Posts by Number6 2296 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Does this mean if I buy bacon in California it will now come with that stupid little notice attached about being known to the State of California to cause cancer?
Not that the bacon over here is anywhere near the quality of good British back bacon. The easy-to-get stuff here is full of fat.
I wasn't talking about the San Andreas, I was looking further north for the big quake and tsunami.
I think the Hayward Fault is building up to something in the near future (noting that 'near' in geological terms is a bit imprecise). San Ramon just had a quake swarm, and the Hayward itself has had a couple of little warm-up events. With the Napa quake relieving a bit of stress in the system to the north, it's got to be pretty tense down around the East Bay geology.
Of more interest is the big subduction fault off the coast of Oregon and Washington. That seems to let rip with an 8+ every 250 years or so, the last one being in the early 1700s before the Europeans arrived there... The subsequent tsunami is likely to flood everything west of I-5.
So if there's a new list each week, can we have it on a fixed URL with an easy way to parse the list for auto-inclusion into the database from a cron job. (Now why did my fingers type 'con job'?) I don't want an Excel spreadsheet or anything irritating like that, just a well-formatted text list (could be CSV, I guess) of number and company name. I don't think it's complex enough to warrant XML.
By all means prosecute them, but don't forget the list - that way we can avoid being disturbed while the legal process grinds through.
999 was the first national emergency number, as used in the UK before WW2. The US caught up sometime in the 1960s and for some reason chose 911, presumably to be different. (New Zealand uses 111, but that's because their dials are upside down, so a '1' gives 9 pulses).
I've never had a call *from* the emergency number, normally a return call is on a standard number (and yes, I have had that a couple of times).
It must depend on where you are, in the past week I've had nine calls from some dodgy debt collection firm, a couple of places wanting to do house renovations, one that Google seems to think is a crank caller, a "not available" and a couple I haven't identified. that's a fairly quiet week's worth, sometimes the debt collection agency manages nine calls in a couple of days. I might even take them off the block list for a bit of entertainment this weekend, just to see who they're trying to find and take the piss a bit.
You have to have the pair, and unfortunately pay for the phone line, but I don't think anything says you have to have a device plugged in that makes a sound when someone calls the line. The call blocker here will take care of most of them - if it recognises the number as bad then it just plays a recorded message and hangs up, otherwise it rings the house phone. I ignore that, let the answerphone take it, then look it up on Google and add the dodgy ones to the database for future use.
Confidentiality clauses are usually well-written and it is clear that they continue to apply for some definite period after termination of the rest of the contract. There's also the point that even if they tried and failed to sue you successfully for breaching the confidentiality clause, it would make all future employers very wary about trusting you. I've worked for employers with a reverse clause in there, requiring you not to bring confidential information from a previous employer with you.
On the other side of that, as an at-will employee, you're quite at liberty to walk into HR and hand them a letter saying "I quit" and pretty much walk out. No notice works both ways and your average US tech business suffers for it with the knowledge that walks out the door without a proper handover period.
There are some rules for large ships in some places. East of Falmouth heading into the English Channel, they're not supposed to burn the bad stuff, so there's a bit of business to be had there providing better-quality fuel to those ships that arrive without any. Possibly it's cheaper for them not to carry it from far away places.
A conveniently-placed camera can capture the CCV. Even if it only has a success rate of one in a hundred it would work, and at that rate it may even hinder those attempting to discover the compromised terminal. Admittedly the US cards I have with a CCV only have the three digits, the UK cards (which are older) helpfully have the last four digits of the card number to assist in matching the picture to the card.
I think it's being done in slow, easy stages. I've just been sent new cards on an account which have chips on them. I actually read through the accompanying blurb carefully, because I didn't see any mention of a second letter containing the PIN, and it turns out that one is not issued. The only difference now is that instead of swiping the mag strip, the chip gets read, then I have to sign as before. To be fair, given that compromised terminals and concealed cameras seem to be easy to obtain, the PIN isn't really much of a security improvement, all they've done is make it harder to access the account without the real card (although said concealed camera may be able to get a picture of the CCV on the back and so make it usable on-line).
Winterkorn probably decided he'd live longer and have a more enjoyable life if he quit. He might not have known how deep the shit was, or indeed that it existed, but having been dropped into it and discovered the hidden depths, he decided to get out pronto.
As for execs and mistakes, par for the course. Screw up one company, there's always another directorship on the horizon unless you screw up really badly. Even some of those have come back after a bit of time inside.
It doesn't say much for their software management processes. If you've got a couple of engineers with an idea, they have to spend time developing the algorithm to recognise and defeat the test, then check it out by seeing if it's capable of recognising test conditions reliably enough to be useful. All this takes time and resources, which presumably the management didn't notice?
Then you have the formal code review before you release production code. Generally this involves letting other people look at your source code, may require you to have all your curly brackets in the correct place and use the correct combination of tabs and spaces and possibly even go through the functionality of the code and check out the results of your regression tests. Then you get the reviewers to sign off that it's OK and does what is required. All without them noticing the big block of source, the function of which wasn't clearly explained.
Yes, clearly the work of a couple of rogue software engineers who are capable of amazing feats when it comes to hoodwinking the system.
If the Doctor knew what was going to happen, then the sunglasses were a good plot device to allow him the functionality of the sonic screwdriver without Davros knowing what it was. I doubt if Davros would have let him grab the screwdriver but sunglasses are harmless.
Hopefully he'll tread on them in the Tardis before the next episode, as a one-off it was good, as a piece of kit, bad idea. How's he going to aim it in dim light?
The fire warden is just tasked with checking that everyone has left the building (so you get to go look in the toilets) and then take a register once out so you know if anyone is missing. While you're busy doing that, the place is free to burn, and you've got an excuse that you had more important things to do at the time.
Either you configure it as a left-handed mouse or you just learn it that way. I'm left-handed and I normally use my left hand on the mouse but I learned to use a right-handed mouse. Otherwise I'd only be able to use my own computer and every other computer in the world would be a challenge.
Plus it means I give the middle finger to every link I click...
I enabled my home network for IPv6 some time back. I started with an HE-net tunnel before switching to an ISP that supported IPv6 natively. Once you've got it set up, it pretty much just works for any site that returns an AAAA record from a DNS lookup. The router is easy to configure too, default deny everything inbound but add a router entry for any inbound stuff that corresponds to an IPv4 NAT forward and you should be OK. As service providers configure their IPv6 and publish AAAA records, my usage of them will seamlessly switch over.
Most bits of kit I connect to the network seems to auto-configure IPv6 quite happily now, I have very few things that are IPv4-only.
My only gripe about it at the moment is that Comcast occasionally change the IPv6 prefix they assign, a bit like occasionally changing your almost-static IPv4 address. Then I have to go edit a bunch of DNS records to suit.
it wouldn't surprise me if they use the "it was all a dream" plot twist.
No, this is Dr Who. They're more likely to reveal that this was a possible future depending on the Doctor's actions. Davros probably has a time TV in his office.
Still, if the TARDIS was destroyed, how did he get back to save the boy?
Clearly the TARDIS escaped - I can't believe that such a piece of advanced technology wouldn't find a way to dematerialise pretty smartish if its existence was threatened. It's gone somewhere safe and the Doctor will summon it when he's ready for it. As for the others, you can't kill off Missy/Master, there's always a plot twist. Davros probably staged it all because clearly he already knows what happened when he was a child, the Doctor has to be pushed into doing his part.
Anyone else notice Missy's reference to Danny? I assume he'll reappear by some means in this series and he and Clara will go off together and live happily ever after.
Umm...I thought you just had to use a strong magnet... Isn't that what they wave your purchases over to keep the anti-theft system from beeping as you leave?
You're confusing two different gadgets. The magnet thing is normally used with the big store-attached devices to remove them at point of sale. I always assumed the RFID-destroyer was some sort of inductor excited at RFID frequency used to induce an excessively-large voltage in the RFID pick-up coil and so zap the electronics in the tag so that it never worked again.
a homing instinct that leads them to hibernate in my good lady's wardrobe so I can never find one when I want one.
Surely you just go look in her wardrobe. After taking suitable precautions, naturally.
As for pairing socks, I just buy a dozen identical pairs so that it doesn't matter too much which two I pick up.
I still have an OS/2 VM running. It's limping a bit now, I can't seem to get the LAN manager to accept the password and I can't remember how to expunge config files and start from scratch, but it's doing the job I need it for (front-end mailserver and spam filter - anyone remember Weasel?) so I don't worry about that. It's been doing the job for over ten years, although the underlying hardware has changed from a bare metal install to being a VM on a succession of machines.
That's interesting, if I look at the Washington Post site with both NoScript and Adblock enabled, I can read articles. If I allow the washingtonpost.com site in NoScript, I get shunted to the "you're running an ad blocker" page. If I disable scripts from the site again, browsing is restored.
There's my answer, WashPo - if I can't read your stuff while engaging my security precautions then I'm just not going to bother. If you serve banner ads from your own machine as normal images with no scripts, no nipping off to some possibly dodgy site, then they'll be displayed as I'm not filtering your site, merely all the unknown third-party sites.
All the tales of leaky server rooms reminds me of Colossus, the Computer Wot Shortened the War, which was installed in a hut that flooded. Much more fun standing in water working on a machine with a couple of hundred volts everywhere.
Obviously not much has changed since then.
It's probably on his business card, I know my work email address is on mine. Plenty of opportunity to pick up such things at shows and conferences, or even a bin somewhere. Lots of places have an easily-guessable email address format so once you've got the names (which are not hard to find on-line in public records), you can crack it.
Telcos, terrified of being consigned to eternal status as ‘dumb pipes’, keep coming up with crazy ideas for over-the-top (OTT) high-value services.
As far as I'm concerned, that's all I need from the telco in the first instance and is all I rate them on. I don't use any other internet service from them.
Of course, the only reason any of these devices needs to talk to the wider internet directly is because someone out there wants to make money from it. If I've got a home security system, smart Fridge, alarm clock, whatever, I want all the information gathered by these devices to stay within my network, talking to a server under my control within that network. If I want remote access then I'll do it by implementing an ssh tunnel or VPN from the remote device and minimise both the attack surface and the leakage of personal information to third parties.
I have indeed clicked on sites where I get a blank page due to NoScript blocking stuff and after trying and failing to guess which of the other weird domain names are relevant, I've gone elsewhere.
I'm with Wade here, until they tone ads down to something harmless, I have no option but to block the lot. This even goes back to the animated gifs and the dreaded pop-up stuff. I know the advertisers want to get noticed, but if they irritate me by the method they use, they're even less likely to get my business.
But an Uber user does (hopefully) travel in a vehicle for which local road-related taxes have been paid, powered by fuel for which local fuel taxes have been paid, etc. I agree that Uber should have some form of umbrella liability insurance because a court somewhere one day is going to hold them jointly liable for an accident involving one of their drivers despite the protestations of their lawyers. Perhaps they could charge a lower fee to drivers who've provided proof of adequate insurance. AirBnB could do the same - lower rates for those people providing proof of third-party insurance.
Even if you use the stock email so on an Android and add the company Exchange account it will require the factory wipe permission.
Interestingly enough, that wasn't the case for me. Using straight IMAP worked without having to agree to anything, so I suspect someone slipped up somewhere. Of course, when I raised the issue of the Outlook factory wipe I was told that of course the company would never do that.
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