Posts by Mike Moyle 1715 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2007
"Dashboard gone??? Oh crap, it's taken my six years to start using that!"
If you had stickies in Dashboard, they've been imported into the Stickies app. Widget and other preferences are still there.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/364114/how-to-recover-dashboard-stickies-on-macos-catalina?rq=1
The Earth is finite.
Therefore, it has finite resources.
Any closed system, the laws of thermodynamics tell us, is a losing proposition; entropy inevitably increases. Hence, recycling what we have here while avoiding "spending billions out there" (...what are we spending our money on "out there"...? I thought it was all paying for stuff down HERE that would GET us out there!) is, inevitably, a losing proposition. It will allow us to deplete our resources more slowly, but just as inevitably.
Meanwhile, "solving" one problem (or, at least, reducing that problem's impact below the threshold where it's seen as a problem) simply raises ANOTHER problem into the position that that one formerly held. Eliminating smallpox simply made some OTHER disease the Number N killer in the world. Were we able to eliminate every disease but the common cold then, by definition, the common cold would be the major killer in public health and so would absolutely HAVE to be solved before we did anything else. This trend holds for ANY group of problems: Demanding that [set of problems] MUST be solved before [other thing] can be done doesn't mean that [other thing] will ever get done if [set of problems] actually DOES get solved; all it means, inevitably, is that [new set of problems] will now be the bugbears that MUST BE SOLVED before we can even THINK about doing [other thing].
...And -- based on the above mentioned laws of thermodynamics -- [new set of problems] will need to be solved with fewer resources than were available to solve the ORIGINAL [set of problems].
Thus, the end result of a "fix everything down here before even THINKING about going out there" mentality is -- inevitably -- that eventually we will no longer have the resources available to us to make the sustained effort necessary and it will be IMPOSSIBLE to leave the Earth at all, since we will have "conserved" and "recycled" ourselves into poverty for all.
OTOH, there appear to be vastly greater resources, in terms of energy, minerals and hydrocarbons, in the asteroid belt, the gas giants, and their moons -- not to mention the sheer amount of new knowledge learned out there and while trying to GET out there -- -- which, if we could but access them, might help us solve those Earthbound problems.
"what was the pressing need they were trying to fulfill inventing this stuff."
I don't KNOW what was in the original programmers' minds, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the process started out as a late-night, drunken " '...wouldn't it be a neat hack if we could...', 'Y'know... I'll bet if we...' " conversation that they had the misfortune to remember the next morning.
"Incidentally, the misspelling "phosphorous" is typically American."
Gee... An American company creates a code name to denote a threat and uses an idiomatic spelling (intentionally or un-) for it and you apparently think that there's some sort of a sinister conspiracy about it. As far as we know, it's not the threat group calling itself that, which MIGHT indicate something.
As Walter Kotschnig said in a 1940 speech at Mount Holyoke College, it's important to keep an open mind, “but not so open that your brains fall out.”
"Be careful there in Australia, if Boris keeps on digging his holes he might pop out down under :-)"
Actually, he'd end up in the ocean somewhere SE of New Zealand. He's have to go severely off-plumb to hit Australia.
(Jokes about "Boris Johnson" and "severely off-plumb" are left as an exercise for the reader.)
https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/interactive-map-shows-where-youd-pop-up-if-you-dug-straight-through-the-earth/
It's been suggested that he also hoped that the "missing server" would contain some sort of a smoking gun ("FROM: Hillary TO: Broadcast -- Hey, guys! Wouldn't it be hilarious to delete all of our emails and claim it was the Russians that did it?") that would prove that Putin, et.al., had nothing to do with the hacking.
I would like to pass on my compliments, Mr. McCarthy. Honestly, while your commentaries have always (IMO) been well-researched and solidly written -- even if I disagreed with your conclusions -- up until recently they have seemed to lack the (if you will) "spark of snark" that has always been the Register's defining characteristic. Lately, however, I have been noticing a greater facility in melding the two into enjoyable and truly Reg-worthy articles.
I just wanted you to know that someone has noticed and approves. Keep up the good work!
Unfortunately, except -- possibly* -- for "...NATO plans to occupy them...", you've pretty much described the mass of National Enquirer-reading, InfoWars-following loonies occupying vast swaths of middle-America.
* For them, its not NATO but jackbooted, United Nations, One-Worlder thugs, all ready to invade and force gun control and universal healthcare on us.
Most of what you cal "leaning left" is approximately 1950s Eisenhower Republicanism: Strong unions, 70%(+) marginal tax rates on high earners and corporations, large-scale federal infrastructure spending, strong federal civil rights protection...
It's just that the Republican party and its radical offshoots have repeated the big lie that they are just what they ALWAYS were and the liberals have been moving left long enough that they've convinced what passes for the center that the lie is the truth and dragged them to the right without their noticing.
And who will indemnify the company against anything done by the loose cannon while on the clock which might be -- shall we say...? -- slightly outside the bounds of propriety? Because people who think the rules don't apply to them when they are on their own aren't likely to be any more circumspect after being told "We hired you to think outside the box and go beyond expectations!"
There's a REASON that companies don't like to hire loose cannon types; it's called "limiting liability".
Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. IF you can get a full-time (40 hr/wk) job, that's $209/wk before taxes. At 4.3 weeks/month, that's $1247/mo., pre-tax.
The median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in my state is about $1850/mo.
Someone working for the federal minimum wage in my state would -- quite literally! -- need to work TWO full-time jobs to rent an average 1-bedroom and still manage to eat, and such like.
...and, somehow, my being able to do simple arithmetic means -- according to you -- that I'm some sort of Nazi(!). </eyeroll>
...and the surest way to make it unlikely that someone will end up on government assistance is to require that the minimum wage can actually provide -- as President Roosevelt said on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act -- "...the wages of decent living," and require that all employers pay AT LEAST that.
At least, that would be the answer if making sure that people wouldn't be a "public charge" was actually the goal.
Or does this "village" sound like one of those "contests" that companies continue to run where they invite artists and designers to redesign their logos / websites / headquarters with a few-hundred-dollar prize* for the winning entry -- getting hundreds of people to do work for them for free...?
* That's, at best, the prize. Otherwise, the "prize" is EXPOSURE!
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Were I the suspicious and cynical sort of individual -- which, of course, I'm not! -- I might wonder whether the police already knew about the property owner's cache of boom-sticks and found the accused woman's actions to be manna from heaven as a suitable proximate cause for a raid.
If they had knowledge through a source that they didn't want to compromise (e.g., as part of an ongoing investigation, whether that investigation is related to illegal weapons sales or not), or via information illegally obtained (fruit of the poisoned tree exclusion), they might have been stymied up to this point and welcomed this as a convenient and defensible excuse to enter the premises fully locked and loaded.
Mind you -- I should probably say this explicitly for the tinfoil-hat brigades -- I have seenNOTHING that suggests that they had any way to encourage the woman -- who an anonymous poster above has claimed to have mental/emotional issues -- to break in to the CapOne server and brag about it to set them up with an excuse, and assume that they just took advantage of the synchronicity that she handed them.
"These things really are as unreliable, untrainable, uncontrollable and as stupid as they sound."
So, basically, just like people.
“Deletion is difficult because most machine learning models are complex black boxes so it is not clear how a data point or a set of data point is really being used,” James Zou, an assistant professor of biomedical data science at Stanford University, told The Register.
Presumably, then, it's just like I have no idea WHY my mind seems to think that it's important that I keep the theme songs for Stingray and Fireball XL-5 in my data set. Apparently, though, it's really, REALLY important that I do and I have to assume that forcing that information OUT of storage would result in permanent damage to my personal program.
We may be backing into actual machine intelligence and won't know that we've achieved it until the AI in question intermittently starts saying "Why can't I get that <random, useless bit of data> out of my head?!!?"
Considering that Area 51 / Groom Lake is attached to the Nellis Bombing Range Test Site, they probably have lots of experimental munitions that they've just been longing for an opportunity to test under realistic conditions and, if not, there are probably tons of UO in the area just waiting for unwary woo-hooers to come along and shout "Oooh! Alien tech! I'm gonna take it home!"
"Apple appears to have concluded that it is better to protect users by silently disabling this component than to respect the wishes of those who like to think they are in control of what gets installed and removed. Few would disagree."
<sarcasm> CURSE YOU, HEAVY-HANDED APPLE CONTROL FREAKERY!!! </sarcasm>
The operative phrase being "...supposed to have been suggested...".
"Supposed" by whom? "Suggested" by whom? (Hint: If Merriam-Webster, et. al. wanted to sell dictionaries in certain states in certain time periods in the past century-and-a-half, discretion in accepting "suggested" etymologies that were "close enough" -- which would have then been codified in future editions if not challenged -- would have made a lot of sense.)
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