Posts by fajensen 1362 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
Don't bother: Just use plain SMS and blab freely on cellphones, don't bother with ID or anything like that, don't keep your head down, instead be very well known to the authorities and carry right on as you were - you see - the authorities are not really there to stop your atrocities from happening.
They are there to show how powerless government is when anyone, anywhere, through some lamentable display of negligence has any freedom left!
... from a western democracy.
I'd say that's exactly what we can expect from western Democracy. See, "Democracy" goes boldly forth and takes a huge crap over the rights of people in far-away countries housing brown people nobody cares about. Then, having learned and perfected the skills used to "govern"/suppress unruly populations and serve "our" business interests abroad, "Democracy" applies the same skillz here at home also - because they do work so well and are good for "the economy (of the few)".
It's a fractal thing: Keep zooming in and terrorists, communists, russian agents and those pesky "not-at-the-present sponsored-by-us"-jihaddis will keep popping out right down to Planck-scale resolution.
Maybe beyond Planck - except now they got tentacles.
Au Contraire - Knowing,
1) why some technology cannot be made to work reliably, and
2) who is pursuing the failed approach / technology
Is of *enormous* commercial value, especially with technologies where the failure modes are subtle and emerge late in the project, preferably after shipping. Watching the competition pouring money and effort into the "should-improve-aany-day-now" rat-hole while you are quietly taking a different approach - and short their stock - is very satisfying.
Especially after having been on the other side of that equation before, working with increasing desperation on finding out *why* those damn HV-transistors are blowing up after some 1000's of hours operation when they ought get 50000 hours MTBF. Then presenting the gist of the project at a conference, leaving out the doesn't work for very long - part. ;-).
Still, Erdogan definitely seems to have more in common politically with Vlad Putin than he does with Obama/Merkel/May/Hollande.
... And some level of Competence and even Ideas even about shaping a desirable future for their people, while "our" leadership seems dead set on performing Brownian Motions while shouting: "TINA, TINA, TINA" at every new problem or opportunity.
I.O.W: We are fuckt!
NATO should give Turkey the boot, as Turkey adds nothing to NATO at this point.
The New and Improved Activist NATO needs War in order to appear relevant. The odds are good that a belligerent Turkey can manage to create yet another of those tribal messes that the NATO of today is so fond of being dragged into.
IOW - NATO likes what is sees in Turkey and want more of it.
Two months to rip out *one* Python program with stdio and some "trixy" formatting rules?
How much work is this going to be, really? Is there only one question - "The Question"?. Or is it one per week, day, hour, phase o' the moon? The "Time Limit" paragraph hints at "Questions"?!
And since it’s about personalised and social experiences, you, other colleagues, friends and family will play a big role in sharing congratulations.
IBM is going the same way as KODAK. Hopefully, the staff can negotiate some good "eff off" payments on their way out.
You have a right to be upset if you did not win but that is all, the result has been reached and the result stands by the original definition of the process.
Well, the powers that be are working on that "process". First off, Boris didn't want to hold the grenade after pulling the pin, now Nigel Farage is quietly slinking away "Mr Farage said his "political ambition has been achieved" with the UK having voted to leave the EU." --- Never Mind that stuff about *leaving*, "getting our country back", eh, nah, "voting" was good enough and all!?
They are walking it all back. After the summer holidays, this unfortunate incident will be totally erased.
Except ... Now that Britain has been called and folded, it's negotiating hand is not all that great any more and it has better lube up for the rogering that is coming.
Don't get too excited. This is Democracy 2.0 EU-style: If the people vote the wrong way, the people will certainly get another opportunity to get it right later. Or maybe not, it's become quite the fashion to just to ignore the whole thing and pretend the bad, bad, vote never happened.
Vote "NO" and see what they come up with to make it a: "Yes Sir, can I please have another, Sir"
How do you use democracy to bail out a failing economy?
You don't. First, you scope the problem. Then you apply the relevant tool to the problem domain.
The problem with Greece was not a "failing economy" (that is just the problem we have NOW).
No, the main problem back in the naughties was mainly Stupid Banks using Greek Bonds as reserves because Basel 2 rules sey that OECD-member government bonds are as good as cash - Ignoring that "the markit" was probably trying to tell them something about the quality of that assumption with Greek EUR-bonds yielding about 10% and German EUR-bonds were sitting at 3% -> Borrowing hugely in Germany at 3%, Investing in Greece for 10%, clearing 7% net without currency risk?
Profits without *any* risk?! Markets do work like this for very long!! And they didn't, Greek bonds tanked to 80% yield, blowing up bank reserves. Deservedly so.
*Then* the German "Ackermänner" got all prissy & moral over all that egg on their stupid faces and abused the EU to force all the debt of the retard banks (Greek and German) onto the wider economy - which is why we are stuck were we are now. Ready for Round Two, now with EFSF as damage multiplier, to *really* make the shit fly all over.
Since this is a Finance Problem, the proper tool would be Capitalism. The old principle that "stupid people eventually loose their shirt in the market" is particularly relevant here. That would have prevented the present mess AND cleaned out some of the very worst retard "investors", like Deutsche Bank.
Bankruptcy clears the debt overhang, making room for new growth. We don't have to "print more money", the cash flow is created from not having to pay useless debts. This worked for centuries, before the EU.
What the EU / ECB is doing with Greece and EFSF, is placing Democracy below the interests of Finance. If that is not crooked (and doomed to fail to boot), I don't know what is.
PS:
A country that controls it's own currency can indeed "vote to print more money". Of course there are consequences to this.
PSS:
What I do blame Greece for is that the Greek government did not seize the opportunity to bring down the full force of the law onto the Greek tax frauds - which is pretty much the entire Greek "elite" - and pushed to confiscate their offshore accounts. They didn't even "out" the bastards in the media; many of these crooks have German and Swiss accounts, the scandals could at least have been used as leverage against Germany for a better deal ... " ... aiding and abetting ... etcetera ...". The Greeks were totally disorganised and useless, presenting Zero threat to anyone, which is why they get raped!
He certainly did what he set out to do, which was to get the UK out of the EU,
Nope. Not even close. The UK need to activate "Clause 50" for the "get out of the EU"-part, but, it seems increasingly clear that not a single one of the buffoons, who presumably wanted Brexit, are actually up for delivering it.
Come September, all of that heady posturing will have been walked back. Just wait and see.
Exactly! The politicians, with all those resources available, should have seen this coming for a decade or more!!
Meanwhile Project Fear continues apace. Why try to bury bad news when you can blame it on Brexit?
There is a huge overhang of mal-investment and straight-up fraud which was quietly buried in the rose patch and left festering after 2008. Of Course everyone with skeletons stacked in their closets, gardens and basement floor will seek to throw them in the skip now that there is opportunity to blame the losses on "other people".
I wouldn't call that "Project Fear", because it's not propaganda; it business. Just riding that business cycle. Smooth and Easy.
Life may be more difficult but what is simply not possible is for the UK to be the destination of every economic migrant in the EU.
That is not entirely the fault of the EU .... You should maybe have considered that fighting the EU so hard for the "right" to have zero-hour contracts and no minimum wages would induce businesses to import only the most desperate workers, those willing to put up with anything, was maybe not in your own interest?
As far as I remember, one had to work in the UK for 1 year before being eligible for any benefits at all.
Otherwise, why ELSE would all that "cheap labor" be flocking to the UK, instead of STAYING PUT?
'cause, strangely enough, life can be shittier with shit on top in places like Romania, even though they are EU member states, they are still 3'rd world in many respects. The cleaning lady at my former job was a Romanian veterinarian (There *could* be an opportunity there is once can find a way to employ all of those immigrants at their actual skill level rather than the menial level society deems appropriate for foreign riff raff).
This is exactly what wrong with EU, according to the continentals: Too much 'free trade and markets', too little 'humanity'.
Which is one of several reasons why "our" side of the pond are not exactly clamouring for the immediate return of the UK and there is just about Zero political support for yet another special deal with the UK.
The words coming out of the national (even the right-wing nationalists) politicians are generic regrets over Britain leaving and nothing else, they are leaving the discussion to the EU, which will go exactly By The Book. Even Boris didn't want to be holding that grenade after pulling the pin on it!
Sure - Because we should bloody well expect wayyy better outcomes from "freedom & democracy" than a Russian autocrat, should we not? Hillary have all the ambitions of the media version of Putin (projection?) without the restraints and the wits to use power wisely that Vladimir Putin clearly have.
We know that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. We also know that Putin in his entire career, even including the KGB part, has managed to kill fewer people than Hillary did through her disastrous and stupid warmongering. Logic therefore says that Putin is in some ways better for humanity than Hillary, who will continue to "regime change" and "humanitarian intervene" for exactly as long as that old gargoyle manages to live.
The missing included “Areas with either higher proportions of students (aged 16-74) [sic], higher proportions of people living in private rented accommodation and/or higher proportions of people living in communal establishments had relatively lower match rates.”
Sounds like Success to me!
What is this Cortana you speak of? How will she/it spy on me?
I suppose that you will at some point acquire a really fancy 3D printer from Microsoft. This will silently activate at 03:00 to print a Personal Cortana Terminal Node in a soft and pliable latex-like material. This brand new Cortana, still nekkid and smelling slightly of long-chain polymers, will then corner you inside your bedroom and persuade you to spill it all in the old & time-tested ways.
Paris, because she will eventually be printed too.
Why is it that governments (and large corporations - not much difference in so many bad ways) are so terrible at specifying penalties for failure to perform
Because, sometimes in the 1990's the CEx's with Jack Welsh spearheading "the movement", figured out that the best way to rise above being a merely highly-salaried employee and make the transformation into the "Independently Wealthy"-class simply was to loot the shareholders.
"Performance" to these people is how large a fraction of profits they can nick before wasting them on the business or paying dividends.
Who Knows?
One does suspect that, since one explicitly has to use a personal credit card for the ESTA application, that "they" need that card to get the applicants "handle" in SWIFT (or whatever) and from there "they" can work out all the accounts registered in your name and probably associated accounts (all accounts you transferred to/from).
... by new and innovative ways to bleed the customer, ...
Mostly the only "innovation" available to the plebs these days; On my holiday, I now have to chose between paying in EUR or paying in my native currency on the credit card terminal.
Why the fuck is that in any way clever or an increased value proposition?
Well, it is, to the bank, because if I make a mistake and pick EUR, I now get stiffed by a "currency fee" bigger than the amount I usually get stiffed with on the exchange rate when using the native currency.
I'd say: The Donald(tm) as El Presidente, Oprah as the Sidekick (VP) for a clean win. Burn the bums!
Not sure I see that as a feasible attack vector. How would the attacker be able to marry any of the passwords to the TV I.D.?
We know the mail address, now we know some passwords going with that mail address from hacked web sites.
Try if one of these works on web-mail for the mail address (everyone has web-mail, right?), if it does work then request a TV password reset, grab the new login from mail, set TV profile to what you need, now log in to users computer via TeamViewer?
. I have to make up for the crap educational system myself
Oh, the irony - India and Japan studied and implemented current research into public education that US researchers developed but never successfully applied in American schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html
Takahashi was especially enthralled with an American group called the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, or N.C.T.M., which published manifestoes throughout the 1980s
But - we do know that Hillary is both a war-monger, a crook and cannot be bothered to take the advice of the best expertise available (which is what email-gate shows). This means that Hillary will hire hacks and sycophants as advisor's, which then means that more disasters will flow.
When one is in the shit, then, that is the time to buy risk rather than "the safer option" or "business as usual" - you know, more of what it was that got us into the mess. It is rational that "all bets are off" .
Trump is being smart with his "ideas and plans", first, it's like talking to lawyers: Any word added to "the contract" is another opening for an attack by the oppositions legal team, and, being an experienced CEO Trump know that the future is unpredictable and it generally does not make sense for "the strategic level" to produce those detailed plans and clear directives that the bean-counters at the operational levels insist on.
Great, so instead of importing people do do the jobs in the US, they'll just offshore the jobs to wherever the people are.
Nope: In many of those places they will cut your hand off for stealing or you get a trip to the organ banks. No bailouts in the 3'rd world, it's the chop or the bullet! Maybe a lynching. Not a good life for our bankers.
Corporations simply want the 1'st world bennies but not any of the responsibilities that go along with that.
Our spoiled-rotten CEx classes would simply not last very long without the protection, nursing and support from the societies and governments they publicly undermine at every speaking opportunity.
I'm no fan of HC, but DT is dangerous to the whole world.
Maybe so - but - the facts are that somewhere between ten thousands and hundreds of thousands have died because of Hillary's need to show off her "Hawkishness" to her handlers.
Based on past performance Hillary is clearly the greater evil. In fact, Trump has so much catching up to do that the next genocidal "regime change" might not even happen before he is replaced and we get 4-5 years of relative peace.
With any luck, this sort of nonsense will encourage these business and departments to re-evaluate the cost of doing so. With any luck …
No such luck. As long as there is money to skim off for the CEx-segment, management will do whatever it takes to get at the trough! Who cares about the business or it's shareholders?
For example:
Businesses set up shop in China. To do this legally, the Chinese subsidiary has to be Chinese owned - the Chinese "partner" must by law hold at least 51% of the stock, the IPR owned by the "mothership", but used in China, must be signed over to the subsidiary - and there is exchange controls in place meaning "good luck getting you money out, should the situation require it!". All these assets are handed over "to be in China". And who cares? It's not the decision makers assets!
Ubuntu could probably distribute ZFS in much the the same way that VmWare distributes VmWare Tools.
The VmWare kernel modules are tgz'ed source code, which are compiled & installed by a Perl script. Probably to get around the same kind of problem. Ubuntu could do a "ZFS-Installer"-package which holds the build dependencies, management scripts and source code, on install / update it kicks off the build again.
You could do very small expeditions on well-marked roads or paths to an official shelter site. In the beginning stay there for cooking some tea, then try to make dinner, then perhaps sleep overnight. Tea is always needed for making "found" water drinkable using the rather cheap and unbreakable Trangia "kitchen".
"Micro-expeditions" is a good way to get experience with handling nature. Keeping the car at a distance of 1 hour of easy navigation and relaxed walking takes the stress of being "lost" away. Having an exit plan, it is just a personal preference to put up a with a wet night in the forest, because some moron forgot to pack the tent, rather than a survival issue. One can choose to suck it up - or - be a wuss ;-)
Two of those cheap 3 x 3 meter light-weight tarps sold at DIY stores and some string can make a decent shelter (bivouac) for 2 persons. Here (Sweden) we would bring a small axe too. All that is really needed for a 2 days hike will fit in a very small backpack.
Anyway, all the planning and doing of the little - totally safe - "expeditions" & "picnics" will build up real skills and confidence that will be very useful if one decide to do "a BIG expedition" (or eventually manage to get lost for real, or ditch the car in some god forsaken road without mobile cover, or is surprised by weather on a Scottish mountain. I have personally encountered a real snowstorm on Dartmoor in May while driving there).
Denmark or any other place won't eventually suffer something similar.
Denmark DID. The "IT provider of last resort" as we call it, CSC, was hacked. The hackers had full access to things like the CPR registry, the motor vehicle registry, the criminal records database.
During the case it became obvious that CSC / "the authorities" in reality have no backups and no change controls - this despite hosting all in an IBM mainframe environment - the prosecution argued that it was not possible to determine if anything had been changed in the records.
The court case was a farce in general, the defence and the prosecution had no access to raw data (the alleged hackers disk drive) and the prosecution did not "get" the concept of a laptop being a server.
The IT skills on display were dire indeed, probably one of many reasons why we have one large IT project after another cratering with great fanfare, yet keep launching them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/30/danish_court_finds_pirate_bay_cofounder_guilty_of_hacking_csc_servers/
The Danish sites have better details:
http://www.version2.dk/fokus/csc-hacking
.. that the reporting so far has studiously avoided to mention any Americans involved in this?
Well, the yanks have Delaware for their money-laundering and tax-fraud needs. There is that.
But it does smell, as you say. The message *could* be that certain officials supporting key American interests such as EU signing up for TTIP and TISA need not be listed - for now - and won't be in the future. Unless these things go the wrong way.
Or maybe the saddest part is after all that the Russian population
Why should they care? It's expected (both the part about their leaders having "business interests" on the side and the part about Putin being presented as the architect of all evil by the west).
... And, things being what they are Here, in the EUSSR, who cares about what "they" say about Putin?
The good part is, that If "they" want some credibility for the Putin story, "they" will need to grass up at least some of the higher-branch monkeys *here*. We know they exist. Their lobbying is why tax law is the way that it is and the reason we allow off-shore entities being *blatantly* used as vehicles for fraud and abuse.
It's probably not worth it, though.
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