* Posts by veti

4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010

Updating in production, like a boss

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In that case, you don't need them to write it. You can do it yourself.

"Per your request, we will be making these changes in production with no rollback mechanism." If you can show you sent that email, that's as good as receiving it.

New York congressman puts forward federal right-to-repair bill

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Re: Common Sense Repairs

If "funky screwdrivers" are your biggest obstacle, just get on with it. You can buy a screwdriver with 40 different shaped bits for like $20.

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Re: It'll die on Party lines.

Partisan bullshit.

In 2019-2020, Congress passed at least 250 bills with broad bipartisan support. (Meaning, a clear majority vote including significant numbers from both parties.)

I haven't found any figures for the current Congress, but I don't see why it should be significantly worse.

Of course most of these bills died without ever being tabled in the Senate, but that's another story.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

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Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

Two days of fully autonomous operation is still two days. Not bad for a start.

For comparison, the Titanic had more than 900 crew, and even so that only lasted five days. And failed to make it home.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

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Re: Not only but also, truck mirrors

So, we need invisible mirrors too?

Great idea, what could go wrong...

UK spends £36m on 18 little 'bullet-proof' boats to protect Royal Navy assets

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Re: No sign of armament

Presumably, run away.

They don't have guns for the same reason the Hercules transport doesn't, or the Airbus A320. That's not their job.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

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Yes, there are a lot of words in a lot of languages to avoid. I believe international trademark lawyers have a helpful database, so it's perfectly possible to avoid them if you're prepared to put the work (and money) into it.

Law prof: New Chinese data regulations make it 'very hard for foreign firms to comply'

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Well, sure. And while you're at it, probably better to stop doing business in Russia and India as well. And the EU, UK, Australia, Japan, and every other country that thinks it's "above" good ol' American law.

Of course companies will do what makes money. That's their entire job description.

Dealing with the pandemic by drinking and swearing? Boffins say you're not alone

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Re: A potted history if 14 units alcohol/week

Unfortunately, evidence is not enough to suggest whether there was any truth in the story, or whether he simply made it up. Maybe the professor was fed up with arbitrary limits too, and the story was a way of venting that frustration.

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Re: rein in their language in the presence of children?

Well, you can't regulate every influence on your kids, and much less so on grandkids. But you can set an example.

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Re: The 5 rules of problematic drinking

No, that means the bottle is added to the list of "appropriate" containers - but only for Guinness.

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Re: rule nr. 4

Depends on the size of your glass and the strength of your wine. Both of these have been trending upwards (in average) for many years, and are now about 50% higher than the average levels when I was a kid. (Which, compounded, means "a glass of wine" contains more than twice as much alcohol as it did.)

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

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Re: The knob......

"Black dust and gunk" sounds like an accumulation of quite-possibly-toxic mould. I hope the system was thoroughly cleaned within the next couple of hours.

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Re: The light..

Or the bulb has gone.

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

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An office microwave only needs one button, whose function is to run the device for precisely 30 seconds, then stop. If you want longer cooking time, press the button again - but only once it's stopped.

That means, the culprit will always be nearby.

McDonald's AI drive-thru bot accused of breaking biometrics privacy law

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Re: Success Rate

It's rare, but it can happen. I know at least one of our border worker cases came about that way - or at least that was the conclusion of people who spent hours on end watching CCTV footage to try and figure it out.

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

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Re: Ah, will you not have a cup of tea father...

You don't "use" those phrases, you can only utilise them. You need those four extra letters to distract from the vacuity of the other words.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

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About 20 years, seems to be the average wait for those.

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Well, how quickly would you have fixed it?

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

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Re: Mother knows best

I can't be the only person who's noticed: the iPad is functionally a portable TV.

(Though come to think of it, my iPad actually has at least four buttons, not counting the screen.)

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Re: My television wants me dead, or just gibbering in a 'special' ward.

One thing I have been very careful of with my TV is never, ever to let it connect to the Internet. There are plenty of other devices to do that, I don't want the bloody TV bricking itself with a security update - or, worse, ransomware.

Supreme Court narrows Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Misusing access not quite the same as breaking in

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If you can indeed do without water, electricity, banking or cellphone provision, I suggest your lifestyle is probably one that is not easily - or even difficultly, come to think of it - available to most of us. "Homesteading in Wyoming" is simply not an option that scales.

I don't know what the basis of the justices' thinking is here, and I can't be bothered to find out, but one possible loophole I see in the law is that although it criminalises "exceeding authorized access" to "information from any department or agency of the United States", it's not clear that that extends to state government records. Maybe states were supposed to pass their own versions to protect their own systems, I don't know. But the defendant has tried - successfully, it seems - to frame the law as an all-or-nothing prohibition on "doing anything unauthorized on your work computer", which is surely not the intent.

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You may not "need" a cellphone (possibly - I haven't tried living without one for more than a couple of days, I imagine it's still doable but I may be wrong). But it may severely limit your job options if you "choose" to do without. I suspect this "option" is only even technically possible to a minority of people.

But you probably do need electricity supply in your house. And water. And it's pretty hard to get along without some kind of banking service. And depending where you live, some kinds of insurance may also be either mandatory or highly advisable.

"Opting out" is an illusion fostered by megacorps who want to avoid regulation by pretending that people interact with them of their own free will. As the recent debates around Google and Facebook have shown, merely "avoiding using someone's services" is not nearly enough.

So - sure, prosecute government employees who abuse their access. But let's not assume ab initio that this abuse is either more pervasive or more serious than the private sector.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

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That's great, but what is going to happen when you get bored enough to move on?

India, Twitter brawl in public as latest content rules begin to bite

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Re: Broad brush.

India has its strengths, but sadly it's fallen under the sway of a politician who is like a more competent, and more evil, version of Trump. Watch closely. It's become a bellwether for demagogues.

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Re: The Twitter Hive Mind is excellent for routing around Government Censorship & its Media Lapdogs.

Yeah, I tried that once.

What I found: most of the posts on Twitter were rehashing, and "hash" was definitely the word, stories from conventional media. Others were reacting, amplifying and generally distorting those same stories. A few were speculating wildly, and attracting much the same "tail" of reaction as the first category. There was no (as in, zero) actual first hand information on the story I was looking for.

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

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Re: Sneaky

What's the point of killing an auditor? It just means there'll be another one around tomorrow.

They're like cops. Or cockroaches.

NASA to return to the Moon by 2024. One problem with that, says watchdog: All of it

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Re: I did it my way

Really? Personally, I would rather my tax money not be given away, no strings, to plutocrats and mad scientists, but each to their own.

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Re: Get real.

'24 was never anything but a Trump vanity project. He wanted it to be within his term.

With that in mind, I imagine he's now rooting for '28.

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Re: Hurry up guys

Actually, "back in the day" large swathes of prairie were indeed "owned" by absentee landlords, mostly on the East Coast. The homesteaders who developed it were squatters, and it took decades for the law to catch up and decide that, actually, yes they did have the better claim to the land.

Battles were fought, both in courts and on the land itself, over that principle. The supreme court came down on the landlords' side, and the result was the wholesale rejection of its authority. Politicians, sheriffs and judges from Mississippi to Michigan lined up to declare that the justices didn't know what they were talking about, and they would refuse to apply the law.

Help wanted, work from anywhere ... except if you're located in Colorado

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Re: My confusion knows no ceiling

My favourite amendment, the 16th, says states may not "deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".

By reverse incorporation, the same principle applies to the federal government.

So if there is any basis for bringing a suit in a federal court, it follows that anyone in the USA can bring that suit, and to deny them on the basis of their address would be unconstitutional.

All you need to do is identify a federal law that might be violated by refusing to consider your application. (You don't have to prove that it has been violated, you only need enough plausibility to issue the writ.) I would imagine various anti-discrimination statutes, such as the ADA, could sserve the purpose.

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Re: My confusion knows no ceiling

Seems to me that excluding applicants based on residency in a particular state is probably illegal in many places. There are anti-boycott laws, there's a constitutional expectation of equal treatment...

This has got to be headed for the USSC pretty soon.

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Re: I want to know the salary rang

"London weighting" - now there's a phrase I haven't seen since last century. I'm guessing some banks and maybe the civil service still do it?

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Re: I want to know the salary range

Correction, it wastes the applicants' time. The people screening CVs are low paid drones, the people doing the interviews are happy to handle a bit of extra bullshit for the money they'll save.

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

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What he has shown is that he can build a useful and usable app, and meet needs that aren't being otherwise addressed.

That's a great ability, practically a superpower in itself - if he decides to set up his own business. But it's a very different skill set from what most employers want, and it would definitely be wasted in the public sector (where the obsession from public watchdog types is not "is he doing something useful?", but rather "is he doing what he's told?").

A government job is probably the last thing he wants.

China says its first Mars rover Zhurong has landed on the Red Planet

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Re: War of the Worlds

No sharks on Mars.

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In other news

"NASA has revealed that Perseverance is equipped with a hitherto concealed buzzsaw."

Coming soon, Robot wars on Mars. Bring popcorn.

Kids in Hong Kong and other highly surveilled states worry infosec careers are just asking for trouble

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Re: @Allan George Dyer - National Security Law

And that is comparable - how, exactly?

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

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Re: What part of that so people have issues with?

Standing during the national anthem is not part of any sport I know. Their contract doesn't specify it. And they're not saying anything on work time, all the explanation and debate happens elsewhere.

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Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

Well yes, those are absolutely political issues, and fall under this policy. Would you have a problem with that?

It's not that hard to go eight hours a day without writing politics, at least not on your work forum. (Talking is not prohibited.)

JET engine flaws can crash Microsoft's IIS, SQL Server, say Palo Alto researchers

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First, a standard issue install of Office does not include Access, much less SQL Server.

Second, what they're talking about is effectively an escalation vulnerability that affects you when someone with privileged access to a JET engine also has privileged access to a SQL server. That's why it's not a priority to fix: the answer is "well, don't give that kind of privilege to people you don't trust, then". Frankly, anyone who is vulnerable to this already has much bigger things to worry about.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

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Re: Don't forget the users with reading difficulties

There are lots of those. I like Lucida Console (so does Microsoft), but if you don't, there are plenty of other options. Check out Consolas, or Dina, or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

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Re: Obviously

Back in the days of Times New Roman, I used to take the trouble to change the font in every document I wrote, because the font itself is unbelievably horrible to read in anything other than narrow columns on a crowded, printed page (what it was designed for). I suppose that's an upside.

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Re: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

The word is "licensed", and sure, there will be a few issues like that. But then, Calibri is also licensed in the same way. Doesn't seem to have been a huge thing, though.

In practice, it's not clear how they could exploit that position. Consider how documents are usually shared. Web? - pah, catch any web designer using a default font anyway. PDF? - embeds the fonts in the file, there'll be trouble if the license prevents them from doing that but it won't. That leaves "sharing working files", which is already enough of a nightmare that font issues are generally pretty low down the list of worries - and if they do come up, they're trivial to fix.

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Re: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

Microsoft already has Arial and MS Sans for that. None of the new options looks even remotely like Helvetica.

Words to strike fear into admins' hearts: One in five workers consider themselves 'digital experts' these days

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Re: Buried the lede

People, by the thousand, demand help on a daily basis with "driving their own car". You don't notice them because you're not the AA, but it happens.

You also don't notice the millions of computer users who successfully manage their own gear for years on end without needing the help of an expert of any sort, because they don't call you.

Funny how that works.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

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Re: Great Idea BUT sh*t implementation

When I see one of those announcements, I find myself actively looking at the junction numbers for a change so I can work out roughly how far it may be. Once out of the car, of course, I forget all that information, but that's OK, it's not something I'm likely to need again until next time.

The trouble with denoting junctions by nearest town is that it's ambiguous. What if there are three towns near the junction, which one do you personally know it by? Or if there are multiple junctions near $TOWN, which one is it talking about?

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Re: Yankees and roundabouts

Horses, in case you were wondering, do not work well on roundabouts.

(To be fair, they're not that good at traffic lights either.)

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Re: Hemel Hempstead

"What's a radio?"

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

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Re: You have not responded for two minutes...

I suggest switching to a bank that lets you download a spreadsheet of your own transactions.