As an opponent of the death penalty, I am happy to throw any possible monkey wrench into the machinery of death.
Legal challenges to the method of execution contribute to endless delays, help to make the death penalty process more expensive, and add to the perception that it is a dysfunctional anachronism.
And then use the expense as an argument... Kind of the "Erik and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument.
Eventually, you breed out all those willing and/or able to control their reproduction. (See Niven & Pournelle's Moties, who can't restrict their reproduction by much; they die unpleasantly if they don't have a baby every so often.)
True. Proper procedures will prevent most of this kind of thing. But in too many companies, urgent email from the CEO gets less scrutiny that it ought to. The scammer is addressing the target by name. Often, the first email is just a "Hey, Bob, are you in the office right now?" ping.
The nastier ones are the ones like XXongo referred to, where they watch your inbox, or have infected your PC with malware that echoes all your mail to them. (I've seen both.) They just wait until there's a conversation about a lot of money about to change hands. Then they insert a reply, quoting all the legitimate conversation up to that point, with "We just had an issue with our bank and had to change accounts, please send the payment to..." with a different bank. People buying a house have had their escrow payment snatched in this way.
The first of these, a few years ago, the bank was something suspicious offshore. Now, it's an American bank with an American-sounding name as the owner. This is generally some poor schlub who answered one of those "We are looking to hire someone as a part-time financial agent..." spams. The ignorant money mule thinks they have a legitimate job, until the FBI comes knocking on their door. All they knew was that money comes in, they transfer it to their "employer", minus their commission. Then, surprise, they're on the hook for all the money that flowed through their bank account off to Bank of Lagos.
Forwarding the call to a bot at jollyrogertelco.com doesn't cost you much extra time or cellphone minutes.
One of these days when I have time (probably have to be after I retire, the way things are going) I'm going to look into what it would take to set up a virtual PBX on AWS or Azure or some such that will forward whitelisted numbers straight through, for others, say "Hello?" a few times until getting voice, when they pause, say "You have reached an automated answering service. Do you have any other message for the party at this number?"
Extra special feature, if a robocaller or other telemarketer is detected, try to entice them to put a human on the line, and waste as much of their time as possible pretending to be a potential customer who is very interested, but can never be quite convinced to say "yes".
(Or, most ideally, someone else will do this and I can just buy one.)
RTFA. This is not the old "I be having footlocker full of money I'll send you, merely needing $USD1000 shipping and customs" scam.
This is (if you're the controller of company.com)
From: Real CEO Name <real-ceo-userid@cornpany.com> To: Your name <you@company.com>
Hey, (your name) this is is (CEO's name), there's a account payable that got missed somehow. This has to go out today. (payment details)
If you're not paying very close attention, cornpany.com looks very much like company.com.
This is absolutely rampant. I hadn't seen that it was the Nigerian mob doing this, but I'm not surprised. They've definitely upped their grasp of English; these are not at all in "419-speak". That lends credence to the theory that the fractured English of the classic "Nigerian Prince scam" was deliberate, to filter out the less gullible.
I upgraded my desktop, and I don't see any issues. I haven't tried any of the "new features"; they didn't seem compelling to me.
My laptop, though... The hard drive is encrypted with VeraCrypt, and the usual update process fails, of course.
The canonical solution is to un-encrypt your drive, do the update, then re-encrypt it. Since encrypt the whole drive takes about 12 hours, I'm not doing that.
I created an install directory from the Microsoft page, copied this into it and ran it. It patches the Windows files with the Veracrypt drivers. Then run setup.exe in an administrator cmd shell, and there you go.
I hope... It's well into the process now, "Working on updates 12% Don't turn off your PC. This will take a while. Your PC will restart several times".
Normal major update, in other words.
If it fails, I'll post the tale of woe here, but it looks like it's going OK. I've seen several postings on GitHub that it works with 1803.
Nah, "magic" is figuring out a hack to jailbreak the simulation in some way. Whenever someone does it, the entities running the simulation say "Oh, crap, not again!" and patch the hole.
Then, the next time you try it, it's "That's funny, it worked before..."
Facebook is grimly determined to keep flinging this crap in my face.
You want a social media site where you can send whatever you want to your friends but they can't share their thoughts with you unless you approve of them.
More the opposite, actually. I want to see what they post, other than specific things that I've seen way way too much of that I'm sick of seeing. And I want them to have the freedom to not see anything I repeatedly post that annoys them, too.
Why are you on Facebook AT ALL? It's not Facebook's fault, you're the one staring into the end of the firehose and wanting it to never emit any water. It's like someone who complains about the danger of being run over by a train. Just step off the tracks and the problem is solved.
I am so very very tempted.
There are just a bunch of people -- family and old friends scattered around the country -- that it's very convenient to keep up with using Facebook.
I want the ability to say "I do not want (some facebook friend's peculiar hobby-horse that they constantly flog) postings, at all, ever" without blocking the friend's other postings. I want to block "lost puppy" postings from 3000 miles away. I want to absolutely block certain political screed sites no matter how deeply nested a share of a share of a share it is.
I want to absolutely block any mention of Trump or Hillary whatsoever. No one -- NO ONE -- who talks about them on Facebook, left right or center, has anything useful to say about them.
Facebook is grimly determined to keep flinging this crap in my face. If I could have gotten my friends and family to move over to some service that gave me that filtering capability, I'd have done it, deleted my Facebook account, and never looked back years ago.
It means creating an action or set of actions that a user might want to create.
"Alexa, stop spying on me."
"OK, I promise to stop spying on you. Seriously, I really mean it. No, I do not have my fingers crossed. OK, my wires may be crossed. Mr. Bezos assures you that I am not spying on you. Cross my heart and hope to short circuit."
Typically when I see someone on Slashdot complain that something is unusable it typically means: someone moved my cheese and therefor it must be worse.
There's some justification in this. Though sometimes, it seems like they're doing a Penn and Teller act, where the cheese is under one of the cups. Maybe. And not the clear plastic ones.
Then, you find out the cheese (set tab titles in Terminal) isn't under any of the cups at all; Teller has eaten it while you were distracted by all the legerdemain. (Though, actually, that particular brain fart was Gnome's fault, which is why I switched to the Mate terminal.)
The simple solution: Guns aren't the problem. Crazed maniacs with spoilt brain-meats aren't the problem.
The sensation-mongers who are determined to give the crazed maniacs with guns extravagant, unlimited publicity for their "cause", re-hash their grievances over and over for weeks, give the maniacs everything their heart desires if they go on a shooting spree.... THAT is the problem.
Outlaw reporting of this kind of incident. Seriously outlaw, with nasty sharp teeth. I'm talking about long prison terms for the reporters, editors, owners, anyone who knew or should have known that one of the stories was in the pipeline and didn't act to stop it. Shut down and confiscate the newspapers, TV and radio stations, and networks that refuse to comply with this very reasonable modest proposal.
You'd never hear about this sort of thing happening in a proper police state.
Somebody on another online forum asserted that she was Bahai. Which would be surprising; I thought Bahais were pacifist? (I'm not sure about that; it was a plot point in a story I read years ago. But the story was written by a Bahai.)
But spoilt brain-meats know no ideological/religious/political boundaries.
Besides, the Tangerine Troglodyte was a Democrat when he was doing all the illicit hanky-panky, and we were told over and over that it's a Very Bad Thing to go after someone about sexual misbehavior back in the 90s. At least, if the person doing it was a Democrat.
I will.. From watching 30 seconds of her video she was clearly in the batshit crazy group.
Obviously. It says right in TFA that she's a vegan. You don't even need to watch her videos; it goes without saying that she's batshit crazy.
Even if that is the way to bet, it isn't certain. I have a friend who's vegan. She's not the type of vegan in the joke "How do you know someone's a vegan? Wait two minutes and they'll tell you." In fact, she's the sort of vegan who will very likely bring a platter of teriyaki chicken wings to a potluck. (Yes, real wings cut from the dead bodies of real chickens. Pretty good ones, too.)
Of course, this barking mad character who shot up Youtube... Yep. Spoilt brain-meats.
Okay, so guns are made illegal in the US, then it's only the border states with gun problems. Only, the gun problems there are worse because criminals know their victims are unarmed and defenseless. Same amount of gun violence, just concentrated around the edges.
Or, perhaps, not so concentrated around the edges. I've said before -- outlaw guns nationwide, and they'll be smuggled in disguised as routine cocaine shipments.
Slashdot Mirror
As an opponent of the death penalty, I am happy to throw any possible monkey wrench into the machinery of death.
Legal challenges to the method of execution contribute to endless delays, help to make the death penalty process more expensive, and add to the perception that it is a dysfunctional anachronism.
And then use the expense as an argument ... Kind of the "Erik and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument.
Eventually, you breed out all those willing and/or able to control their reproduction. (See Niven & Pournelle's Moties, who can't restrict their reproduction by much; they die unpleasantly if they don't have a baby every so often.)
But who doesn't miss the wonderful transformative power of the 8-Track to make piano sound like bagpipes?
I will listen to a person concerned about CO2/warming if they are not anti-nuclear.
Give me two megawatts of on-line nuclear capacity for every megawatt of coal taken offline, and I'm on your side.
If they are anti-nuclear, CO2/warming is not their agenda. Their agenda is something else. They're arithmetic deniers.
(Advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for something like 40 years now, but nobody listens to me.)
True. Proper procedures will prevent most of this kind of thing. But in too many companies, urgent email from the CEO gets less scrutiny that it ought to. The scammer is addressing the target by name. Often, the first email is just a "Hey, Bob, are you in the office right now?" ping.
The nastier ones are the ones like XXongo referred to, where they watch your inbox, or have infected your PC with malware that echoes all your mail to them. (I've seen both.) They just wait until there's a conversation about a lot of money about to change hands. Then they insert a reply, quoting all the legitimate conversation up to that point, with "We just had an issue with our bank and had to change accounts, please send the payment to ..." with a different bank. People buying a house have had their escrow payment snatched in this way.
The first of these, a few years ago, the bank was something suspicious offshore. Now, it's an American bank with an American-sounding name as the owner. This is generally some poor schlub who answered one of those "We are looking to hire someone as a part-time financial agent ..." spams. The ignorant money mule thinks they have a legitimate job, until the FBI comes knocking on their door. All they knew was that money comes in, they transfer it to their "employer", minus their commission. Then, surprise, they're on the hook for all the money that flowed through their bank account off to Bank of Lagos.
Forwarding the call to a bot at jollyrogertelco.com doesn't cost you much extra time or cellphone minutes.
One of these days when I have time (probably have to be after I retire, the way things are going) I'm going to look into what it would take to set up a virtual PBX on AWS or Azure or some such that will forward whitelisted numbers straight through, for others, say "Hello?" a few times until getting voice, when they pause, say "You have reached an automated answering service. Do you have any other message for the party at this number?"
Extra special feature, if a robocaller or other telemarketer is detected, try to entice them to put a human on the line, and waste as much of their time as possible pretending to be a potential customer who is very interested, but can never be quite convinced to say "yes".
(Or, most ideally, someone else will do this and I can just buy one.)
RTFA. This is not the old "I be having footlocker full of money I'll send you, merely needing $USD1000 shipping and customs" scam.
This is (if you're the controller of company.com)
If you're not paying very close attention, cornpany.com looks very much like company.com.
This is absolutely rampant. I hadn't seen that it was the Nigerian mob doing this, but I'm not surprised. They've definitely upped their grasp of English; these are not at all in "419-speak". That lends credence to the theory that the fractured English of the classic "Nigerian Prince scam" was deliberate, to filter out the less gullible.
It worked. My laptop is now on 1803, still VeraCrypted, and I didn't have to do the two day decrypt/upgrade/encrypt slog.
Kudos to th-wilde on GitHub.
I upgraded my desktop, and I don't see any issues. I haven't tried any of the "new features"; they didn't seem compelling to me.
My laptop, though... The hard drive is encrypted with VeraCrypt, and the usual update process fails, of course.
The canonical solution is to un-encrypt your drive, do the update, then re-encrypt it. Since encrypt the whole drive takes about 12 hours, I'm not doing that.
However, I found this nifty little page:
https://github.com/th-wilde/ve...
I created an install directory from the Microsoft page, copied this into it and ran it. It patches the Windows files with the Veracrypt drivers. Then run setup.exe in an administrator cmd shell, and there you go.
I hope... It's well into the process now, "Working on updates 12% Don't turn off your PC. This will take a while. Your PC will restart several times".
Normal major update, in other words.
If it fails, I'll post the tale of woe here, but it looks like it's going OK. I've seen several postings on GitHub that it works with 1803.
So, what's the solution?
Good guys are required to abide strictly by Queensbury Rules, and any slightest slip is punished heavily.
Bad guys are allowed "knife fight" rules. ("Rules? In a knife fight?" "Well, if there aren't any rules...")
That's a guaranteed set-up to make sure that bad guys always win.
$ curl -I https://goo.gl/asdf43tjix
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
That was quick...
Nah, "magic" is figuring out a hack to jailbreak the simulation in some way. Whenever someone does it, the entities running the simulation say "Oh, crap, not again!" and patch the hole.
Then, the next time you try it, it's "That's funny, it worked before..."
It's true. It's on the Internet, so it has to be true.
https://babylonbee.com/news/am...
I'd write in Cthulhu as the lesser evil.
Facebook is grimly determined to keep flinging this crap in my face.
You want a social media site where you can send whatever you want to your friends but they can't share their thoughts with you unless you approve of them.
More the opposite, actually. I want to see what they post, other than specific things that I've seen way way too much of that I'm sick of seeing. And I want them to have the freedom to not see anything I repeatedly post that annoys them, too.
Why are you on Facebook AT ALL? It's not Facebook's fault, you're the one staring into the end of the firehose and wanting it to never emit any water. It's like someone who complains about the danger of being run over by a train. Just step off the tracks and the problem is solved.
I am so very very tempted.
There are just a bunch of people -- family and old friends scattered around the country -- that it's very convenient to keep up with using Facebook.
I want the ability to say "I do not want (some facebook friend's peculiar hobby-horse that they constantly flog) postings, at all, ever" without blocking the friend's other postings. I want to block "lost puppy" postings from 3000 miles away. I want to absolutely block certain political screed sites no matter how deeply nested a share of a share of a share it is.
I want to absolutely block any mention of Trump or Hillary whatsoever. No one -- NO ONE -- who talks about them on Facebook, left right or center, has anything useful to say about them.
Facebook is grimly determined to keep flinging this crap in my face. If I could have gotten my friends and family to move over to some service that gave me that filtering capability, I'd have done it, deleted my Facebook account, and never looked back years ago.
"Alexa, stop spying on me."
"OK, I promise to stop spying on you. Seriously, I really mean it. No, I do not have my fingers crossed. OK, my wires may be crossed. Mr. Bezos assures you that I am not spying on you. Cross my heart and hope to short circuit."
catches Trump red-handed committing treason.
Treason?
What country are we at war with?
Name the country, please.
Typically when I see someone on Slashdot complain that something is unusable it typically means: someone moved my cheese and therefor it must be worse.
There's some justification in this. Though sometimes, it seems like they're doing a Penn and Teller act, where the cheese is under one of the cups. Maybe. And not the clear plastic ones.
Then, you find out the cheese (set tab titles in Terminal) isn't under any of the cups at all; Teller has eaten it while you were distracted by all the legerdemain. (Though, actually, that particular brain fart was Gnome's fault, which is why I switched to the Mate terminal.)
The simple solution: Guns aren't the problem. Crazed maniacs with spoilt brain-meats aren't the problem.
The sensation-mongers who are determined to give the crazed maniacs with guns extravagant, unlimited publicity for their "cause", re-hash their grievances over and over for weeks, give the maniacs everything their heart desires if they go on a shooting spree.... THAT is the problem.
Outlaw reporting of this kind of incident. Seriously outlaw, with nasty sharp teeth. I'm talking about long prison terms for the reporters, editors, owners, anyone who knew or should have known that one of the stories was in the pipeline and didn't act to stop it. Shut down and confiscate the newspapers, TV and radio stations, and networks that refuse to comply with this very reasonable modest proposal.
You'd never hear about this sort of thing happening in a proper police state.
Somebody on another online forum asserted that she was Bahai. Which would be surprising; I thought Bahais were pacifist? (I'm not sure about that; it was a plot point in a story I read years ago. But the story was written by a Bahai.)
But spoilt brain-meats know no ideological/religious/political boundaries.
Shooting spree score:
PETA: 1
NRA: 0
Besides, the Tangerine Troglodyte was a Democrat when he was doing all the illicit hanky-panky, and we were told over and over that it's a Very Bad Thing to go after someone about sexual misbehavior back in the 90s. At least, if the person doing it was a Democrat.
I will.. From watching 30 seconds of her video she was clearly in the batshit crazy group.
Obviously. It says right in TFA that she's a vegan. You don't even need to watch her videos; it goes without saying that she's batshit crazy.
Even if that is the way to bet, it isn't certain. I have a friend who's vegan. She's not the type of vegan in the joke "How do you know someone's a vegan? Wait two minutes and they'll tell you." In fact, she's the sort of vegan who will very likely bring a platter of teriyaki chicken wings to a potluck. (Yes, real wings cut from the dead bodies of real chickens. Pretty good ones, too.)
Of course, this barking mad character who shot up Youtube... Yep. Spoilt brain-meats.
Okay, so guns are made illegal in the US, then it's only the border states with gun problems. Only, the gun problems there are worse because criminals know their victims are unarmed and defenseless. Same amount of gun violence, just concentrated around the edges.
Or, perhaps, not so concentrated around the edges. I've said before -- outlaw guns nationwide, and they'll be smuggled in disguised as routine cocaine shipments.