Re: We already pay people to do nothing
Point is, people will cheat. There will be people who will attempt identity theft to steal someone else's benefits. Used to be a common crime to steal old-age benefit checks.
16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"There's nothing stopping those workers doing that now except the lack of sufficient better employers. I can't see why UBI should improve that situation."
There's a greater chance they'll go "sod this" and walk away from the workforce. UBI may not be enough, but people may pool and get by for long enough to make employers reconsider standards of work when the available work pool shrinks.
I'll grant you, employers may pivot to other tactics, though, like getting machines to do the work instead or finding a more-reliable source of cannon fodder.
You accepted a REDUNDANCY offer. Redundancy, voluntary or not, is considered getting laid off, as INVOLUNTARY redundancy usually follows if there aren't enough takers.
Voluntary termination means things like two weeks notice, or simply walking away of your own volition.
"(Its an obvious fact but obviously not well known because my workplace bans the sending and receiving of ZIP files so you have to rename them to send them outside the building)"
Just be glad your firewall doesn't do magic number scanning to check for trick files, then, because it'll get tripped up by the fact a lot of modern formats are actually containers based on (guess what?) ZIPs. The Magic Number trick isn't as useful as it once was because of this.
"Some hundreds of kilometres of rock are available to block the yammering of Earth. With the advangage of lower gravity and less environmental hazards, telescopes could be built bigger, more flexible and probably cheaper and they would never run out of volunteers - I'd be one - to act as maintenance men and operators."
But since Luna has no breathable atmosphere, and since you'd still need a link back to Earth, that sort of puts a floor on the maintenance costs. Just think how much it cost for each Apollo mission.
If you're a country like China, you really wouldn't care (my country, my rules). And I would think it would be pretty easy to detect ground stations, stationary or not, simply by detecting their transmissions, which would be both of a specific frequency range and a certain minimum level of power.
If you're BORN in the United States, jus soli is in effect because of the 14th Amendment (reinforced by the Wong Kim Ark SCOTUS decision). The man can officially run for President. Where in the Constitution does authority allow for the stripping of birthright citizenship?
PS. If you say, "What Constitution?", then all bets are off anyway.
"If everyone had your attitude, the British would still rule India and black people would still get lynched in Mississippi."
Doesn't always work. Look what happened in the Middle East. It's like why Agateans in the late Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times never noticed anyone on horseback: anyone who did died. Similarly, if the customary response to someone resisting a jackboot is a bullet or 10 to the brain, people start preferring the jackboot. Always be wary of someone who is ready to say, "Well, if that's the way YOU want it..."
"Isn't it awful when some nanny state tires to stop people harming themselves and other people?"
Is it any more awful when some Laissez-faire state lets people do as they please and stupid people end up taking innocent people with them, including perhaps someone close to you?
And incidentally, it's kinda hard keeping your air clean when you live in a thermal inversion zone like Los Angeles County. Why do you think "California Emissions" were a thing decades back?
I believe CTRL-ALT-LED is based on that. Thing is, this technique works even with a user logged in unless the user in question regularly handles things in the red spectrum. Plus it can work indirectly (meaning the camera doesn't have to directly see the screen; the reflection off a wall IIRC is enough, and most facilities don't have flat black walls).
The sheriff in question was out of the loop and claimed jurisdiction due to federalism (the building was of municipal jurisdiction, the state normally doesn't get involved in municipal matters under federalism). If you tried something like the above on him, he probably would've added additional charges, sued to have the terms declared null and void, and try to fine the people involved several times over.
That's the problem when you start dealing with government agencies: sovereignty gets involved (which means someone's going to claim overriding authority--that includes contracts).
Sorry my butt! No one knew that ship was full of poison. Call the ship back to port before it sinks and pollutes all our water! I'd much rather such things be either standalone apps or thin clients presented by protocols such as VNC. It's the simplest way to make most of the Internet much safer and more secure. This is one time we MUST stop stupid before he takes the rest of us with them.
"Wasm's "means of accessing the outside" is whatever the embedder chooses to expose. In a browser that means exactly the same access to the outside world as JavaScript - the DOM, canvas, web audio etc. with all the same cross origin & security model checks. Anything that a browser stops you doing in JS it would also stop you doing in wasm."
And IIRC some scripts were able to escape those security measures, and the risk will always be there, meaning the ONLY way to keep the browser safe is to ignore Joe Stupid's demands and not offer the feature at all.
Did your code also take into consideration RTL languages? Different filesystems and other logistical differences? Was it smart enough to recognize different architectural limitations (like the <256-char and >256-char limit depending on whether or not you were using Unicode in Windows)?
"Can any grey beard name _one_ attack vector of wasm code you write running outside of a browser that is not significantly less of a risk than _any_ other mechanism for running code you have in 2020?"
Yes, actually: the same attack vectors that existed before. If you're going to do anything new, why not make it have fewer potential vulnerabilities? And if you say that's the price of admission, I contend the price is too high and a new approach is needed: Joe Stupid be damned.
"We either have a system that ensures some kind of dictatorship (benign or otherwise); or allow that 'stupid' will occasionally/often win the day and live with the consequences."
Consequences including taking the rest of us with them. Thus why you can't escape American imperialism or Facebook: because you get caught up by Stupid even without your intervention. So I say you MUST find a way to argue with Stupid. Otherwise, you're basically conceding we're stranded up the mountain, staring up at the avalanche and realizing the only option left is to curl up and pray.
You HAVE to consider overall rates because removing low-hanging fruit can simply make people seek other trees. Consider that neither the UK nor the US are very high in the per-capita suicide rates overall while two of the worst (Japan and South Korea) have strict gun-control laws. If they can't shoot themselves, they'll throw themselves in front of cars and trains, off of buildings, or just poison themselves. Frankly, crime rates and suicide rates can probably correlate more to environment and culture than anything else (the countries with the highest suicide rates, for example, are either broken socially or have crazy high social standards for success--for overall homicide rates, look for hotspots like southern California that inflate the stats for the rest of the country).
"Some will not like it.
But then you can't please everyone."
But if you don't, you end up with people like Donald Trump up top. See the problem? If the voters demand unicorns and you tell them STFU, the next person to come along with a horn glued to a horse gets people voted out, and then you get what we're seeing now: solid proof that your approach doesn't work.
"You believe that anyone who disagrees with you is a "howler monkey", and present your opinions using a range of emphases that attempt to ram them down the throats of others (again, despite stating your own dislike for those that do exactly this) instead of engaging in calm, rational and meaningful debate."
Or perhaps one's speaking from the trenches and from firsthand experience. If someone's personally been to No Man's Land, they're going to have a different perspective, especially if one's been personally betrayed in the past. It's all a matter of trust. The article is saying we have to have SOME level of trust to get things done, but he disagrees on the exact level. Me? I'm reminded of the phrase, "If you want something done right..."
"It sounds to me that your problem isn't JSON, but the proliferation of third-party libraries built to handle it. There are plenty of programming languages with either built-in support for JSON, or with "official" libraries, or reference implementations of serialisers / deserialisers. JSON is, at the end of the day, just a way of formatting data so that it can be easily passed around as a string in a platform-independent way."
It's that last part that gets you. No one can ever agree on most things: not even what counts as a "reference" implementation.
Frankly, the only way to be sure your code works consistently is to not rely on outside control. Or rather, if you must, lock it in place such as with an internal copy or static linking (thus the need for flatpacks and other implementations of multiple conflicting versions of the same library). IOW, move away from global dependencies and keep them local in scope. Close to the vest is the safest way to avoid a switcheroo.
I would think that would make it easier, not harder, as a sneaky saboteur can just hide among the noise, concealing things by scattering them among more-useful features and make the exploit by gestfault. I mean, it's not like there's someone poring over every little connection, is there? Probably not given the scram example you cited that slipped through. You say, "Many eyes...", I say, "Too many cooks..."