I made a mistake filing my taxes around 1992 - copied a number from my home-grown spreadsheet into the wrong box on the form.
The IRS noticed and sent me a letter saying "you owe us $1200".
I looked, figured out the mistake, and replied saying "my bad - updated form shows I don't owe anything".
The IRS replied "you owe $1200 plus penalties for late payment".
Two more cycles of this and I was starting to get nervous.
Finally got advice from a friend and owner of a small software business - reply and say the magic words "please transfer my case to Problem Resolution".
When you do that, the IRS drops your file on one person's desk, and it stays there until it's either settled or in court.
One call to the IRS person in Problem Resolution and everything was fixed.
I recently upgraded from a 10-year-old TiVo HD to a Bolt. Both of them allow fast-forward commercial skipping, and the Bolt's SkipMode makes commercials disappear completely.
Yes, monthly service is expensive, as is lifetime service. TiVo was kind/desperate enough recently to move my lifetime service from the old machine to the new one for $100.
When mathematicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "logically inconsistent with published proofs, and those proofs are the basis of EVERYTHING".
When scientists say something is impossible, they usually mean "inconsistent with published models, and those models are good enough to take us to the moon and back".
When politicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "the current legislature will say no, but that can be changed".
When politicians hear "secure encryption with back doors is impossible", they hear "impossible" in legislative terms when it's really at least in scientific terms, and very close to mathematical terms.
Especially for those of us who have fond memories of Snow Leopard. Back in the days when successive OSX releases made the system faster and more responsive, even on the same hardware.
macOS could definitely use a mostly bug-fixes and performance improvements release. Windows is still the champ when it comes to flaky behavior and unintelligible errors, but macOS has been drifting in that direction over the last few releases.
Scrape the weird stuff off of Preview and Mail, and I will strongly consider an iMac Pro.
Body cameras should encrypt their contents as they capture them.
Records at the station house should be dumps of the encrypted data.
The keys should be stored elsewhere, available by subpoena or warrant.
In addition to making body cam data useless for mass surveillance, wearers can be required to have the camera running all the time - nobody gets to see officers in the bathroom unless they are accused of beating someone up there.
For ages, there have been less problems with malware on Macs than on Windows PCs.
For ages, one main excuse for this has been "more people use Windows, so it's naturally a bigger target". Technical arguments about vulnerability are dismissed by people who make this argument.
OK, so now in Chromebook we have a new malware target which may be both bigger than the Mac market AND theoretically less vulnerable.
If I were Sergey Brin, Larry Page, or Eric Schmidt, I would be looking into this as a way of taking the drudge work off my desk so I could do more of the fun, world-changing stuff.
Two principles to be aware of when you are on a bike in auto traffic:
1. You are in the most danger when auto traffic crosses your path. Intersections are the most obvious example. Especially dangerous are turning lanes and off-ramps when you are going straight - cars that are changing lanes or preparing to turn are looking for other cars, not bicycles.
2. If you hear a siren, get off the road NOW. Cars will be trying to get out of the way of emergency vehicles, and looking to avoid other cars, not bicycles.
I've been a short-distance commuting cyclist since 1994. I've been hit once in traffic - at an off-ramp, by a car that was getting out of the way of a fire truck.
I live in a blessed neighborhood that has both FIOS and Comcast, so I can credibly threaten to switch. I almost went for Comcast recently; they offered me
105 Mb down + basic cable + phone
for the same price as Verizon's
50 Mb down + basic cable + phone
The deal-breaker was Comcast's up speed is 10 or 20 Mb, and Verizon's is 50 Mb. Not in this age of video calling and torrenting, thankyouverymuch.
Comcast's infrastructure is still apparently fundamentally biased toward broadcast. Verizon at least understands communication should be two-way.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the benchmarks like when the phone is plugged in and charging?
If Apple's HomePod gives information to anyone for commercial use, it's a bug.
With the others, it's a feature (their business model requires it).
The real problem with modern, "deep learning" AI is that usually not even the experts can tell you how such systems work.
The most they can tell you is:
* The model makes the choices we labeled on our training data set
* We add stuff to the training set as it makes detected mistakes
The weights in the neural network after training become an opaque fuzzy partition of the training set.
Does this inspire confidence in you? Me neither.
When creating a new volume, it apparently puts the password into the password hints field.
If you create a new volume using command-line tools, things are fine.
The encryption is still OK; this bug just leaves the key to the front door under the mat.
Which is still appalling.
I made a mistake filing my taxes around 1992 - copied a number from my home-grown spreadsheet into the wrong box on the form.
The IRS noticed and sent me a letter saying "you owe us $1200".
I looked, figured out the mistake, and replied saying "my bad - updated form shows I don't owe anything".
The IRS replied "you owe $1200 plus penalties for late payment".
Two more cycles of this and I was starting to get nervous.
Finally got advice from a friend and owner of a small software business - reply and say the magic words "please transfer my case to Problem Resolution".
When you do that, the IRS drops your file on one person's desk, and it stays there until it's either settled or in court.
One call to the IRS person in Problem Resolution and everything was fixed.
I recently upgraded from a 10-year-old TiVo HD to a Bolt. Both of them allow fast-forward commercial skipping, and the Bolt's SkipMode makes commercials disappear completely.
Yes, monthly service is expensive, as is lifetime service. TiVo was kind/desperate enough recently to move my lifetime service from the old machine to the new one for $100.
I never watch commercial TV live.
When mathematicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "logically inconsistent with published proofs, and those proofs are the basis of EVERYTHING".
When scientists say something is impossible, they usually mean "inconsistent with published models, and those models are good enough to take us to the moon and back".
When politicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "the current legislature will say no, but that can be changed".
When politicians hear "secure encryption with back doors is impossible", they hear "impossible" in legislative terms when it's really at least in scientific terms, and very close to mathematical terms.
Especially for those of us who have fond memories of Snow Leopard. Back in the days when successive OSX releases made the system faster and more responsive, even on the same hardware.
macOS could definitely use a mostly bug-fixes and performance improvements release. Windows is still the champ when it comes to flaky behavior and unintelligible errors, but macOS has been drifting in that direction over the last few releases.
Scrape the weird stuff off of Preview and Mail, and I will strongly consider an iMac Pro.
When I recently enabled two-factor authentication on my iCloud email, it broke Thunderbird.
There is a workaround - app-specific passwords.
Fixed Thunderbird for my iCloud email, anyway...
From the last sentence of the summary:
Google, once again, outspent every other technology company. It was 10th overall, tallying $3.5 million.
Why was this not in the title?
YouTube evades paying market rates for the use of copyrighted content by exploiting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions...
Neutral phrasing, anybody?
... won't.
Body cameras should encrypt their contents as they capture them.
Records at the station house should be dumps of the encrypted data.
The keys should be stored elsewhere, available by subpoena or warrant.
In addition to making body cam data useless for mass surveillance, wearers can be required to have the camera running all the time - nobody gets to see officers in the bathroom unless they are accused of beating someone up there.
I use it to tell me when the damned Government-required anti-virus scanner starts up in the background.
That's when the time remaining value drops by about half.
I did, when we talked about WhatsApp back in 2014.
Worked and lived in Mountain View in the late 1980's; visited the peninsula many times since then.
Got out when I realized that I would not be able to afford a house unless I hit the startup lottery.
Also, realized I did not want to rear children in either side of Palo Alto (east or west).
Still, having some direct experience of Silicon Valley has been useful ever since; it helped me get every job I've had since that time.
For ages, there have been less problems with malware on Macs than on Windows PCs.
For ages, one main excuse for this has been "more people use Windows, so it's naturally a bigger target". Technical arguments about vulnerability are dismissed by people who make this argument.
OK, so now in Chromebook we have a new malware target which may be both bigger than the Mac market AND theoretically less vulnerable.
This could be amusing...
Encryption source code is First-Amendment-protected speech.
(See the Criminal Investigation section)
Don't these legislators (or anyone on their staffs) know anything about what they're attempting to restrict?
That's the way we handle information that may end up as evidence in court.
That's the way we should handle police body cam video. ALL OF IT.
... when they start using version-control systems on legislation.
The ability to track who wrote every line of a big law would be a revelation to the public, which is why it will never happen.
Google is no doubt watching this experiment very carefully...
If I were Sergey Brin, Larry Page, or Eric Schmidt, I would be looking into this as a way of taking the drudge work off my desk so I could do more of the fun, world-changing stuff.
If data is on my personal server and the US government wants to see it, they need a warrant.
If it's on a cloud server, they don't.
Two principles to be aware of when you are on a bike in auto traffic:
1. You are in the most danger when auto traffic crosses your path. Intersections are the most obvious example. Especially dangerous are turning lanes and off-ramps when you are going straight - cars that are changing lanes or preparing to turn are looking for other cars, not bicycles.
2. If you hear a siren, get off the road NOW. Cars will be trying to get out of the way of emergency vehicles, and looking to avoid other cars, not bicycles.
I've been a short-distance commuting cyclist since 1994. I've been hit once in traffic - at an off-ramp, by a car that was getting out of the way of a fire truck.
I live in a blessed neighborhood that has both FIOS and Comcast, so I can credibly threaten to switch. I almost went for Comcast recently; they offered me
105 Mb down + basic cable + phone
for the same price as Verizon's
50 Mb down + basic cable + phone
The deal-breaker was Comcast's up speed is 10 or 20 Mb, and Verizon's is 50 Mb. Not in this age of video calling and torrenting, thankyouverymuch.
Comcast's infrastructure is still apparently fundamentally biased toward broadcast. Verizon at least understands communication should be two-way.