We have to use Slack at work (because people that think it's cool said we do), and it's such a resource hog it isn't funny. I've disabled every feature and blocked animated images and it's still annoying. You can connect with pidgin if you want a semi-functional version of it, but the XMPP support is missing critical things, like when someone opens a new group chat with you (you won't see it). I would love for it die, but I know that won't happen.
I'm thankful it's not corporate standard here, though some people want it to be. (I have invites to the "official unofficial corporate slack network"). And I told our IT admin to resist calls to get everyone on slack (seriously, I think at least 3-4 different people created 3-4 different corporate slack accounts)
The happiest day was when I could uninstall slack. (Slack is not a corporate standard where I work, however, a project I was on, the customer insisted on using slack). Took me less than a day to figure out why Firefox was consuming 30% of the CPU (slack web pages...) so I installed the app hoping it would be less resource hungry Was I wrong... but at least it wasn't bogging Firefox down
Turned off all the effects so I could at least get some usability out of my PC - it cut CPU usage done somewhat. I come to believe that the slack app is one of those node.js things that embed electron and turn a web app into a native app by running it under Chrome or something.
I know it's got a lot of stuff, but when things like Discord could exist happily on my machine taking 0% most of the time, or in a browser window taking practically no CPU cycles as well, there is no reason Slack has to be so inefficient. We shouldn't need to have Core i7's or top of the line Ryzens just to use a chat app.
Maybe we should replace all their developer PCs with what we can scrounge up at Goodwill
You're wrong about that. A male who believes that he'll become female if he cuts off his penis has a mental disorder by every definition.
Except that's not what happens. You end up with a person who believes they are female, but has a penis. They never think they're male. They believe themselves to be female.
In fact, there is a very genetic reason for this - you have to remember that a female has two X chromosomes, while a male has one X and one Y. When conception begins, the Y chromosome is not active. In fact, the fertilized egg multiplies as if it was female - yes, that includes early development of ovaries and a vagina. sometime later, around two weeks or so, the genes in the Y chromosome start to assert themselves and deactivating certain genes in the X chromosome. In effect, the Y chromosome patches the X chromosome. (This is standard - some genes deactivate other genes at certain times).
So what happens? Well, the vagina descends and becomes the scrotum, while the ovaries descend as well and transform into testes. Other genes are involved with hormone production - testosterone and others replace estrogen production. It's a wonderful example of reuse, since the testes and ovaries perform similar functions - just one produces an egg, the other, sperm. But they are both involved in producing cells with half the chromosomes.
Now, all this takes time, and while for the vast majority of people, it definitely happens, but genetic defects do happen, as well as errors. It's entirely possible that only part of the X chromosome is patched properly, so you get some of the male transition happening, but not all of it. So you end up with someone who's a little more ambiguous, and this conflict between who they feel they are and how their body develops causes a great deal of internal stress.
Chopping off their penis doesn't make them female - they were ambiguous and felt female to begin with, but always was identified biologically as male. Gender reassignment surgery helps relieve internal stress by making their perceived sex the same as their physical sex.
The majority of roles in the military don't involve that though. Some front line troops and special operations people, sure, but most people employed in the military are not even fighters. They are engineers, service staff, administrators, pilots not engaging in dogfights...
And I'd question if being transgender would really have much effect on those situations anyway. It doesn't make people unable to deal with stress or "distracted".
The military is generally considered to be a logistics agency, not a fighting force. Fighting is but a tiny part of what a military needs to do.
You see, for every soldier that fights on the front line (or pilot, or sailor), there's an entire group of people needed to support said warfighter. You need to be able to give him food, for they need to eat (there's a lot of truth of an army marches on their stomachs). You need to provide them with weapons. You need to provide them with an array of personnel to maintain said weapons, vehicles, etc, and those personnel need support as well - tools, parts, food, shelter, workspace, fuel, etc.
Just managing it is a logistical nightmare. Add in hostile territory and you're in a whole new world, because now your logistics support folks need soldiers to protect them, and those need support as well. It's why a common tactic in war is to cut supply lines - you basically want to remove support from the fighters so they will eventually give up due to breakdowns of machines, weapon systems failure (running out of ammo), lack of fuel (or power, for battery powered equipment), hunger, etc. And why a big part of it is maintaining robust supply lines.
The military is not a fighting force - that is just the "glamour" side of things. The military is really a logistics company. But what fun is it to reveal that most jobs really involve trying to get pallets of stuff from point A to point B?
I think MMR is from 6 months through several years, but all vaccines can be taken at any time, so lapses are easy to cure.
Vaccinations are also damn cheap to administer and from a purely monetary POV, have some of the largest ROI around - the cost is very low (we mass produce vaccines nowadays, so the vaccine itself only costs a few pennies per shot), and yet, keeping such virulent diseases at bay means less lost productivity - parents don't have to care after sick kids, quarantines don't need to be established, general treatment of disease costs, etc., so overall a vaccinated population is more productive. Plus, the risk of complications from disease is so much lower - measles may seem like a minor thing, but it is a deadly disease. It's just we've been able to treat it.
It won't be long until companies realize that mandatory vaccinations of their employee's kids might be increasingly common - a vaccine is cheap, and unless there are medication reasons against it, not losing days of work having to deal with sick kids, health care costs over preventable diseases , etc. would make sense on the bottom line.
Heck, at least the excuses for not getting the HPV (Human Papiloma Virus) vaccine are interesting. For those not in the know, HPV is a STD that has been implicated in several forms of cancer. The excuses against vaccination against HPV has generally been "but kids will have more sex!" (usually administered in your teens, though). As if other STDs don't exist to begin with (we can't vaccinate against HIV, yet), or that being protected against HPV is an excuse to be promiscuous. There's also a religious excuse - namely because sex outside of marriage is bad. But HPV vaccinations are offered and most teenage girls can get it for free in places with decent health care, while boys typically have to pay, but even that's changing. Like I said, HPV is implicated as the source of several cancers so it just makes sense to get a jab now than have to undergo much more invasive cancer treatment.
Automated vehicles are usually better than humans for long-distance highway driving. Humans tend to gradually lose focus and grow tired, an automated truck would be just as alert in hour 25 of a 2000 mile drive as it was in hour 1, but with humans that is far from the case.
That's why trucks are moving to the Europe model where the logbooks are no longer paper, but electronic and every driver has their own smart card that logs the driving data that's downloaded periodically at checkpoints. It's to enforce rest requirements because fatigue is a huge issue (if the wheels aren't turning, you ain't earning). Dispatchers at companies are squeezing the drivers to take the minimum rest (it's not the dispatcher's issue if the driver is caught - sole responsibility for rest and load rests on the driver). So overloaded trucks, etc, all fall on the driver's shoulder, while the dispatcher gets bonuses for reducing costs.
But the other thing with automated vehicles is they can respond much faster than humans. Human reaction times can easily measure into the seconds range in an emergency, while an automated vehicle can respond much quicker - they're usually sampling the environment a hundred times a second, if not more, and the sensors used are far better than human sensors - cameras that can look further, radars that can look ahead of the car ahead and predict sudden braking, etc.So not only can an automated vehicle apply the brakes much quicker, they can see farther ahead and predict potential emergencies and prepare for them .
Heck, you can use them to platoon - how about cars that immediately move on a green light rather than one at a time as you have now? (And surely you must have had the experience where you're only a few cars back, and the cars ahead move so slowly the light turns red by the time you reach the intersection). Or better yet, completely automated intersections, where cars plan their arrivals so they can sail on through because they can navigate through the gaps in cross traffic? (This requires V2V and V2I communications so each car can be "scheduled" in to a slot and maintain a precise speed so cars can pass through each other - though it might not happen purely because of the scare factor.
The problem with CTE is it's cumulative. The more trauma, the more damage. Some of the more aggressive players have unfortunately succumbed with devastating results. Basically, who was once a family man suddenly has behavioral changes which include sudden outbursts of anger and violence that are unprovoked. Who if they weren't football players, we may have normally had jailed or committed.
Some are even suicidal, which is a shame because most take a bullet to the head, which destroys any evidence. (Some do have enough presence of mind left to avoid damaging the head and thus allowing researchers to diagnose CTE).
The only reason for doubt is because the NFL is rather self-interested in not promoting tackle football causes CTE. Two reasons. First, they are worried - yes, scared sh*tless - that if the association is made, parents will withdraw their kids from football programs. This may lead to lowered interest in football, which means the millions of dollars it brings in could dry up.
The second reason is the players associations - they have successfully sued the NFL over hiding or discounting the medical issue which is more than career ending, it's life changing.
Before CTE was even discovered, it was thought brain damage happened as a result of a major event - it was thought the brain could handle getting hit and recover, when instead it recovers irregularly. CTE is the result of repeated minor brain damage caused by the brain banging against the skull causing scarring and bruising, and which builds up over time.
The sports associations are heavily into discounting CTE because it really affects their bottom lines. It's also why there's a ton of research going into smart helmets that can indicate when a potentially damaging event occurs, and why at least at the college level and below, the threshold for benching someone has gone from knockout or concussion to a blow that exceeds 75Gs or so, even if the player is still conscious and lucid. And after a concussion, the bench time has a fixed minimum - no longer you wake up and you're in the next game, it's minimum 4-6 weeks benched, and only the doctor can clear you. Heck, some teams have even banned tackling during practice to avoid causing more damage than necessary.
The link between football (and other contact heavy sports) and CTE has been long proven. There are many well regarded papers behind it. The only question left is what percentage of the football playing population has CTE.
And finally, this is a VERY recent discovery. Bennet Omalu discovered this in 2002, and the NFL reluctantly acknowledged CTE's existence in 2009, after 7 years of trying to discredit Omalu. It's just like leaded gas, cigarettes, CFCs, and global warming all over again.
Just how many iPhones do you think Ireland buys?!. Apple (and Google and Microsoft and every other large tech company... ) pay minimal tax in the countries they sell their products, via a series of tax setups & company structures that allow them to take the profits out of the country the money is made before it is considered "profit", to a country where less tax has to be paid. This isn't new - global corporations have been doing forever. Whats changed is that software & IP is a lot more valuable and easy to shift over borders & the numbers are now staggering so it gets noticed.
Ireland is special - it's treated as Europe as far as anyone is concerned. So all the Irish profits Apple makes are really Europe profits. Yes, Apple has a pile of cash outside the US, because it was legitimately earned outside the US - hell, even Apple realizes China is a bigger market than the US these days
Sure they do the IP licensing thing, but they're not, because most of the IP is generated in the US, and they pay US wages for that (thus, the profit they make in the US goes into funding development in the US and they have to pay US taxes on it). Of course, this is only a quick move away - should something like anti-encryption laws get enacted, forcing the encryption and security parts
I'm not including the usual "don't stand next to any big microwave emitter" type vulnerabilities, those aren't new and affect non-connected devices too.
Actually, it turns out the anti-theft detectors at store doorways is good enough to trip up a pacemaker. I think the ones they use at Best Buy are particularly susceptible to turning pacemakers and other devices like neurostimulators off. Often without notice or an alarm. The only thing the patient gets is either increased seizures or their heart is again beating oddly.
Apparently doctors give notice about these devices and the frequencies that cause issues, but people do forget.
what was more than likely was that the event was handled by some social media presentative/pr side of niantic who of course don't understand anything about technology
No, PR people know to get planners in. PR people know that they need to set everything "up right" so they don't make a mess of an event (which would be bad PR).
However, it's possible it was handled by a "social media rep" who thinks highly of social media and a disdain for "traditions". So they may think they're immune to the whole "planning" thing.
also wonder if you'd need for phones' OTA data to be updated to talk to them.
Yes but it's completely transparent to the user. A phone that's been in use will have an up to date database, but that just means if you're searching for a cell signal, an updated database means you can acquire it really fast and have service in a few seconds.
If you haven't powered your phone up recently, it may have an outdated database that should still work, so it'll try to use it.
If the database doesn't work at all, then it will do a full network search by listening to the control channels to figure out whose networks are available, and consulting the roaming database for compatible network IDs (stored on the SIM card and updated periodically). If it can't find that, it will then connect to a network for connectivity. (The order is the preferred network first, then roaming partners, finally unaffiliated companies providing service. The latter is always a last choice because those companies don't negotiate roaming agreements voluntarily. You usually see them on cruise ships where they can easily ding you dollars a minute and there's nothing you can do - your cell provider is forced to pay the bill).
A full network search can take as little as 30 seconds to a few minutes or more before it can establish a signal. But you don't need an update OTA database for this since all phones are designed to be able to be "cold started" with very little information. Of course, for customer service, the SIM cards you get will typically have the latest database as of when the SIM was made (which isn't that old) so by the time you finish the OOBE application, the phone would've acquired a network signal.
The thing is that many companies (e.g. banks and government sites) have been saying that you should look to see if you see a lock, as if that would mean that the connection is safe.
The thing is that that is NOT the case. Secure and safe are not interchangeable.
Therein lies the problem. Far too long we've conditioned users to look for the lock. And now practically every site has a lock.
And therein lies a BIG problem if you use LetsEncrypt. Because a good chunk of LE certificates go towards phishing sites (notably Paypal), there's a really good chance that someone somewhere will simply block LE certificates as a anti-phishing measure. I mean, with like 95% of the sites being phishing sites, that's a really big target,. and the remaining 5% are sites that "normal people" don't usually care about.
Competent in what? Precisely what kind of event has taken place before where 20000 people simultaneously need to use data from the same area. It's easy from the IT sidelines to see the obvious, but given an event with these requirements hasn't happened before, just how were a bunch of "competent event planners" (I hear that's a uni degree now) supposed to know the what they don't know without precedence?
Practically every event ever nowadays. A stadium can hold 20,000+ people easily, and people love to tweet and snapchat and facebook and everything else. And there will be at least 10% of the people who are streaming video and audio commentary during the game, while everything else is bursty.
In fact, we had several festivals already. Not big ones, but since it was aimed at the millennial crowd, there were CoWs (Cells on Wheels) set up around the perimeter. These CoWs are miniature cell towers meant to cover a small area that's likely to have a high density of cellphones. They typically backhaul onto either a dedicated link (if one was put in during construction - so sites like stadiums and arenas and parks will have them) or via a microwave link to a regular cell tower.
All it takes is an event planner calling it in and the big carriers will truck in a CoW with advance notice and set it up. You tell them how many people are there and they'll estimate the number of units and type to bring in (they may bring in more than one and backhaul onto the one with a dedicated link).
This is not new - it's been around a few years and you'll often see them at stadiums until they set up local repeaters inside.
When I worked the Google IT help desk, I had to talk a newly hired CS graduate into turning on his own workstation. He only used the workstations at the university lab and wasn't allowed to touch the workstations there. He was shocked that no one was standing around to turn on his workstation.
That's the problem when you run Linux. If those workstations ran Windows, then they'd figure out how to at least hit the power button from time to time just because it's Windows.
In our computer labs, they were all bolted down with steel anti-theft metal housings. But they had access to the front for the CD-ROM and power button.
Here's an odd one. My domain (see the message bar) keeps getting emails from British Telecom about some company's ADSL service. I had their address, their service details, etc. Oddly enough, though even though I get these emails, I can't "password reset" it using that address - it always comes back as not found, even though the link takes me to their log in page. Go figure.
Since i only get it now and again, and not for a long while now, I can only assume they're out of business.
I also got one from some guy with a US West bank account, and I think that same guy used it for travel websites because I kept getting surveys for how my trip was. I ignored them at first, then decided screw with the surveys - hey, they're asking me about my non-existent trip? Sure, I'll answer them! Giving one-star ratings and berating the staff never felt so cathartic. I even said to cancel my account as I never want to be a customer of them again. Oddly, those stopped a long while back as well. Either I made it so that guy's travel arrangements got really hard to make or the CAN SPAM laws made everyone scrub their mailing list.
Now, my Gmail, however, accidentally had it happen, and I got some really confusing emails about board meetings and whatnot. And some rather personal information as they forward application forms between them. Figuring out what happened, I sent them a nice email that they really did have the wrong person and got an invite to visit them if I was in the area (I live on the west coast, they are east coast). But that was only because they're actually a group of people who'd I'd actually be interested in spending time with.
Took a week to get it resolved because the mailing list I got put on (to send to the board) generated only like 1 email a day. So I had to figure out if it was a fluke, or if someone made an error. It turns out the real guy's email had numbers at the end and whomever entered it in the mailing list software truncated it.
I don't understand why my domain got hit with them - it's not like it was close to any ISP or somesuch, and it's even a.net - the.com was taken and I've had it for 16 years now.
A better question is, why do we need thumbnail preview at all? It's a huge attack surface that doesn't even require you to open a file to get infected. Not to mention a huge performance hog.
Oh, yeah, because Windows has been doing it for years.
Well, thumbnail previews are helpful for the common case of a collection of photos in a directory. Perhaps you're totally organized and categorize the heck out of every digital photo you take, but most people are not, and it's nice to open a folder of photos and quickly glance and see what they're about than to see generic icons and open each one to see what the file is inside.
It's a user thing. It's why complex beasts like NetworkManager, Pulse Audio and SystemD exist - because no amount of "simple scripting" can get around fundamental limitations of the "keep it the Unix way".
In fact, why do shell scripts in sysvinit... reimplement init? The default init that sysvinit uses already handles daemonizing really well, and if daemons die, it can easily restart them. In fact, if they die too quickly, init will stop spawning it for 5 minutes. And to heck with S/K scripts, since init handles runlevel invocations as well. The only reason I can see is that editing inittab is too hard, but we seem to make do with other files like passwd and such.
And users like NetworkManager - because things like WiFi screw up the networking model Unix created. (Just because you connect to WiFi, doesn't mean you want the same settings for WiFi - perhaps you connect to public WiFi and want a VPN, while corporate WiFi you don't. And then there's multiple connections...).
And Pulse Audio is a pain, but necessary to accomplish some tricky audio routing issues. For example, take a standard PC with a sound card. It's playing music or a video, and there's a VoIP app running in the background. The user wants to take the call, so they plug in their headset via USB or Bluetooth, and the VoIP app's audio needs to move to the new sound device transparently - the app shouldn't need to close and reopen (or even know a new audio device was added). Yes, it works in Windows when people insist on using voice with Skype (I normally just use speakers and built in microphone, but if there are people around, a headset gets better privacy. But I don't have a headset - I borrow one from my manager since work doesn't provide me with one and I don't use one enough to justify the expense. I plug it in, and magically, the call is routed to them and I can chat in privacy).
Oh yes, the audio from the existing music player or video player must NOT be routed to the headset, either.
Feel free to try to implement these two basic use cases with shell scripts.
Stop using bloated frameworks for webpages. If you want to make an application, WRITE A GODDAMNED APPLICATION!
And what language and platform should one do this? Windows? Seems pretty reasonable - after all, no one uses macOS or Linux, right? Or Android or iOS.
Or maybe we do Android, and ignore iOS and Windows and people who use desktops?
The reality is - the web browser has become the universal platform. With very little code, you can write an application in a web browser that runs on practically all platforms, even ones you think no one cares about (hello Windows Phone). It's the universal runtime, something you can consider that practically everyone who will use your application has access to.
Oh, and people are writing applications as applications. Thanks to stuff like NodeJS, what's happening is the "application" is really a web browser hard coded to a specific web site.
Like "Ok-Google", "Cortana" or even "Siri" (although, in all fairness, maybe siri and cortana exist in non-western cultures)...
That way, there is no interference with people with the same name as the virtual Assistants...
Siri's voice activation command is "Hey Siri", thus avoiding a collision with someone named that. Of course, some dumba** will name their new baby "HeySiri" just to confuse things. At least "OK Google" sounds stupid enough that no one would want to use it as a name... right?
I dunno. I could just as easily see an HR department using that against you.
"Well, we'd really love to give you a raise, but we'd have problems if everyone saw how much more you're making..."
Any Norwegians here? Would love to hear how this actually affects your relationship with your employer and fellow employees.
That's the general fear about making salaries transparent - that high earners will have to justify their high salaries and thus see that it might be lowered. What really happens is those who make less start asking questions as to why they make less. Sometimes it's genuine skill and contributions - Employee A makes more because their work is high quality and people like working with Employee A - using his work output, working with them in general, etc. Employee B, however, barely produces output, and people hate using it because there are so many errors than it needs to be corrected before it can be used, as well as people just avoid interacting with Employee B.
Other times, there can be real problems. This is in general the bigger cauxe - perhaps they didn't negotiate their starting salary as much, or other reason. This is why companies hate salary transparency - they don't want high performers to know how little they're being paid compared to their peers whom were recently hired. One coworker made a mention that if he applied for a job the company was offering, he'd make more money. (He went to his managers and the company re-evaluated all their pay scales).
The tools are out there. It's up to the buyer to use them. Part of the free market is that people more concerned about saving money by cross-checking prices (poor people who take the time to research and inform themselves) end up paying lower prices. Their purchases are effectively subsidized by people who don't care about price (rich people) and people who are too lazy to do price comparisons before buying; these people pay the regular price and help stores make up their margins so they can hold sales that get the well-informed poor shoppers to buy.
FYI, the people who pay "regular" price aren't necessarily rich. It can very well be the discount that gets offered is a pittance compared to the effort of shopping around.
If the item costs $30, I'm not going to lose much sleep if I buy it for that and find out it's $25 somewhere else. Sure I could've saved $5, but maybe that requires another hour of shopping around. Is that worth $5? I can't say. (This applies especially so if the savings are from say, Amazon third party sellers, or from dodgier sites). And if I already have it, well, by the time you try returning it (gas to drive to post office, getting it repackages, etc), you eat up all the savings anyways.
It's like the people who drive 20 miles out of the way to save a couple of cents per gallon of gas. Or line up for hours waiting to fill up because the cheap station has it 30 cents cheaper than everyone else.
A few hacked up, rooted game consoles isn't going to cause developers to flee the platform. Movies are pirated and they still make them. Music is bootlegged and they still sing. Applications are copied and they still write programs. They try to make it sound like the end of the world but it is a very small percentage. It's called shrinkage and every business has it.
The problem is fine if it's "a few". It's a problem when it's "a lot".
PC piracy rates are somewhere around 90%, while console piracy is around 10% (averages). If you haven't noticed, PC versions of games tend to suck - either piss-poor console ports released months/years after the game was originally released, or not released at all.
Sure, some games with other forms of DRM are released same day - FPSes and such where the goal is playing online, which allows for servers to check for pirate keys and such, and those generally don't suck on PC.
Heck, even the couple of years before Denuvo fell PC gaming was on the uptick - even though they got broken in the end, the fact that Denuvo kept games "locked up" for a couple of months was good enough.
But now it's pretty much gone (it's cracked in under a week now), you can bet a lot of PC games are going to dry up and begin to suck again, leaving us with the piles of indie games. Sure there's a few gems in there, but anyone who's browsed Steam knows, there's a lot clogging it up.
And back to PC ports that suck because piracy makes it not worth while to do a good port because you won't make up the money doing the port.
Ok, this guy was exceptionally stupid, or maybe he got arrogant over time, whatever. But there's a lesson to be learned here: Anonymity is actually hard.
Here, and on most sites, I use my real identity. On some sites, I post under a pseudonym with its own email address. For me, it's not critical, but I still try to keep the pseudonym separate. It's a lot harder than you suppose - it's easy to mix the two identities. If privacy were a serious concern, it would be essential to always use proxies for the pseudonym, so that IP addresses wouldn't match, and to never use those (same) proxies for my normal identity. Always use a different machine, with a different hardware and browser fingerprint (or a VM).
If you haven't tried something like this, you should. And consider: it takes exactly one mistake, and you have doxxed yourself.
Then add on human greed - the guy was making lots of money running the site, and obviously converting it from bitcoins to cash. Now it's even harder because all the firewalls you put up to be anonymous get in the way of rapidly cashing in all that money. Even worse, you may get your accounts frozen because you can't prove your identity. And this may result in having to walk away from accounts with thousands of dollars in them (which quickly adds up).
And yes, he got greedy, just by looking at his expenditures.
What's NOT so great is that they seem able to meet with such high mucky-mucks almost at will.
Well, the big thing is Apple has celebrity. Tim Cook is well known and when he comes calling, people notice. Elon Musk will probably get similar attention, as would Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. And yes, that also includes other celebrities in the traditional sense, too.
I'm sure local celebrities in the area also command similar attention from politicians.
My head reels at the inept OpSec of this clown. He runs the largest illegal marketplace in the world, yet posts links to his real PayPal account. With no visible source of income, he lives a high profile lifestyle in Bangkok with 3 houses and the most expensive Lamborghini they make, while running the marketplace with an unattended decrypted laptop. Another demonstration that intelligence and common sense rarely go hand-in-hand.
The problem is greed. I'm sure when he started out he was careful. But after that, once the bucks start rolling in, greed takes over. I mean the police haven't caught you yet, so instead of making your life difficult and constraining how much money you make, you relax a bit and rake more in.
Perhaps his first laptop was encrypted, but then he wanted a new laptop, and just didn't bother anymore
You want to make a site hard for the police to find you? It's not hard, but proper opsec requires you to not get greedy, so remove all thought of making lots of money - just make enough to pay for itself. Once you get greed involved, you get sloppy.. Of course, money is probably a huge reason why people set up the sites to begin with, but eventually human nature and greed take over over opsec and you make yourself vulnerable.
Baloney. I have heard this argument so many times from OS developers. What does "effectively frozen" and "severely limited" mean? They are either frozen or they aren't. If they aren't frozen then they are taking up resources.
Apple has a few categories of apps that don't completely freeze up - e.g., apps that are VoIP related, audio related, location related. For these apps, iOS will let them run a background thread so they can continue to listen for calls (or handle the current call in progress), continue to play music, or continue to get GPS location information so they can update your position.
These apps don't freeze by default (though you can force iOS to freeze them even if they do this), since it's expected that you'd want your VoIP app / music player / map app to keep going even when it's not in the foreground. But just because they don't freeze completely doesn't mean the OS can't freeze the other threads that handle the UI, for example, and reclaim those resources.
And by severely limited, only those apps in thsoe categories can be backgrounded and still run. All other apps will be frozen.
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I'm thankful it's not corporate standard here, though some people want it to be. (I have invites to the "official unofficial corporate slack network"). And I told our IT admin to resist calls to get everyone on slack (seriously, I think at least 3-4 different people created 3-4 different corporate slack accounts)
Bleh.
Finally the truth comes out.
The happiest day was when I could uninstall slack. (Slack is not a corporate standard where I work, however, a project I was on, the customer insisted on using slack). Took me less than a day to figure out why Firefox was consuming 30% of the CPU (slack web pages...) so I installed the app hoping it would be less resource hungry Was I wrong... but at least it wasn't bogging Firefox down
Turned off all the effects so I could at least get some usability out of my PC - it cut CPU usage done somewhat. I come to believe that the slack app is one of those node.js things that embed electron and turn a web app into a native app by running it under Chrome or something.
I know it's got a lot of stuff, but when things like Discord could exist happily on my machine taking 0% most of the time, or in a browser window taking practically no CPU cycles as well, there is no reason Slack has to be so inefficient. We shouldn't need to have Core i7's or top of the line Ryzens just to use a chat app.
Maybe we should replace all their developer PCs with what we can scrounge up at Goodwill
Except that's not what happens. You end up with a person who believes they are female, but has a penis. They never think they're male. They believe themselves to be female.
In fact, there is a very genetic reason for this - you have to remember that a female has two X chromosomes, while a male has one X and one Y. When conception begins, the Y chromosome is not active. In fact, the fertilized egg multiplies as if it was female - yes, that includes early development of ovaries and a vagina. sometime later, around two weeks or so, the genes in the Y chromosome start to assert themselves and deactivating certain genes in the X chromosome. In effect, the Y chromosome patches the X chromosome. (This is standard - some genes deactivate other genes at certain times).
So what happens? Well, the vagina descends and becomes the scrotum, while the ovaries descend as well and transform into testes. Other genes are involved with hormone production - testosterone and others replace estrogen production. It's a wonderful example of reuse, since the testes and ovaries perform similar functions - just one produces an egg, the other, sperm. But they are both involved in producing cells with half the chromosomes.
Now, all this takes time, and while for the vast majority of people, it definitely happens, but genetic defects do happen, as well as errors. It's entirely possible that only part of the X chromosome is patched properly, so you get some of the male transition happening, but not all of it. So you end up with someone who's a little more ambiguous, and this conflict between who they feel they are and how their body develops causes a great deal of internal stress.
Chopping off their penis doesn't make them female - they were ambiguous and felt female to begin with, but always was identified biologically as male. Gender reassignment surgery helps relieve internal stress by making their perceived sex the same as their physical sex.
The military is generally considered to be a logistics agency, not a fighting force. Fighting is but a tiny part of what a military needs to do.
You see, for every soldier that fights on the front line (or pilot, or sailor), there's an entire group of people needed to support said warfighter. You need to be able to give him food, for they need to eat (there's a lot of truth of an army marches on their stomachs). You need to provide them with weapons. You need to provide them with an array of personnel to maintain said weapons, vehicles, etc, and those personnel need support as well - tools, parts, food, shelter, workspace, fuel, etc.
Just managing it is a logistical nightmare. Add in hostile territory and you're in a whole new world, because now your logistics support folks need soldiers to protect them, and those need support as well. It's why a common tactic in war is to cut supply lines - you basically want to remove support from the fighters so they will eventually give up due to breakdowns of machines, weapon systems failure (running out of ammo), lack of fuel (or power, for battery powered equipment), hunger, etc. And why a big part of it is maintaining robust supply lines.
The military is not a fighting force - that is just the "glamour" side of things. The military is really a logistics company. But what fun is it to reveal that most jobs really involve trying to get pallets of stuff from point A to point B?
I think MMR is from 6 months through several years, but all vaccines can be taken at any time, so lapses are easy to cure.
Vaccinations are also damn cheap to administer and from a purely monetary POV, have some of the largest ROI around - the cost is very low (we mass produce vaccines nowadays, so the vaccine itself only costs a few pennies per shot), and yet, keeping such virulent diseases at bay means less lost productivity - parents don't have to care after sick kids, quarantines don't need to be established, general treatment of disease costs, etc., so overall a vaccinated population is more productive. Plus, the risk of complications from disease is so much lower - measles may seem like a minor thing, but it is a deadly disease. It's just we've been able to treat it.
It won't be long until companies realize that mandatory vaccinations of their employee's kids might be increasingly common - a vaccine is cheap, and unless there are medication reasons against it, not losing days of work having to deal with sick kids, health care costs over preventable diseases , etc. would make sense on the bottom line.
Heck, at least the excuses for not getting the HPV (Human Papiloma Virus) vaccine are interesting. For those not in the know, HPV is a STD that has been implicated in several forms of cancer. The excuses against vaccination against HPV has generally been "but kids will have more sex!" (usually administered in your teens, though). As if other STDs don't exist to begin with (we can't vaccinate against HIV, yet), or that being protected against HPV is an excuse to be promiscuous. There's also a religious excuse - namely because sex outside of marriage is bad. But HPV vaccinations are offered and most teenage girls can get it for free in places with decent health care, while boys typically have to pay, but even that's changing. Like I said, HPV is implicated as the source of several cancers so it just makes sense to get a jab now than have to undergo much more invasive cancer treatment.
That's why trucks are moving to the Europe model where the logbooks are no longer paper, but electronic and every driver has their own smart card that logs the driving data that's downloaded periodically at checkpoints. It's to enforce rest requirements because fatigue is a huge issue (if the wheels aren't turning, you ain't earning). Dispatchers at companies are squeezing the drivers to take the minimum rest (it's not the dispatcher's issue if the driver is caught - sole responsibility for rest and load rests on the driver). So overloaded trucks, etc, all fall on the driver's shoulder, while the dispatcher gets bonuses for reducing costs.
But the other thing with automated vehicles is they can respond much faster than humans. Human reaction times can easily measure into the seconds range in an emergency, while an automated vehicle can respond much quicker - they're usually sampling the environment a hundred times a second, if not more, and the sensors used are far better than human sensors - cameras that can look further, radars that can look ahead of the car ahead and predict sudden braking, etc.So not only can an automated vehicle apply the brakes much quicker, they can see farther ahead and predict potential emergencies and prepare for them .
Heck, you can use them to platoon - how about cars that immediately move on a green light rather than one at a time as you have now? (And surely you must have had the experience where you're only a few cars back, and the cars ahead move so slowly the light turns red by the time you reach the intersection). Or better yet, completely automated intersections, where cars plan their arrivals so they can sail on through because they can navigate through the gaps in cross traffic? (This requires V2V and V2I communications so each car can be "scheduled" in to a slot and maintain a precise speed so cars can pass through each other - though it might not happen purely because of the scare factor.
The problem with CTE is it's cumulative. The more trauma, the more damage. Some of the more aggressive players have unfortunately succumbed with devastating results. Basically, who was once a family man suddenly has behavioral changes which include sudden outbursts of anger and violence that are unprovoked. Who if they weren't football players, we may have normally had jailed or committed.
Some are even suicidal, which is a shame because most take a bullet to the head, which destroys any evidence. (Some do have enough presence of mind left to avoid damaging the head and thus allowing researchers to diagnose CTE).
The only reason for doubt is because the NFL is rather self-interested in not promoting tackle football causes CTE. Two reasons. First, they are worried - yes, scared sh*tless - that if the association is made, parents will withdraw their kids from football programs. This may lead to lowered interest in football, which means the millions of dollars it brings in could dry up.
The second reason is the players associations - they have successfully sued the NFL over hiding or discounting the medical issue which is more than career ending, it's life changing.
Before CTE was even discovered, it was thought brain damage happened as a result of a major event - it was thought the brain could handle getting hit and recover, when instead it recovers irregularly. CTE is the result of repeated minor brain damage caused by the brain banging against the skull causing scarring and bruising, and which builds up over time.
The sports associations are heavily into discounting CTE because it really affects their bottom lines. It's also why there's a ton of research going into smart helmets that can indicate when a potentially damaging event occurs, and why at least at the college level and below, the threshold for benching someone has gone from knockout or concussion to a blow that exceeds 75Gs or so, even if the player is still conscious and lucid. And after a concussion, the bench time has a fixed minimum - no longer you wake up and you're in the next game, it's minimum 4-6 weeks benched, and only the doctor can clear you. Heck, some teams have even banned tackling during practice to avoid causing more damage than necessary.
The link between football (and other contact heavy sports) and CTE has been long proven. There are many well regarded papers behind it. The only question left is what percentage of the football playing population has CTE.
And finally, this is a VERY recent discovery. Bennet Omalu discovered this in 2002, and the NFL reluctantly acknowledged CTE's existence in 2009, after 7 years of trying to discredit Omalu. It's just like leaded gas, cigarettes, CFCs, and global warming all over again.
Ireland is special - it's treated as Europe as far as anyone is concerned. So all the Irish profits Apple makes are really Europe profits. Yes, Apple has a pile of cash outside the US, because it was legitimately earned outside the US - hell, even Apple realizes China is a bigger market than the US these days
Sure they do the IP licensing thing, but they're not, because most of the IP is generated in the US, and they pay US wages for that (thus, the profit they make in the US goes into funding development in the US and they have to pay US taxes on it). Of course, this is only a quick move away - should something like anti-encryption laws get enacted, forcing the encryption and security parts
Actually, it turns out the anti-theft detectors at store doorways is good enough to trip up a pacemaker. I think the ones they use at Best Buy are particularly susceptible to turning pacemakers and other devices like neurostimulators off. Often without notice or an alarm. The only thing the patient gets is either increased seizures or their heart is again beating oddly.
Apparently doctors give notice about these devices and the frequencies that cause issues, but people do forget.
No, PR people know to get planners in. PR people know that they need to set everything "up right" so they don't make a mess of an event (which would be bad PR).
However, it's possible it was handled by a "social media rep" who thinks highly of social media and a disdain for "traditions". So they may think they're immune to the whole "planning" thing.
Yes but it's completely transparent to the user. A phone that's been in use will have an up to date database, but that just means if you're searching for a cell signal, an updated database means you can acquire it really fast and have service in a few seconds.
If you haven't powered your phone up recently, it may have an outdated database that should still work, so it'll try to use it.
If the database doesn't work at all, then it will do a full network search by listening to the control channels to figure out whose networks are available, and consulting the roaming database for compatible network IDs (stored on the SIM card and updated periodically). If it can't find that, it will then connect to a network for connectivity. (The order is the preferred network first, then roaming partners, finally unaffiliated companies providing service. The latter is always a last choice because those companies don't negotiate roaming agreements voluntarily. You usually see them on cruise ships where they can easily ding you dollars a minute and there's nothing you can do - your cell provider is forced to pay the bill).
A full network search can take as little as 30 seconds to a few minutes or more before it can establish a signal. But you don't need an update OTA database for this since all phones are designed to be able to be "cold started" with very little information. Of course, for customer service, the SIM cards you get will typically have the latest database as of when the SIM was made (which isn't that old) so by the time you finish the OOBE application, the phone would've acquired a network signal.
Therein lies the problem. Far too long we've conditioned users to look for the lock. And now practically every site has a lock.
And therein lies a BIG problem if you use LetsEncrypt. Because a good chunk of LE certificates go towards phishing sites (notably Paypal), there's a really good chance that someone somewhere will simply block LE certificates as a anti-phishing measure. I mean, with like 95% of the sites being phishing sites, that's a really big target,. and the remaining 5% are sites that "normal people" don't usually care about.
It's only a matter of time, really.
Practically every event ever nowadays. A stadium can hold 20,000+ people easily, and people love to tweet and snapchat and facebook and everything else. And there will be at least 10% of the people who are streaming video and audio commentary during the game, while everything else is bursty.
In fact, we had several festivals already. Not big ones, but since it was aimed at the millennial crowd, there were CoWs (Cells on Wheels) set up around the perimeter. These CoWs are miniature cell towers meant to cover a small area that's likely to have a high density of cellphones. They typically backhaul onto either a dedicated link (if one was put in during construction - so sites like stadiums and arenas and parks will have them) or via a microwave link to a regular cell tower.
All it takes is an event planner calling it in and the big carriers will truck in a CoW with advance notice and set it up. You tell them how many people are there and they'll estimate the number of units and type to bring in (they may bring in more than one and backhaul onto the one with a dedicated link).
This is not new - it's been around a few years and you'll often see them at stadiums until they set up local repeaters inside.
That's the problem when you run Linux. If those workstations ran Windows, then they'd figure out how to at least hit the power button from time to time just because it's Windows.
In our computer labs, they were all bolted down with steel anti-theft metal housings. But they had access to the front for the CD-ROM and power button.
Here's an odd one. My domain (see the message bar) keeps getting emails from British Telecom about some company's ADSL service. I had their address, their service details, etc. Oddly enough, though even though I get these emails, I can't "password reset" it using that address - it always comes back as not found, even though the link takes me to their log in page. Go figure.
Since i only get it now and again, and not for a long while now, I can only assume they're out of business.
I also got one from some guy with a US West bank account, and I think that same guy used it for travel websites because I kept getting surveys for how my trip was. I ignored them at first, then decided screw with the surveys - hey, they're asking me about my non-existent trip? Sure, I'll answer them! Giving one-star ratings and berating the staff never felt so cathartic. I even said to cancel my account as I never want to be a customer of them again. Oddly, those stopped a long while back as well. Either I made it so that guy's travel arrangements got really hard to make or the CAN SPAM laws made everyone scrub their mailing list.
Now, my Gmail, however, accidentally had it happen, and I got some really confusing emails about board meetings and whatnot. And some rather personal information as they forward application forms between them. Figuring out what happened, I sent them a nice email that they really did have the wrong person and got an invite to visit them if I was in the area (I live on the west coast, they are east coast). But that was only because they're actually a group of people who'd I'd actually be interested in spending time with.
Took a week to get it resolved because the mailing list I got put on (to send to the board) generated only like 1 email a day. So I had to figure out if it was a fluke, or if someone made an error. It turns out the real guy's email had numbers at the end and whomever entered it in the mailing list software truncated it.
I don't understand why my domain got hit with them - it's not like it was close to any ISP or somesuch, and it's even a .net - the .com was taken and I've had it for 16 years now.
Well, thumbnail previews are helpful for the common case of a collection of photos in a directory. Perhaps you're totally organized and categorize the heck out of every digital photo you take, but most people are not, and it's nice to open a folder of photos and quickly glance and see what they're about than to see generic icons and open each one to see what the file is inside.
It's a user thing. It's why complex beasts like NetworkManager, Pulse Audio and SystemD exist - because no amount of "simple scripting" can get around fundamental limitations of the "keep it the Unix way".
In fact, why do shell scripts in sysvinit ... reimplement init? The default init that sysvinit uses already handles daemonizing really well, and if daemons die, it can easily restart them. In fact, if they die too quickly, init will stop spawning it for 5 minutes. And to heck with S/K scripts, since init handles runlevel invocations as well. The only reason I can see is that editing inittab is too hard, but we seem to make do with other files like passwd and such.
And users like NetworkManager - because things like WiFi screw up the networking model Unix created. (Just because you connect to WiFi, doesn't mean you want the same settings for WiFi - perhaps you connect to public WiFi and want a VPN, while corporate WiFi you don't. And then there's multiple connections...).
And Pulse Audio is a pain, but necessary to accomplish some tricky audio routing issues. For example, take a standard PC with a sound card. It's playing music or a video, and there's a VoIP app running in the background. The user wants to take the call, so they plug in their headset via USB or Bluetooth, and the VoIP app's audio needs to move to the new sound device transparently - the app shouldn't need to close and reopen (or even know a new audio device was added). Yes, it works in Windows when people insist on using voice with Skype (I normally just use speakers and built in microphone, but if there are people around, a headset gets better privacy. But I don't have a headset - I borrow one from my manager since work doesn't provide me with one and I don't use one enough to justify the expense. I plug it in, and magically, the call is routed to them and I can chat in privacy).
Oh yes, the audio from the existing music player or video player must NOT be routed to the headset, either.
Feel free to try to implement these two basic use cases with shell scripts.
And what language and platform should one do this? Windows? Seems pretty reasonable - after all, no one uses macOS or Linux, right? Or Android or iOS.
Or maybe we do Android, and ignore iOS and Windows and people who use desktops?
The reality is - the web browser has become the universal platform. With very little code, you can write an application in a web browser that runs on practically all platforms, even ones you think no one cares about (hello Windows Phone). It's the universal runtime, something you can consider that practically everyone who will use your application has access to.
Oh, and people are writing applications as applications. Thanks to stuff like NodeJS, what's happening is the "application" is really a web browser hard coded to a specific web site.
Siri's voice activation command is "Hey Siri", thus avoiding a collision with someone named that. Of course, some dumba** will name their new baby "HeySiri" just to confuse things. At least "OK Google" sounds stupid enough that no one would want to use it as a name... right?
I don't know what Cortana's activation word is.
That's the general fear about making salaries transparent - that high earners will have to justify their high salaries and thus see that it might be lowered. What really happens is those who make less start asking questions as to why they make less. Sometimes it's genuine skill and contributions - Employee A makes more because their work is high quality and people like working with Employee A - using his work output, working with them in general, etc. Employee B, however, barely produces output, and people hate using it because there are so many errors than it needs to be corrected before it can be used, as well as people just avoid interacting with Employee B.
Other times, there can be real problems. This is in general the bigger cauxe - perhaps they didn't negotiate their starting salary as much, or other reason. This is why companies hate salary transparency - they don't want high performers to know how little they're being paid compared to their peers whom were recently hired. One coworker made a mention that if he applied for a job the company was offering, he'd make more money. (He went to his managers and the company re-evaluated all their pay scales).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
FYI, the people who pay "regular" price aren't necessarily rich. It can very well be the discount that gets offered is a pittance compared to the effort of shopping around.
If the item costs $30, I'm not going to lose much sleep if I buy it for that and find out it's $25 somewhere else. Sure I could've saved $5, but maybe that requires another hour of shopping around. Is that worth $5? I can't say. (This applies especially so if the savings are from say, Amazon third party sellers, or from dodgier sites). And if I already have it, well, by the time you try returning it (gas to drive to post office, getting it repackages, etc), you eat up all the savings anyways.
It's like the people who drive 20 miles out of the way to save a couple of cents per gallon of gas. Or line up for hours waiting to fill up because the cheap station has it 30 cents cheaper than everyone else.
The problem is fine if it's "a few". It's a problem when it's "a lot".
PC piracy rates are somewhere around 90%, while console piracy is around 10% (averages). If you haven't noticed, PC versions of games tend to suck - either piss-poor console ports released months/years after the game was originally released, or not released at all.
Sure, some games with other forms of DRM are released same day - FPSes and such where the goal is playing online, which allows for servers to check for pirate keys and such, and those generally don't suck on PC.
Heck, even the couple of years before Denuvo fell PC gaming was on the uptick - even though they got broken in the end, the fact that Denuvo kept games "locked up" for a couple of months was good enough.
But now it's pretty much gone (it's cracked in under a week now), you can bet a lot of PC games are going to dry up and begin to suck again, leaving us with the piles of indie games. Sure there's a few gems in there, but anyone who's browsed Steam knows, there's a lot clogging it up.
And back to PC ports that suck because piracy makes it not worth while to do a good port because you won't make up the money doing the port.
Then add on human greed - the guy was making lots of money running the site, and obviously converting it from bitcoins to cash. Now it's even harder because all the firewalls you put up to be anonymous get in the way of rapidly cashing in all that money. Even worse, you may get your accounts frozen because you can't prove your identity. And this may result in having to walk away from accounts with thousands of dollars in them (which quickly adds up).
And yes, he got greedy, just by looking at his expenditures.
Well, the big thing is Apple has celebrity. Tim Cook is well known and when he comes calling, people notice. Elon Musk will probably get similar attention, as would Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. And yes, that also includes other celebrities in the traditional sense, too.
I'm sure local celebrities in the area also command similar attention from politicians.
The problem is greed. I'm sure when he started out he was careful. But after that, once the bucks start rolling in, greed takes over. I mean the police haven't caught you yet, so instead of making your life difficult and constraining how much money you make, you relax a bit and rake more in.
Perhaps his first laptop was encrypted, but then he wanted a new laptop, and just didn't bother anymore
You want to make a site hard for the police to find you? It's not hard, but proper opsec requires you to not get greedy, so remove all thought of making lots of money - just make enough to pay for itself. Once you get greed involved, you get sloppy.. Of course, money is probably a huge reason why people set up the sites to begin with, but eventually human nature and greed take over over opsec and you make yourself vulnerable.
Apple has a few categories of apps that don't completely freeze up - e.g., apps that are VoIP related, audio related, location related. For these apps, iOS will let them run a background thread so they can continue to listen for calls (or handle the current call in progress), continue to play music, or continue to get GPS location information so they can update your position.
These apps don't freeze by default (though you can force iOS to freeze them even if they do this), since it's expected that you'd want your VoIP app / music player / map app to keep going even when it's not in the foreground. But just because they don't freeze completely doesn't mean the OS can't freeze the other threads that handle the UI, for example, and reclaim those resources.
And by severely limited, only those apps in thsoe categories can be backgrounded and still run. All other apps will be frozen.