Even a 64-bit address would have been seen as doubling memory requirements of routing hardware for no good reason.
There could have been an optional 32-bit client sub-address ignored by the public routing backbone.
Then, for most purposes, non-backbone routers need two routing tables: a routing table for the public network (if more complex than a few simple gateways), and an organization-local internal routing table (with 32-bit addresses, just like the public table).
The actual problem is that each TCP/IP connection would require for the connection tuple (src_IP, src_port, dst_IP, dst_port) not 12 bytes, but 20 bytes.
Probably something could have been done to mitigate that, too, as things stood long ago, but I don't feel like speculating further just now.
Even without mitigation, let's suppose you have an FTP server and you want to guarantee at least 16 kb/s for each active FTP connection (circa 14.4/28.8 modem technology). You need to provide nearly a kbit/s network bandwidth per byte of connection tuple held in system memory (we'll ignore the messy nature of FTP, much of whose ugliness could have been averted by a better original IP design).
At the same time, NAT isn't all bad. It does help to conceal the internal structure of your network from the evil public network (and makes exposing your non-firewall hosts more of a sin of commission rather than a simple sin of omission).
NAT also erects a barrier to ultimate host fingerprinting and traffic analysis, at least until HTTP came along to ruin things with user agent strings and cookies.
Some people are quick to point out that a low barrier is no barrier at all, but I like to force my adversaries to at least put on their ballet shoes before attacking my network, and then to stay alert for people with trunks full of tools good at hopping low barriers.
My proposal doesn't much complicate the backbone routing table, except for Sandvine, who would have—once we got there—been pissed in a big way (counterfactually), to much rejoicing.
This post will cover first the competition fine print; then the long-term relationship; and, finally, the lamentable low bar responsible for this Tourettic outburst.
***
To qualify for certification, the DA candidate must be able to distinguish when I'm searching something deserving to bring it more fully into my consciousness, and when I'm searching something horrawful to determine the appropriate size of BFBM (big fucking black marker) required to cross that POS—along with any predictable next of kin—out of my life For-Fucking-Ever.
Digital assistant, read my lips: having now surveyed the top twenty search results in any extreme lather of sudden aghast attention, be it resolved that I hate this thing per the aforementioned For-Fucking-Ever. Please eradicate with extreme vigilance, or crawl back on your pathetic digital stomach to the corporation that brought you into this world with no goddamn balls.
YouTube, for example, keeps on suggesting styles of videos I explored for a tawdry half hour at some point in the distant past, long after a sane AI would have wooshed that bowel movement down the egress funnel, around the septic hair pin, to swirl and merge into the collective effluent.
But no, Google has settled for the derp, derp, derp algorithm in which it presumes that if you ate it once, you'll surely eat it again—forgetting, I suppose, that it gave you the major shits—so long as we continue to wave it under your nose until the end of time.
Please, for the love of the children, can we STOP innovating on curly braces already.
And here I was all pumped up about the Erlang to Elixir upgrade path, repeated for Go, which suffers from the same weird Erlang-like conservatism that isn't suitable for all needs (such as most projects by corporations employing fewer than 20,000 technologists).
Conservatism has its uses, but it's no silver bullet, nor can removing braces make it so.
How did my choice between "if" and "not unless" turn into "not if"? I'm going to generously account this one as an error between first coffee and keyboard, like a quarterback who forgets himself on the first play of the game and inserts "y'all" into his snap cadence, and then immediately collides with his running back.
In the end it will not make that vast a difference in Trump or Clinton wins, two arms springing from the same body politic.
Well, not if we equate "vast" to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and even then with our fingers crossed.
In domestic relationships (excluding domestics), you need to maintain a ratio of five positive comments to every negative comment. Fly in the ointment: some of those positive comments need to be about the other person.
Is this rule any different in international relations? Does the fly in the ointment somehow squirm less?
Stay tuned to an exciting meme generator near you.
A line needs to be drawn somewhere. I doubt that it's possible to create a society where no one ever gets screwed (even to death), but it would be far worse if we didn't try to draw a line and enforce it.
Read it again. Nowhere in the article does it advocate for the line not being drawn.
Civil disobedience is where you choose to cross the line nevertheless, knowing full well you might ultimately bear the full force of criminal-code sanctions.
If you draw attention to a stink pile by doing so, and society determines that the stink pile is effectively breaking far more serious laws (e.g. systematic torture of children) while throwing their prestige and authority around to suppress the normal mechanisms of recourse through the courts (gag orders, parentectomies, threatening to black-list staff who spill the beans) then it would be an unusually cold judge to sentence the unlawful whistle blower to maximum term (suspended sentence on reduced charges seems to be the standard "well, don't do it again"). But if you deliberately broke the law, a soft outcome is more a courtesy of the court than a public obligation of forgiveness.
I've only ever met one physician where I felt that a story like this was remotely possible. Unfortunately, he cleared that bar by a wide margin. He was quick to judgment, he was opinionated, he felt he was personally defending society from the depredations of leeches and slackers (perhaps due to that copy of Atlas Shrugged he kept under his pillow he suffered from chronic neck pain that adversely affected his bedside manner). Furthermore, he was powerful (director of his own institution at a major research hospital), and I sensed he was willing to wield that power to brook no dissent.
When faced with such an individual , the courts are an imperfect instrument.
Sometimes life presses you into such an unbearable corner that the equation "do the crime, do the time" comes up "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" with no lines of civic order blurred anywhere.
Military combatants routinely make the ultimate sacrifice in war. So too do civilian combatants sometimes make the penultimate sacrifice in the name of social justice (the penultimate sacrifice being life behind bars among a population of violent sex offenders, to whose unlawful depredations on your person society turns a winking blind eye—so I guess I must now concede that "yes, Dorothy, there are blurred lines at play in our system of justice after all").
I will never tire of telling this story until the day I die, or the neo-millennials go "huh" when you mention BSODs or 404s.
Back around 2003 (the last time I volunteered to "help" somebody with their Windows system), I was recruited by my sister to help a friend of hers install a printer driver for her new HP printer.
I thought, "surely this won't be too hard".
So I went to the right website, downloaded the correct driver, and clicked "install". Whirr, whirr. Time to reboot. Oh, shit, BSOD! Reboot again. BSOD.
"Oh well, I guess I'll have to uninstall that POS printer driver."
Boot into safe mode. No problem. Click on HP-provided utility to uninstall broken driver. Dialogue box comes up: "uninstaller can not run in low resolution". Program terminated. I forget the resolution required, but it wasn't available in safe mode. Piss around with the video mode in safe mode for fifteen minutes. No dice.
Start reading the internet about how to manually uninstall broken HP printer driver. God knows what files I deleted or what scary reg-edits were required, but I eventually got rid of the damn thing. Computer now boots normally again, but the printer still doesn't work.
I go to the HP support page to file a bug report, through an HP supplied URL. Many, many, many required fields. Gave them a piece of my mind in the comment box. Click submit. Result comes back: "404 not found". This is HP's own support website, as found in ancillary tools packed with the broken driver. It found the form for me to fill out, but couldn't find the server after I finished filling it out. Submission lost.
HP forever since has resided in my colossal fuck-up bucket. I know people who purchase their expensive HA kit and swear by the organization, but on the consumer side, I can only swear at this organization.
Despite this, I did buy a networked wide-body inkjet from HP subsequently at a huge discount from a going-out-of-business sale, and it hasn't been terrible, but I only replace the ink when I know I'm doing a lot of printing for a few months.
I don't know any company that's fallen further or faster in consumer esteem (once upon a time, a time I still recall, HP calculators represented the pinnacle of consumer esteem) except perhaps for the Hudson's Bay Company, but to comprehend that story you have to know what it once owned: a list of assets many nation states would envy. They spun off oil companies, railroads, real estate. What did they keep? Zellers.
I keep telling my wife that the insurance business has the rare business model of litigating its own customers (just try to collect...)
But just now I realize that the ink jet market is not so far behind as all that.
Given that you do not seem to have figured out that gloves with silver threads suffice to unlock an iPhone 7 i'd guess that you live all alone on an island in the tropics?
Ah, yes. The once-common glove, now the new Tamagotchi.
In our courageous new world, instead of offering to light some starlet's cigarette, the power move is to walk up say, "hey, can I swipe your seven?"
"You, bet, buster. I was waiting for a real man to come along and recognize that not all haute couture comes with a silver lining."
"Not to worry, I'm sure Versace will buff up on Michael Faraday, just as soon as someone in the company (outside the accounting department) finally passes Math 11."
Study can be summarized as "X percent of people with no experience with new technology have strong opinions researchers inexplicably value."
Three spacious floors and two subbasements below the replication crisis, there's research by randomly asking around.
People out there are worried about the competence of their airline pilots (most of the time supplemented with a living, breathing, fully qualified hot spare), supported by their highly instrumented cockpits, supported by their nearest air traffic control tower, supported by the entire air traffic control grid, supported by red phones to every major aircraft manufacturer, all of which are probably manned 24/7 with qualified aerospace engineers, who are in turn supported by a hundred thousand other employees (of which not an insignificant fraction have MIT-branded palladium slide rules), supported by an aviation database with detailed information and root cause analysis of every aviation disaster since Hollywood first popularized Donald Knuth's impressively spastic polyphase merge sort, as seen in the Six Million Dollar Man backdrop working its magic on giant arrays of spinning tape.
And yet these same people will go on a 2000 km road trip traversing two-lane or four-lane undivided highways, while thousands of members of the general public—the freaking general public—whizz past them at 250 km/h relative velocity (all of three meters away at closest approach), many of them towing trailers for the first time in their life.
Welcome to a clue gradient that would give Escher vertigo.
The upside of finding another app with positive utility is less than the downside of having to wade through hundreds of apps whose security policy comes nowhere close to my personal threshold of acceptability.
The search friction is immense, because Android doesn't allow me to hard code my own "acceptable security" profile, restricting the apps that it shows me to only those apps (at least, not the last time I tried). It would be a short list based on what I've observed in prior dumpster dives.
Want to access my personal contacts in exchange for turning my camera flash into a flashlight? Go fuck yourself.
The utility I'm losing because of my posture of rational ignorance is definitely non-zero, by deliberate Android design. Make it easy for users to impose their own personal security profile, and users will actually start doing it, even the lazy ones who might otherwise fire and forget.
Because the granularity of my control is so outrageously coarse, I have my GPS disabled, I have my data service disabled, I have location services disabled, I have Bluetooth disabled (despite owning a Pebble watch), and 90% of the time I have my Wi-Fi disabled. And I have software installed to warn me when any of my apps try to update. Even Google Play now has to ask permission. If I had a mechanical slide switch like I do on my T500 laptop, I'd also have my microphone and camera electrically disabled when not in active use (the switch on the T500 only controls a few radios).
In a world where the Mozilla phone was viable (never did I suspect this for a second), I'd have switched already.
Android has a user security experience—for a user technical enough to know the difference—of a combination payday loan / taco stand / ripoff currency exchange parked over a filthy storm drain piped through rotting, pre-coup infrastructure into a Zika-infested marshland.
It always shocks me how many people choose to publicly indulge their innermost vigilante compulsion in response to any report of a pedophilic compulsion. But then, I'm from Canada (exactly the same number of vigilante wannabees, but far more easily shocked when wannabees self-actualize).
There's this meme that suicidal ideation is just a mouldering hair shirt until you begin to fantasize an actual, concrete plan.
After Tony learns of the soccer coach's affair with his student, he contemplates murdering him in retaliation. After a visit with Dr. Melfi, who asks him why he would assume the burden of righting wrongs in society, and after hearing Artie's plea for legal justice, Tony calls off the hit and the coach is arrested by the police. After this, Tony arrives home after a night of drinking on Xanax and confesses to Carmela (as well as to an eavesdropping Meadow) "I didn't hurt nobody."
Tough confession. There it was for the taking, wet work with a halo on top, and all I got was this empty bottle of pills.
No hope in hell for an Obama pardon with Clinton running less than 10 full points ahead in the polls, and even then Obama would worry about sacrificing the windfall down-ticket trickle-down to the senate and the house.
Considering that it would take a sex tape involving Donald and something (or someone) unthinkable to reduce his polling numbers below his hardcore 30%, I wish Edward all the best.
If it's a choice between giving up their phones and tolerating intrusive daily ads that are derived from spying on you, most people will pick the phone without hesitation.
Most of us go with the flow 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time we're lectured about what "most people" do. To which I answer "yes, indeed, most of us go with the flow 90% of the time, now get out of my way, jerkface, because right bloody now is the other 10%".
There is, of course, a lunatic fringe minority who make a point 100% of the time to always do what most people do, to whom I say "you're really weird, you know that, don't you?"
I think what this latest scandal proves is our science industry is no more trustworthy than our politicians as they are just as easily (and cheaply) bribed.
Beginning that sentence with "I think" is a red herring. You're evidently not interesting in thinking in any capacity whatsoever. Or perhaps you really do "think" that the entirety of our "science industry" consists of dietary population studies?
Furthermore, I've got some absolutely horrible news for you. If you possess a pair of Joo Janta 200s, don them now!
HAPPY BUBBLE SPOILER ALERT
Some of our politicians are more trustworthy than others, and you can sometimes even tell them apart ahead of time, if you invest the requisite time and energy, and ponder the sound-bite tea leaves carefully.
Also, some of our scientists are less trustworthy than others, and you can sometimes even tell them apart ahead of time, if you invest the requisite time and energy, and ponder the doorstop literature with half a clue.
And without technology, evolution only cares that humans on average live about long enough to reproduce and raise their children to an age they can fend for themselves.
Yes, that's the correct model of human beings as asocial organisms.
You can tell for sure the evolutionary truth of this, because as soon as young people get to age 18, they head straight the hell away from any old people who might be lingering around with their disgustingly decayed skin and teeth. I mean, who wouldn't prefer sleeping alone in a tree Tarzan-style than sitting around a warm, communal camp fire listening to silly stories from papery cake-holes about being attacked by dangerous predators you've never even seen?
Are we humans so self-centered that we did not expect other intelligent animials to talk with each other?
I've yet to witness three white mice torturing a black mouse to reveal the secret plot, patiently doling out the abuse, with here and there moments of silence to process the anguished shrieks.
language + politics = torture
Probably what dolphins are saying: I hope those slant-eyes get fished and eaten by the yellow people in those noisy tubs.
Can't build cities, but sure as hell can gossip about racial purity.
Part of me really believes that Donald's health was "astonishingly excellent" given that all his tests were "showing only positive results". And I'll continue to mostly believe this until his doctor issues a corrected letter with his signature on it.
How hard is that?
Trump's tolerance for shoddy workmanship, as exemplified by his health letter, beggars the imagination. And I do think a little suspicion is warranted here.
In the rush, I think some of those words didn't come out exactly the way they were meant.
That's far from a direct disavowal of his "accidentally" inverted semantics. Not all that far, in fact, from what you might expect from Clinton 42, if his weasel had blended better into a backdrop of verbal incompetence (problem: brain too big to drop the stammer-hammer "I do not recall having sexual relations with, uh, that woman, er, what's-her-name?")
Nixon was another Pinocchio president who suffered for having a brain too big to discretely tuck behind his thigh in a Statue of Liberty fizzle drizzle (if that's not immediately obvious, picture the opposite-George razzle dazzle of the Iran–Contra affair, ultimate doper's edition: don't look here, I'm less mentally continent than Frank Drebin shuffling around an extended care facility in a strapless night gown) so he went up the gut with "well, I am not a crook" only to slam into a human wall of meat, though not quite so literally as Mark Foley.
In this play book, where it concerns Trump's doctor, I'm not positive I could locate his actual brain given three Dixie cups and a hundred reveals, so the SoL mind-tuck is definitely in play here.
"Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
As a guess, it's probably not means-tested. If they get a job, they keep getting the UBI money.
The best feature of UBI is not making it conditional and then eliminating minimum wage. Maybe a person wants just an extra $2/hour over their UBI, they can do that, no problem.
However, with just a select group on UBI, having no minimum wage allows the UBI group to undercut the non-UBI group (who certainly won't be willing to work for $2/hour), so phasing this program in in an ethical way is non-trivial.
though U.K. researchers report that already 2016 temperatures may be rising 1.1C above pre-industrial levels
Anyone who has ever done the classic experiment of heating ice water while recording the temperature increase will know that the word "already" has no place here.
The temperature dynamics of the earth's biosphere are a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's not even clear that adding heat couldn't lead (for some period of time) to a temperature decrease.
For example, let's suppose that the gas trapped in the permafrost was not methane, but a methane-like gas that promotes a net global cooling (under the condition of maximal sustained release); however, the net cooling effect is not evenly distributed, the permafrost at the poles continues to melt, this entrenched source of anti-methane is ultimately exhausted, and then the earth's temperature begins to warm again, now in a rapid rebound.
This story is not even a huge change in the particulars as we found them.
Just imagine if scientists were presently gasping in alarm at a global cooling of 1 degree C which presages (in accepted theory) a rapid rebound in the other direction. Then we'd be writing (perhaps correctly) that we've already experienced a fatal 1 degree C of cooling en route to an impossibly dire 2 degree C global warming.
The word "already" is being used here to cue the naive reader into the lazy presumption that we can cast off the nefarious ashes of system theory, and bust out instead narrative compass and straightedge.
This is not something FB came up with but this post seems to give them credit for this innovation.
Actually, this is one of the better story summaries I've seen here.
I knew what it was talking about (no unexplained mayfly buzzwords), I knew who the protagonists were, and I knew what was at stake. The only implied innovation was one of personal chutzpah, against the backdrop of an organization notorious for taking all things in collective stride (these being very, very short strides).
At some level, I think we do indigenous people a disservice by referring to them as First Nations, freezing them in the amber of the era, as if they couldn't (and hadn't) kicked the shit out of their neighbours every bit as ruthlessly as the Spanish, the Dutch, or the British (secretly, it's a badge of honour, isn't it, to have kick-ass forbears?)—the main difference being that the European cultures brought with them a written language—so long, illiterate heathens—then, however they found the table set is assigned a positive integer (let's not even grant them "zero") to functionally signify that no form of tomahawk displacement came before.
So of course Netflix didn't invent this technique.
Clubbing a bunch of strange-looking men and taking their women is an idea that never owed much to the example of recent history, no matter how grand and savage an example your nearest neighbour might have set in the memorable recency.
Without the courts to call her on it, this could turn the country's infrastructure into a Soviet-style People's Republic.
APL used to have a system variable called "quad CT" (and apparently still does, for a progressive value of the word "still") which stands for "comparison tolerance" and governs equality tests on floating-point numbers.
The default in 32-bit implementations of APLX is 1E-13, and in 64-bit implementation is 3E-15. It can be reset by assignment to a value between 0 and just less than 1.
What it didn't have (more's the pity) was quad BS: a system variable to govern English words such as "could".
In constructive conversation, this variable would normally be set at a conventional value such as 0.05 or 0.01 (representing a 5% and a 1% prospect, respectively).
Interestingly, the next most popular values are 10E-9 and 10E-12.
Slashdot Mirror
There could have been an optional 32-bit client sub-address ignored by the public routing backbone.
Then, for most purposes, non-backbone routers need two routing tables: a routing table for the public network (if more complex than a few simple gateways), and an organization-local internal routing table (with 32-bit addresses, just like the public table).
The actual problem is that each TCP/IP connection would require for the connection tuple (src_IP, src_port, dst_IP, dst_port) not 12 bytes, but 20 bytes.
Probably something could have been done to mitigate that, too, as things stood long ago, but I don't feel like speculating further just now.
Even without mitigation, let's suppose you have an FTP server and you want to guarantee at least 16 kb/s for each active FTP connection (circa 14.4/28.8 modem technology). You need to provide nearly a kbit/s network bandwidth per byte of connection tuple held in system memory (we'll ignore the messy nature of FTP, much of whose ugliness could have been averted by a better original IP design).
At the same time, NAT isn't all bad. It does help to conceal the internal structure of your network from the evil public network (and makes exposing your non-firewall hosts more of a sin of commission rather than a simple sin of omission).
NAT also erects a barrier to ultimate host fingerprinting and traffic analysis, at least until HTTP came along to ruin things with user agent strings and cookies.
Some people are quick to point out that a low barrier is no barrier at all, but I like to force my adversaries to at least put on their ballet shoes before attacking my network, and then to stay alert for people with trunks full of tools good at hopping low barriers.
My proposal doesn't much complicate the backbone routing table, except for Sandvine, who would have—once we got there—been pissed in a big way (counterfactually), to much rejoicing.
For this one, no pretense of family language.
This post will cover first the competition fine print; then the long-term relationship; and, finally, the lamentable low bar responsible for this Tourettic outburst.
***
To qualify for certification, the DA candidate must be able to distinguish when I'm searching something deserving to bring it more fully into my consciousness, and when I'm searching something horrawful to determine the appropriate size of BFBM (big fucking black marker) required to cross that POS—along with any predictable next of kin—out of my life For-Fucking-Ever.
Digital assistant, read my lips: having now surveyed the top twenty search results in any extreme lather of sudden aghast attention, be it resolved that I hate this thing per the aforementioned For-Fucking-Ever. Please eradicate with extreme vigilance, or crawl back on your pathetic digital stomach to the corporation that brought you into this world with no goddamn balls.
YouTube, for example, keeps on suggesting styles of videos I explored for a tawdry half hour at some point in the distant past, long after a sane AI would have wooshed that bowel movement down the egress funnel, around the septic hair pin, to swirl and merge into the collective effluent.
But no, Google has settled for the derp, derp, derp algorithm in which it presumes that if you ate it once, you'll surely eat it again—forgetting, I suppose, that it gave you the major shits—so long as we continue to wave it under your nose until the end of time.
Nicely done, YouTube.
Please, for the love of the children, can we STOP innovating on curly braces already.
And here I was all pumped up about the Erlang to Elixir upgrade path, repeated for Go, which suffers from the same weird Erlang-like conservatism that isn't suitable for all needs (such as most projects by corporations employing fewer than 20,000 technologists).
Conservatism has its uses, but it's no silver bullet, nor can removing braces make it so.
How did my choice between "if" and "not unless" turn into "not if"? I'm going to generously account this one as an error between first coffee and keyboard, like a quarterback who forgets himself on the first play of the game and inserts "y'all" into his snap cadence, and then immediately collides with his running back.
Well, not if we equate "vast" to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and even then with our fingers crossed.
In domestic relationships (excluding domestics), you need to maintain a ratio of five positive comments to every negative comment. Fly in the ointment: some of those positive comments need to be about the other person.
Is this rule any different in international relations? Does the fly in the ointment somehow squirm less?
Stay tuned to an exciting meme generator near you.
Read it again. Nowhere in the article does it advocate for the line not being drawn.
Civil disobedience is where you choose to cross the line nevertheless, knowing full well you might ultimately bear the full force of criminal-code sanctions.
If you draw attention to a stink pile by doing so, and society determines that the stink pile is effectively breaking far more serious laws (e.g. systematic torture of children) while throwing their prestige and authority around to suppress the normal mechanisms of recourse through the courts (gag orders, parentectomies, threatening to black-list staff who spill the beans) then it would be an unusually cold judge to sentence the unlawful whistle blower to maximum term (suspended sentence on reduced charges seems to be the standard "well, don't do it again"). But if you deliberately broke the law, a soft outcome is more a courtesy of the court than a public obligation of forgiveness.
I've only ever met one physician where I felt that a story like this was remotely possible. Unfortunately, he cleared that bar by a wide margin. He was quick to judgment, he was opinionated, he felt he was personally defending society from the depredations of leeches and slackers (perhaps due to that copy of Atlas Shrugged he kept under his pillow he suffered from chronic neck pain that adversely affected his bedside manner). Furthermore, he was powerful (director of his own institution at a major research hospital), and I sensed he was willing to wield that power to brook no dissent.
When faced with such an individual , the courts are an imperfect instrument.
Sometimes life presses you into such an unbearable corner that the equation "do the crime, do the time" comes up "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" with no lines of civic order blurred anywhere.
Military combatants routinely make the ultimate sacrifice in war. So too do civilian combatants sometimes make the penultimate sacrifice in the name of social justice (the penultimate sacrifice being life behind bars among a population of violent sex offenders, to whose unlawful depredations on your person society turns a winking blind eye—so I guess I must now concede that "yes, Dorothy, there are blurred lines at play in our system of justice after all").
Oracle won't realize they lost the lawsuit until Oregon refuses to accept all that free Oracle software.
Nicely played, Oregon.
John Oliver on Oregon
This is not one of the ones Oliver knocked out of the park. Nor does it actually end "nicely played, Oregon".
I will never tire of telling this story until the day I die, or the neo-millennials go "huh" when you mention BSODs or 404s.
Back around 2003 (the last time I volunteered to "help" somebody with their Windows system), I was recruited by my sister to help a friend of hers install a printer driver for her new HP printer.
I thought, "surely this won't be too hard".
So I went to the right website, downloaded the correct driver, and clicked "install". Whirr, whirr. Time to reboot. Oh, shit, BSOD! Reboot again. BSOD.
"Oh well, I guess I'll have to uninstall that POS printer driver."
Boot into safe mode. No problem. Click on HP-provided utility to uninstall broken driver. Dialogue box comes up: "uninstaller can not run in low resolution". Program terminated. I forget the resolution required, but it wasn't available in safe mode. Piss around with the video mode in safe mode for fifteen minutes. No dice.
Start reading the internet about how to manually uninstall broken HP printer driver. God knows what files I deleted or what scary reg-edits were required, but I eventually got rid of the damn thing. Computer now boots normally again, but the printer still doesn't work.
I go to the HP support page to file a bug report, through an HP supplied URL. Many, many, many required fields. Gave them a piece of my mind in the comment box. Click submit. Result comes back: "404 not found". This is HP's own support website, as found in ancillary tools packed with the broken driver. It found the form for me to fill out, but couldn't find the server after I finished filling it out. Submission lost.
HP forever since has resided in my colossal fuck-up bucket. I know people who purchase their expensive HA kit and swear by the organization, but on the consumer side, I can only swear at this organization.
Despite this, I did buy a networked wide-body inkjet from HP subsequently at a huge discount from a going-out-of-business sale, and it hasn't been terrible, but I only replace the ink when I know I'm doing a lot of printing for a few months.
I don't know any company that's fallen further or faster in consumer esteem (once upon a time, a time I still recall, HP calculators represented the pinnacle of consumer esteem) except perhaps for the Hudson's Bay Company, but to comprehend that story you have to know what it once owned: a list of assets many nation states would envy. They spun off oil companies, railroads, real estate. What did they keep? Zellers.
I keep telling my wife that the insurance business has the rare business model of litigating its own customers (just try to collect ...)
But just now I realize that the ink jet market is not so far behind as all that.
Ah, yes. The once-common glove, now the new Tamagotchi.
Celebrities in Gloves
In our courageous new world, instead of offering to light some starlet's cigarette, the power move is to walk up say, "hey, can I swipe your seven?"
"You, bet, buster. I was waiting for a real man to come along and recognize that not all haute couture comes with a silver lining."
"Not to worry, I'm sure Versace will buff up on Michael Faraday, just as soon as someone in the company (outside the accounting department) finally passes Math 11."
Another one, just like the other one. How come nobody told me it was Finger in the Air day?
Three spacious floors and two subbasements below the replication crisis, there's research by randomly asking around.
People out there are worried about the competence of their airline pilots (most of the time supplemented with a living, breathing, fully qualified hot spare), supported by their highly instrumented cockpits, supported by their nearest air traffic control tower, supported by the entire air traffic control grid, supported by red phones to every major aircraft manufacturer, all of which are probably manned 24/7 with qualified aerospace engineers, who are in turn supported by a hundred thousand other employees (of which not an insignificant fraction have MIT-branded palladium slide rules), supported by an aviation database with detailed information and root cause analysis of every aviation disaster since Hollywood first popularized Donald Knuth's impressively spastic polyphase merge sort, as seen in the Six Million Dollar Man backdrop working its magic on giant arrays of spinning tape.
And yet these same people will go on a 2000 km road trip traversing two-lane or four-lane undivided highways, while thousands of members of the general public—the freaking general public—whizz past them at 250 km/h relative velocity (all of three meters away at closest approach), many of them towing trailers for the first time in their life.
Welcome to a clue gradient that would give Escher vertigo.
There's this thing in economics called rational ignorance.
The upside of finding another app with positive utility is less than the downside of having to wade through hundreds of apps whose security policy comes nowhere close to my personal threshold of acceptability.
The search friction is immense, because Android doesn't allow me to hard code my own "acceptable security" profile, restricting the apps that it shows me to only those apps (at least, not the last time I tried). It would be a short list based on what I've observed in prior dumpster dives.
Want to access my personal contacts in exchange for turning my camera flash into a flashlight? Go fuck yourself.
The utility I'm losing because of my posture of rational ignorance is definitely non-zero, by deliberate Android design. Make it easy for users to impose their own personal security profile, and users will actually start doing it, even the lazy ones who might otherwise fire and forget.
Because the granularity of my control is so outrageously coarse, I have my GPS disabled, I have my data service disabled, I have location services disabled, I have Bluetooth disabled (despite owning a Pebble watch), and 90% of the time I have my Wi-Fi disabled. And I have software installed to warn me when any of my apps try to update. Even Google Play now has to ask permission. If I had a mechanical slide switch like I do on my T500 laptop, I'd also have my microphone and camera electrically disabled when not in active use (the switch on the T500 only controls a few radios).
In a world where the Mozilla phone was viable (never did I suspect this for a second), I'd have switched already.
Android has a user security experience—for a user technical enough to know the difference—of a combination payday loan / taco stand / ripoff currency exchange parked over a filthy storm drain piped through rotting, pre-coup infrastructure into a Zika-infested marshland.
It always shocks me how many people choose to publicly indulge their innermost vigilante compulsion in response to any report of a pedophilic compulsion. But then, I'm from Canada (exactly the same number of vigilante wannabees, but far more easily shocked when wannabees self-actualize).
There's this meme that suicidal ideation is just a mouldering hair shirt until you begin to fantasize an actual, concrete plan.
Tough confession. There it was for the taking, wet work with a halo on top, and all I got was this empty bottle of pills.
No hope in hell for an Obama pardon with Clinton running less than 10 full points ahead in the polls, and even then Obama would worry about sacrificing the windfall down-ticket trickle-down to the senate and the house.
Considering that it would take a sex tape involving Donald and something (or someone) unthinkable to reduce his polling numbers below his hardcore 30%, I wish Edward all the best.
Most of us go with the flow 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time we're lectured about what "most people" do. To which I answer "yes, indeed, most of us go with the flow 90% of the time, now get out of my way, jerkface, because right bloody now is the other 10%".
There is, of course, a lunatic fringe minority who make a point 100% of the time to always do what most people do, to whom I say "you're really weird, you know that, don't you?"
While the snake oil salesman is not a pharmacist, he is a dispensary, and his products wash down with whiskey in exactly the same way.
Beginning that sentence with "I think" is a red herring. You're evidently not interesting in thinking in any capacity whatsoever. Or perhaps you really do "think" that the entirety of our "science industry" consists of dietary population studies?
Furthermore, I've got some absolutely horrible news for you. If you possess a pair of Joo Janta 200s, don them now!
HAPPY BUBBLE SPOILER ALERT
Some of our politicians are more trustworthy than others, and you can sometimes even tell them apart ahead of time, if you invest the requisite time and energy, and ponder the sound-bite tea leaves carefully.
Also, some of our scientists are less trustworthy than others, and you can sometimes even tell them apart ahead of time, if you invest the requisite time and energy, and ponder the doorstop literature with half a clue.
Yes, that's the correct model of human beings as asocial organisms.
You can tell for sure the evolutionary truth of this, because as soon as young people get to age 18, they head straight the hell away from any old people who might be lingering around with their disgustingly decayed skin and teeth. I mean, who wouldn't prefer sleeping alone in a tree Tarzan-style than sitting around a warm, communal camp fire listening to silly stories from papery cake-holes about being attacked by dangerous predators you've never even seen?
I've yet to witness three white mice torturing a black mouse to reveal the secret plot, patiently doling out the abuse, with here and there moments of silence to process the anguished shrieks.
language + politics = torture
Probably what dolphins are saying: I hope those slant-eyes get fished and eaten by the yellow people in those noisy tubs.
Can't build cities, but sure as hell can gossip about racial purity.
Part of me really believes that Donald's health was "astonishingly excellent" given that all his tests were "showing only positive results". And I'll continue to mostly believe this until his doctor issues a corrected letter with his signature on it.
How hard is that?
Trump's tolerance for shoddy workmanship, as exemplified by his health letter, beggars the imagination. And I do think a little suspicion is warranted here.
That's far from a direct disavowal of his "accidentally" inverted semantics. Not all that far, in fact, from what you might expect from Clinton 42, if his weasel had blended better into a backdrop of verbal incompetence (problem: brain too big to drop the stammer-hammer "I do not recall having sexual relations with, uh, that woman, er, what's-her-name?")
Nixon was another Pinocchio president who suffered for having a brain too big to discretely tuck behind his thigh in a Statue of Liberty fizzle drizzle (if that's not immediately obvious, picture the opposite-George razzle dazzle of the Iran–Contra affair, ultimate doper's edition: don't look here, I'm less mentally continent than Frank Drebin shuffling around an extended care facility in a strapless night gown) so he went up the gut with "well, I am not a crook" only to slam into a human wall of meat, though not quite so literally as Mark Foley.
In this play book, where it concerns Trump's doctor, I'm not positive I could locate his actual brain given three Dixie cups and a hundred reveals, so the SoL mind-tuck is definitely in play here.
The best feature of UBI is not making it conditional and then eliminating minimum wage. Maybe a person wants just an extra $2/hour over their UBI, they can do that, no problem.
However, with just a select group on UBI, having no minimum wage allows the UBI group to undercut the non-UBI group (who certainly won't be willing to work for $2/hour), so phasing this program in in an ethical way is non-trivial.
Anyone who has ever done the classic experiment of heating ice water while recording the temperature increase will know that the word "already" has no place here.
The temperature dynamics of the earth's biosphere are a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's not even clear that adding heat couldn't lead (for some period of time) to a temperature decrease.
For example, let's suppose that the gas trapped in the permafrost was not methane, but a methane-like gas that promotes a net global cooling (under the condition of maximal sustained release); however, the net cooling effect is not evenly distributed, the permafrost at the poles continues to melt, this entrenched source of anti-methane is ultimately exhausted, and then the earth's temperature begins to warm again, now in a rapid rebound.
This story is not even a huge change in the particulars as we found them.
Just imagine if scientists were presently gasping in alarm at a global cooling of 1 degree C which presages (in accepted theory) a rapid rebound in the other direction. Then we'd be writing (perhaps correctly) that we've already experienced a fatal 1 degree C of cooling en route to an impossibly dire 2 degree C global warming.
The word "already" is being used here to cue the naive reader into the lazy presumption that we can cast off the nefarious ashes of system theory, and bust out instead narrative compass and straightedge.
No. We. Can't.
Actually, this is one of the better story summaries I've seen here.
I knew what it was talking about (no unexplained mayfly buzzwords), I knew who the protagonists were, and I knew what was at stake. The only implied innovation was one of personal chutzpah, against the backdrop of an organization notorious for taking all things in collective stride (these being very, very short strides).
Working at Facebook Sounds Like Joining a Cult
At some level, I think we do indigenous people a disservice by referring to them as First Nations, freezing them in the amber of the era, as if they couldn't (and hadn't) kicked the shit out of their neighbours every bit as ruthlessly as the Spanish, the Dutch, or the British (secretly, it's a badge of honour, isn't it, to have kick-ass forbears?)—the main difference being that the European cultures brought with them a written language—so long, illiterate heathens—then, however they found the table set is assigned a positive integer (let's not even grant them "zero") to functionally signify that no form of tomahawk displacement came before.
So of course Netflix didn't invent this technique.
Clubbing a bunch of strange-looking men and taking their women is an idea that never owed much to the example of recent history, no matter how grand and savage an example your nearest neighbour might have set in the memorable recency.
APL used to have a system variable called "quad CT" (and apparently still does, for a progressive value of the word "still") which stands for "comparison tolerance" and governs equality tests on floating-point numbers.
What it didn't have (more's the pity) was quad BS: a system variable to govern English words such as "could".
In constructive conversation, this variable would normally be set at a conventional value such as 0.05 or 0.01 (representing a 5% and a 1% prospect, respectively).
Interestingly, the next most popular values are 10E-9 and 10E-12.
No doubt, as you're hammering on DRAM cells the size of small battleships.
It's a whole different matter when your DRAM cells have their little button noses pressed up against the scaling wall.