Slashdot Mirror


User: MikeRT

MikeRT's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,255
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,255

  1. If it's vigilantism for GitHub to conduct a private retaliation against the Chinese government, then one could call what the Chinese did an act of war. Hey, if we're tossing around emotionally loaded terms without regard for the context, why stop with just calling that hypothetical action by GitHub an act of vigilantism.

  2. Too bad the US is so legalistic on Github Under JS-Based "Greatfire" DDoS Attack, Allegedly From Chinese Government · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If our country weren't run by lawyers, we'd do what Russia and China do which is allow victims like GitHub to retaliate. Would be hilarious if GitHub contracted a few black hats to penetrate China's academic/military networks and give them a taste of the Wikileaks treatment.

  3. Left unsaid in the article on Broadband ISP Betrayal Forces Homeowner To Sell New House · · Score: 1

    Was whether or not he offered to finance the build out. I don't know what closing costs are like in his area, but in my area, they're easily $6k-$8k. Comcast doesn't want to drop the money on him, but I bet they'd have jumped if he agreed to pay for the build out since it was already nearby.

  4. She should be fired on IBM Will Share Tech With China To Help Build IT Industry There · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And sued into the poor house by the shareholders and board of directors. This is not just training competition, but competition in a country notorious for wiping its ass with IP and trade secrets, using every other dirty trick to get ahead and using hyper nationalist politics to freeze out companies like IBM. Were she a politician and not a business executive, it would be roughly grounds for treason.

  5. Meanwhile in Appalachia... on Obama To Announce $240M In New Pledges For STEM Education · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The money will almost invariably not go to help Jim Bob in coal country or Tyrone in the hood get a shot at getting the foundation for a STEM career. Instead, it'll go to Sally Middle Class Smith to cajole her into pursuing a career she'll likely leave for marketing or raising kids.

  6. Most of it is social on Child Psychotherapist: Easy and Constant Access To the Internet Is Harming Kids · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm a millennial right on the divide with Gen X (~31 years old). My part of the generation was in middle school when the Internet started to become mainstream in the mid 90s. It was also around that time schools were permitted to adopt that adorable doctrine known as zero tolerance wherein they non-judgementally declared all parties equally guilty in utter defiance of state, constitutional and common law. Many of the pathologies that are just bewildering to many "experts" today were eminently foreseeable. Most of my own peers at the time, at the tender ages of 11-13, understood that the administration was setting things up for bullies to get worse and victims to get very nasty in retaliation.

    Most of these problems from sexting to bullying happen today because there are few consequences for the people who violate social norms. Bullies don't get the shit kicked out of them by their victims for fear that the victim will be arrested and prosecuted for "victimizing their victimizer." Teens who sext don't get their social lives routinely ruined by their parents. Shit. If someone had tried sexting while I was in high school, their parents would have thrown their computer/camera/webcam in the garbage and grounded them until they turned 18. Today? Most parents couldn't even fathom doing that and if one did, they'd probably be called an abusive parent even though their child technically committed a serious felony.

  7. Some irony... on Fraud Rampant In Apple Pay · · Score: 1

    Suppose the industry banded together and said not just no but "Hell. No!" to measures to water down security in the name of convenience. Then they'd be accused of anti-competitive tactics and trying to protect their business model by many of Apple's supporters.

  8. You want a deterrent? on LAPD Police Claim Helicopters Stop Crimes Before They Happen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Combine liberalized concealed carry with the police subsidizing the purchase of guns and ammo by law-abiding, poor concealed carry holders. Let them also use police shooting ranges for free as long as they're in good standing. Then, on the street, take a reflexively pro-CCW holder stance until the facts say otherwise.

  9. Their two biggest mistakes on Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not making electrolysis their #1 priority a few years ago and turning on Eich. I just switched to Chrome and can't imagine what the hell people are thinking when they say that Firefox is now "just as fast as Chrome." Uh, no. It's noticeably less responsive in many cases. And with the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest. Then their online magazine waded into the gamergate waters and took a pro-censorship of comments stance when the message didn't line up.

    This is increasingly not a Mozilla that I want to support. If they want my support, they can make electrolysis their #1 priority so it becomes as fast and responsive as Chrome and then drive out the social justice warriors.

  10. It needs to be ridiculously simple on Moxie Marlinspike: GPG Has Run Its Course · · Score: 2

    Most ordinary users I know actually like the idea of encryption. They just can't use it because no one has created a highly opinionated encryption API that is intended to be plugged into browsers, email applications, office suites, etc. and is dead simple to use. This is something that an open source desktop like KDE should take on as a proof of concept. I'm sure there's plenty of code in GPG that could be extracted, turned into a tight little module and then wrapped with really slick C or C++ APIs with really friendly dialogs in Qt or GTK.

  11. Brought to you by the same government on Fedcoin Rising? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That arbitrarily seizes cash left and right because it is deposited in "structured deposits" to avoid a policy requiring the transaction information be logged in a government database. I'm sure this will be a real hit--with the IRS.

  12. As a BeOS fan on Google Faces Anti-Trust Probe In Russia Over Android · · Score: 1

    Let me be the first to say that Yandex sounds like a bunch of whiny losers if this is their comparison. Google isn't imposing anti-competitive contracts on OEMs and using secret APIs to give their products a home turf advantage. They've open sourced the entire OS and most of the problems getting a competing product on an Android device is due to OEM malfeasance.

    If Microsoft had competed with Be and Netscape back then like this, I'd be running Firefox on BeOS R10.5 not Windows 7.

  13. Drones don't say you're serious on US May Sell Armed Drones · · Score: 1

    Ground forces, however do. It's time to take the kid gloves off and let the US Army have a free hand at deploying troops against these targets instead. Ground forces say you're committed in a way drones never will. They also tend to produce far fewer non-combatant casualties.

    And while we're at it, you want to defund ISIS? Obama could start to weaken them by simply announcing on in a press conference that he has given permission to the DNI and SOCOM to start assassinating any foreign national found intentionally supplying funds to ISIS. Live in Qatar and send them money? Too bad. CIA will slit your throat and dump your body in the gulf if they find you.

  14. One easy first step for the consumer on Privacy: the 21st Century's Newest Luxury Item · · Score: 1

    Pass a federal law that stipulates the following...

    1. All programs that deal with user activity data and/or PII must have a privacy policy in a centralized location, prominent on the company's web site.
    2. They must be written to the 9th grade reading level and all industry terms must be defined in as close to 9th grade reading level language as possible.
    3. Failure to publish a good faith attempt of a privacy policy within one business week of publishing production code is a civil offense with strict liability.
    4. Failure to comply within 90 business days is a misdemeanor.
    5. A pattern of three or more intentional failures within a five year period is a class E federal felony (1 to 5 years prison).
    6. When done to facilitate other classes of crime, it becomes a class D federal felony (5 to 10 years in prison).

  15. As KDE developer, he's missing the obvious solutio on PC-BSD: Set For Serious Growth? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Make KDE into a full OS. Fork Kubuntu, tell all other distributions that KDE will provide them access to the sources and patches, but KDE intends to become a full competing desktop and tablet OS. Ubuntu vs Mint vs Fedora makes no sense to the casual users I know. If I could hand them a copy of KDE and say "run this" that would improve things tremendously.

  16. Most of the NSA scandal would go away... on Tech Industry In Search of Leadership At White House Cyber Summit · · Score: 1

    If the national security hawks would pass a bill that categorically prohibits the sharing of criminal evidence between national security agencies and law enforcement except where the criminal accusation is based upon violent terrorism, solicitation to terrorism, provision of material aid, treason, efforts to overthrow the United States Government, sabotage the functioning of the United States Government for the direct benefit of a terrorist organization or conspiracy to commit any of the aforementioned. If they really wanted to make the case, they'd make it black letter of the law, strict liability (ie no intent or motive required to be fully guilty) that any assistance involving intelligence methods in ordinary criminal investigations results in immediate revocation of security clearance and life-long removal from civil service qualification.

  17. Google screwed up badly on the enterprise on Peak Google: The Company's Time At the Top May Be Nearing Its End · · Score: 2

    Google has a number of products they could be marketing to private cloud providers and large enterprises. Google Translate alone would probably net them conservatively $100m/year in licensing fees if they offered it on private federal networks with a license system that lets federal contractors develop for free on the open internet version and deploy on private federal networks. Yet I doubt it's even occurred to anyone at Google to have their federal consulting team even ask the Director of National Intelligence, DHS and DoJ how much it would be worth to them.

    They sell an overpriced search appliance when in reality what they should be doing is going after software licensing like Autonomy, ElasticSearch and Solr. Again, Google doesn't want to deal with this, even though they could go so far as to create separate corporations that do nothing more than make private deployable forks of Google's ad-supported products.

    They've left so much money on the table it's not even funny.

  18. Misandry on WA Pushes Back On Microsoft and Code.org's Call For Girls-First CS Education · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Boys are systematically falling behind women across academia and they are obsessed with getting more women into one of the few areas where boys are still doing well. No equivalent zeal for the question of why boys are falling behind on most other subjects. If the roles were reversed with legislators assaulting the few academic strongholds where girls were still excelling, the center and left would be frothing at the mouth about the obviously misogynistic priorities of the government.

    There should be absolutely no government concern for women in CS until boys are back up to parity with girls in public education and universities. None. Women already are starting to dominate Law, Medicine and other big former bastions of professional men. The idea that girls face any meaningful barriers to getting an education that leads to a career in a field with solid remuneration is a very sick joke.

    Women, particularly feminist women, need to do some serious "privilege checking" on the education issue.

  19. Perspective on Is Modern Linux Becoming Too Complex? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Traditionally, one could twiddle who could mount devices via /etc/fstab lines and perhaps some sudo rules. Granted, you had to know where to look, but when you did, it was simple; only two pieces to fit together. I've even spent time figuring out where to look and STILL have no idea what to do.

    On the other hands, mounting USB storage "just works" now on Linux.

  20. Why not? No one takes foreign language seriously.. on Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission · · Score: 1

    Foreign language classes in most K-12 classes are so useless that they might as well be disbanded. In most schools, senior foreign language classes are about as difficult as very early elementary school classes in English. I had about 7 years of Spanish between middle and high school; barely learned a damn thing until my senior year when I read the grammar rules and decided to just start talking to a teacher who was actually fluent (ironically, not our Spanish teacher***).

    ***I also learned basic Esperanto and would respond to his Spanish with Esperanto. If you've ever heard spoken Esperanto, it sounds about as close to Spanish as Portuguese. Needless to say, he often couldn't tell that it was Esperanto.

  21. Now if they're truly evil on Microsoft Open Sources CoreCLR, the .NET Execution Engine · · Score: 1

    They'll make a patent pledge to never go after FOSS software and offer a program wherein anyone who uses .NET for commercial purposes can sign a mutual non-litigation agreement over patents pertaining to the use of .NET and the patents covered by the software implemented in .NET.

  22. Remember folks... on FBI Put Hactivist Jeremy Hammond On a Terrorist Watchlist · · Score: 2

    Well, what do you expect from an agency whose director said that despite the fact that Americans who've signed up with ISIS have literally committed treason (since ISIS is a standing army/unrecognized state at war with the US and its allies in Iraq), there's not much more the FBI can do than monitor said Americans if they return to US soil. This is an agency that goes into Shatneresque contortions straining gnats while wolfing down camels like they're popcorn.

  23. Gun control didn't help Australia here on DEA Planned To Monitor Cars Parked At Gun Shows Using License Plate Readers · · Score: 1

    However before you start raving how stupid we Aussie's are, what other country can you name where the leader can go for a regular morning jog in the street without a small army of heavily armed body guards following him around?

    Certainly not the UK which has gun laws comparable to Australia. I don't know of any other country where you could make this claim, if it's even generally true of Australia, but even if it is, it's a statistical outlier across the world regardless of gun laws. Chances are that if your leader needs no body guard (this was not true even in the medieval era for monarchs), your leader is simply not important enough for anyone to want dead.

  24. Evidence of a market failure on Comcast Employees Change Customer Names To 'Dummy' and Other Insults · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Serious libertarianish social conservative here...

    Anyone who thinks there exists more than a Potemkin Village level of competition in this industry is either an idiot or a liar. Exhibit A? You're looking right at it in TFA. In a modestly competitive market, stories like this would get Comcast eaten alive.

    If I were a major executive at Verizon, I'd see if we could find these people and if they're anywhere near FiOS. Why? Because I'd order the construction crews to build out to their neighborhoods and then offer them two years of free service just as a publicity stunt to show how much more Verizon cares about its customers than Comcast.

  25. Most of our problems are government policy on Young Cubans Set Up Mini-Internet · · Score: 2

    If the states would each accredit a new medical school, expand seating by 25-50% in core medical programs and such, we could easily start matching Cuba on the professional supply side. The AMA and others won't go for that because it would mean forcing highly paid medical professionals to get competitive on their salaries and such. How about the states start applying price gouging laws? How about they start requiring posting of all fee schedules at medical establishments so consumers can price shop? How about they start throwing doctors in prison for quietly bringing in partners who are out of network so the practice can bill at much higher rates?

    Just as radical, how about we start demanding that health insurance act like real insurance. Meaning...
    1. It only covers things which are reasonably outside of the person's control.
    2. It covers them absolutely past the deductible which should be reasonable.
    3. If the buyer becomes indigent once the emergency happens, the insurance company cannot stop paying just because premiums are no longer being paid and the insurance company cannot lawfully back bill for premiums lost when the insured incident happened and the buyer was unable to pay.