplore his charitable actions, but there are a couple of alarms that go off. For example: " I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems." No, and as such, he's also admitting he doesn't have a magic formula for solving the world's problems.
Which is honest of him. but the corollary to that is that while he may not have the perfect (or even best) answer, he has a lot more influence over priorities and solutions than all but a few people on this Earth.
Monopolies aren't just businesses. It's possible that because he has so much more cash to throw at problems than everyone else, he could even be doing harm by overwhelming other possible solutions.
Who is General Failure anyway, and why does he keep trying to read my hard drive??
I'm sorry, that's classified. And the NSA categorically denies doing it.
over the last 20 years i've used almost every brand of hard drive and have had all the brands fail at least once. every single brand has had quality issues at one time or another
Sooner or later all drives wear out. I usually lose 1 or 2 drives a year. I mostly buy Seagate. I liked them best when 7-year guarantees were common, but I've only had one Seagate actually fail within warranty.
Western Digital, on the other hand, is something I avoid. One project I worked on was seeing a 30% infant mortality rate. And that included the drive the sysadmins installed in my development system and then didn't bother to keep up the backup schedule on. Lost 2 weeks of work that way.
More recently, got a laptop where the WD drive was flaky from Day 1. Ordered a replacement, and the replacement (still factory-wrapped) was worse than the original. Bad sectors all over the place. Gigabytes of them. Had to swap it out for yet another drive before finally getting one that worked reliably.
There are bad models and bad runs, but I've just had overall better results with Seagate.