* Posts by Charles 9

16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Charles 9

Re: EMF-sensitive here

Then why didn't it happen so much with cordless phones, which can create the same conditions and predates ubiquitous cell phones by a decade or so?

Charles 9

Re: Block Facebook. Always.

No good. They'll just use it (they MUST, as they have to use say Whatsapp for work, it's a REQUIREMENT--and no, there are no other job offers) outside your purview, associate you anyway, and you're screwed through no action of your own.

You don't want Facebook to learn about you? Forget it. They can find out everything they need from everyone else: no input on your part required. Big Brother is already here, and if it isn't Facebook, it's someone else: likely some Gibsonian transnational megacorp able to get around any laws you try to throw at them.

If you have enough of this type of gut microbe, you can get drunk for free after eating carbs

Charles 9

Re: Re. BAC

"The worrying thing is the courts convicted despite there being no evidence of alcohol or illegal drugs, in fact the report came back "nothing found" apart from caffeine. The BCL was equivalent to having drunk 20 cups of coffee in a very short time and high enough to cause visible symptoms."

DUI doesn't require the influencing substances to be illegal to be enforceable. After all, alcohol is legal as long as you're old enough, and impairment can easily come from a dose of diphenhydramine hycrochloride or doxylamine succinate (both common over-the-counter sleep aids--Simply Sleep and Unisom, respectively). Besides, 20 cups of coffee in a short time is actually physically dangerous. The FDA-specified limit for caffeine is 400mg/day as above that the heart can be affected (as in potentially cause fatal arrhythmia).

Charles 9

Re: OMFG...

It's not unheard of. Kombucha (a peculiar fermented tea that's a current fad) relies on both fungal and bacterial action to achieve the desired result.

As for other things, I don't know if we should trust this culture. Based on research I've picked up, it normally ferments lactose (milk sugar), and if it gets out of the gut, it can be pretty nasty so it probably does other things one wouldn't want in the mash. It seems the most direct way requires yeast; bacteria that produce alcohol generally do it as a side effect to something else.

It's seeing better reviews in the agricultural sector where it's found to be pretty good at nitrogen-fixation.

Emergency button saves gamers from sudden death... of starvation

Charles 9

Did you ever happen to watch that raunchy school comedy "Hamburger: The Motion Picture"? I believe near the end some a bunch of fat people came into a burger joint and (with them eating everything in sight--including the other customers' food) the workers decided to fight back with milkshakes laced with industrial-strength laxative.

Charles 9

Re: Well now....

"Back in classic, some 40-man raid bosses can take a full 8 hours to defeat."

That's what I was wondering. A single, enclosed battle with a single mega-boss and it takes a full eight hours to defeat with (due to this being a mega-boss) no possibility of a break. I wouldn't be too surprised, down the line, if these kinds of battles are structured more in stages. Every possibility of victory or total wipe still there, of course, but as you reach certain milestones the boss flees or something happens that separates the belligerents temporarily, allowing for those pit stops I mentioned.

Charles 9

Re: Well now....

Hmm? I thought it was commonly just straight-up dehydration. Anyway, how soon before these kinds of games are required to institute "pit stops" of at least 15 minutes every two hours to avoid being held liable for deaths like this?

Those furious gun-toting Aussies were just a glitch. Let's try US drone deliveries, says Wing

Charles 9

FYI

The chain involved in the deal is Walgreens, a drug store (read: chemist) chain, for product already available in store the way DoorDash and Postmaster works. For legal reasons, prescriptions cannot be delivered (many are controlled substances like painkillers), but common groceries are on the list. May not be worth stealing if the delivery's just munchies for the Sunday game. As for trying to steal the drone, consider anti-theft measures already in use for things like Bird/Lime scooters.

Huawei to lob devs $1.5bn in apparent effort to Trump-proof cloud and mobile ecosystem

Charles 9

Re: Since money is being spent...

SIMULTANEOUSLY?

Plus, what about user-replacable batteries while you're at it? That's always the first thing to wear down for me.

Larry Ellison tiers Amazon a new one: Oracle cloud gets 'always' free offer, plus something about Linux

Charles 9

Re: Always free services

"However, the specs of embedded devices like IoT junk or consumer routers are even worse, and they get broken into for cryptomining quite frequently."

Because Mirai showed they can make up for it with sheer numbers. You don't have such a guarantee here (because, let's face it, they'll take information from you first which they can check--if you need to come up with a bunch of phony lives for these accounts, you might be better off stealing accounts outright).

Charles 9

Re: Always free services

Unless they already took that into consideration by limiting the CPU power and network bandwidth. Have you read those specs? They don't seem to be anything to write home about.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

Charles 9

Re: fermented Mares Milk

I wonder how one would classify drinks made from kombucha, then. Last I checked, it's BOTH yeast- AND bacteria-fermented. Last I heard, they classed the end result as a tea.

Charles 9

And you wonder where the term "applejack" came from.

Charles 9

Re: You're thinking..

Which is why they're so popular in America. Just recall: America is a lot hotter than Europe, especially in the summer. Most won't care if it's close to water; so long as it isn't actually water; they just wanna cool off and get a buzz.

And PS. If you think the big brand names are close to water, you might want to stay away from the thought experiment which is low-point beer (as in 3.2% ABV)...or worse, near-beer (attempts to have all the taste but none of the alcohol--most are held in low regard).

Charles 9

Re: A traditional brew with 52% alcohol?

Eisbocks (ice beers), IOW. Stuff like Tactical Nuclear Penguin is usually jacked (freeze-distilled). The best known super-strong all-fermented beer is Samuel Adams Utopias (from an American craft brewer). Their custom yeast IINM tops out at about 25% ABV.

First they came for 'face' and I did not speak out because I... have no face? Then they came for 'book'

Charles 9

Re: Trademark This...

Could be tricky as it's in the Unicode standard: U+1F595 (REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED). Stylized Fingers can probably get away with it if they're one-offs, but the Finger in general would probably be considered not specific enough.

Charles 9

Re: I'm talkin' 'bout wealth

"Those rich motherfuckers that own the colour "blue""

You mean Thrifty Rent-A-Car? Their application was rejected years ago as too broad and the rejection upheld on appeal.

At least UPS's service mark lists a specific shade of brown (titled Pullman Brown after the brown used in Pullman railroad cars in the past). Plus it was able to get past two other rejection tests: first, brown isn't a color naturally associated with courier services (white would fail this test); second; there's no significant practical reason to use brown versus, say, a different color, in the line of courier work (although brown can conceal dirt, so can black).

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

Charles 9

Re: Blackest material

Don't think so. Based on my recollection, black holes really didn't figure into the humor of the film. Lot of crude humor as well as multiple knocks at various sci-fi flicks, but no black holes as I recall. You're probably thinking of the Schwartz, their joke on Star Wars' Force: pretty basic joke until the Dark Helmet fight when they went into Double Entendre territory.

Charles 9

Re: Details, my dear Watson, details

Then it would have three interesting properties, then, since this stuff is omni-directional whereas Vantablack only works in specific directions.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Charles 9

Re: Its about time....

Thing is, what was the cost of the testing vs. the cost/value of the device being tested? Paying $20K to test a $20 coffee maker is ridiculous, but when it a $20M piece of machinery meant to last decades and having a legal testing requirement in order to operate, that's another story.

What was the value of that system that required $1M worth of testing?

Charles 9

Re: I guess it depends on how/why one is doing the gig work.

The problem becomes similar to that of the Living Wage argument. How is it possible to separate those only doing it for extra cash versus people struggling to pay the bills without loopholes big enough for a big rig/lorry to drive through?

And then there's the whole cost of labor argument which can leave employers on razor margins teetering on the edge and putting everyone under his/her employ at risk.

Charles 9

"Schools. You can't have a real democracy without a public single-payer education system."

Sure you can. Why can't it be done with private schools?

What I was saying was healthcare has no direct connection to the government. There is no explicit mandate, unlike law enforcement (which ties to the police and the courts and the jails).

Perhaps that's why the Founding Fathers originally insisted you have some land in order to vote: to make sure you had some actual skin in the game.

BTW, if you're worried about the people at the top cutting the runs of the ladder, you're playing the wrong game; you're trying to blame the owner of the casino when what you should be considering is changing the game altogether.

Charles 9

Re: "the gig economy is the difference between paying rent and being out on the streets"

"The law should ensure people are able to pay rent and food with a single lawful job, or the society fails - and we're already seeing the consequences."

Two sides to the coin. The law should ALSO ensure employers are able to pay their leases and operating expenses so they can stay in business and hire the people so these people can actually get PAID, or the society fails - and we're already seeing the consequences.

It's a dilemma, basically: a zero-sum game to an extent. Protect the workers and the employers tighten belts, meaning employees suffer. Give the employers the free reign they need to survive and the employees suffer. Either way the proles suffer.

Charles 9

Re: About time

"It looked like a duck, walked like a duck and quacked like a duck."

What if they said it was a goose with a duck call?

Charles 9

Because the ones you've listed have historical connections to corruption and extortion. "Nice house you have there, ahem..." Courts and police are tied to the laws which are under the sole purview of government, so they're under the government, too, by necessity. Healthcare has neither going for it.

Finally! A solution to 42 – the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

Charles 9

I withdrew my earlier post because it hadn't been made clear that "Mersenne number" (n = 2^p - 1 where p is prime) and "Mersenne prime" (n = 2^p - 1 where p is prime) are actually the same thing (2^p - 1 being prime -> p is also prime). That said, I'll believe their practicality when I see them in action.

Charles 9

Re: Silly question...

That only works for perfect cubes like 8, 27, or 64 (which are respectively -1, 0, and 1 modulo 9).

Charles 9

"And Mersenne primes are incredibly important."

I'd be interested to know why they're so important compared to say a non-trivial prime number (one not determinable in any programmatic way), or perhaps a proof that prime numbers have no discrete or algorithmic distribution.

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Charles 9

Re: Encryption and Authentication and trust

"Personally i prefer DoT to DoH as it does just what you want it to encrypt the content of the DNS request, and still allows the service to be managed independantly."

Not necessarily if the port is hijacked wholesale (DNS and DoT both have this issue). The only way to prevent this is to either use random ports or piggyback a ubiquitous port (and as DoH uses the HTTPS port of 443, this puts ISPs in a bind).

Charles 9

Re: Cloudflare?

How can you be sure your ISP isn't spying on you on the quiet? Remember Verizon's Supercookie? Notice all the ISP-emblazoned pages when a DNS fails (even when you change the DNS IPs, meaning the ISP MUST be hijacking port 53 wholesale, something DoT doesn't fix because it's on a fixed port and ISPs can ALSO just hijack wholesale)?

Charles 9

TLS 1.3 encrypts the SNI.

The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network

Charles 9

Re: Wireshark is my shell...

Physics. Most people develop a certain style of typing that can be easy to pick out. Plus, most of us are trained in touch-typing which involves certain layouts of both the fingers and keys. Because of the movements involved, it's a lot faster to press an F or a J compared to say a Q or a P. That's where the pattern recognition starts.

Tesla Autopilot crash driver may have been eating a bagel at the time, was lucky not to get schmeared on road

Charles 9

"there are, I believe, even planes (fighters) that humans could not directly fly but require a flight computer to manage most of the load"

I believe that started with the F-117, which wasn't really designed to be aerodynamic in the first place but to be stealthy. That said, I read that modern fighters and other aircraft built for maneuverability tend to be built with a tendency not to make them very aerodynamically stable, as this makes them more responsive when turning.

Charles 9

That's actually just an urban legend that's been making the rounds since the 1970's.

Charles 9

Re: It will be interesting when the 1st similar case happens in the UK what the police reaction is

#1 is the reason the practice is checked carefully in the US. It was and may still be a common way to commit insurance fraud: pin a car in a single lane with buddy cars, slip just in front of the car and slam the brakes, get rear-ended, and claim damages, whiplash, and other harms. I hear it isn't used as often these days because (a) some of them actually died in the crash, and/or (b) police got wiser to the act and used forensic evidence to prove their case.

Charles 9

If ever, or do you recall the Douglas Adams quote about the ingenuity of complete fools?

Charles 9

Re: Whole story

As said before, wouldn't help. What you need is a professional test done on a crash course randomized for each driver. This actually accounts for the big problem with your idea: the difference between OUTSIDE-the-car IQ and INSIDE-the-car IQ, which can be significant.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Charles 9

Re: Linux.

One other thing it had as well: a distinct beginning signature, which good terminal programs could pick up to automatically start downloading. HSLink turned out to have a similar signature, allowing it to also be auto-starting.

Charles 9

Re: PO Box in the US

The regs seem to vary from state to state, but I know in Virginia you're required to enter an actual physical, in-state street address (with proof via a recent utility bill or whatever) when applying for a driver's license or state ID card. This is because the card itself becomes proof of residency so carries a certain legal standing that requires some verification (cards can only be issued to residents). You can have the card sent to a PO Box, but the official address cannot.

Charles 9

Re: Linux.

I was definitely using it back in '91 when an 80486 was the hottest thing out there, and I was lucky to have a 14.4 modem and a line clean enough to actually use it. ZMODEM was the goto protocol then because it had three key features: batch transfer (can set up to transfer a group of files in one go), resume (in case the transfer or even the connection dropped out partway), and adjustable packet sizes (from as low as the XMODEM standard of 128B to the YMODEM standard of 1KB, and in between if necessary to balance between data integrity and transfer efficiency). A little later, a competing system called HSLink made the rounds as well with similar features.

After banning adverts in command-line terminals, NPM floats idea of Patreon-style donations to open-source devs

Charles 9

Re: Please donate

Sure, there is. Ever had to answer a bum with, "Get lost, you mooch!" Same potential problem here: being turned away as a mooch.

Charles 9

Re: Payment

"There's more to free than money, and in the last few decades I've seen this play out a lot of times. The best and only solution is free, free and free in all senses of the word."

No.

MY firsthand experience tells me it's simply against human nature. 90% of the time, it's Someone Else's Problem. The only way to make people care is to remove any degrees of separation: get their skin in the game (IOW, defeat the SEP field by making it THEIR problem). If nothing gets done, then someone gets desperate enough that their skin gets hurt less getting it done than letting it lie.

And for a business, the bottom line is about the only way to get their skin in the game (as anything else can be lawyered away).

Q. If machine learning is so smart, how come AI models are such racist, sexist homophobes? A. Humans really suck

Charles 9

Re: How come AI models are such racist, sexist homophobes

"In poorer societies the leaders aren't necessarily looking for riches, maybe more influence, respect etc."

The universal factor you're seeking is POWER: influence, IOW, the ability to get one's way. In richer docieties, money's the meal ticket. In poorer places, it may be social influence, but the justification is the same and goes to the same Law of the Jungle instinct.

Charles 9

Just because the data is thorough doesn't mean it can't be biased. If the bias is nigh omnipresent, more data would just make it worse. It's like trying to find an absolute...ANY absolute. There simply isn't any.

Despite billions in spending, your 'military grade' network will still be leaking data

Charles 9

Re: Faxing

"Why the hell are they using fax machines? Game theorists should have told them how stupid it is."

Until they run into medical documents regulations which explicitly stipulate that it isn't legal unless it's faxed...or couriered...

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Charles 9

Re: No matter what.

Then ask them, "Then how may we address you respectably, given the absence of an honorific is considered itself DIShonorable?"

At least in the US, where knights and nobility never existed, "Sir" is considered the generic honorific for respectably addressing an unknown gentleman. Thus the aforementioned greeting protocol. "Miss" is used for young ladies and "Ma'am" or "Madam" for older women.

Charles 9

BUT opinions can agree and create elections on the collective opinion on the matter. And yes, words formed from acronyms matter; otherwise, you wouldn't have lists like The 20 Worst Acronyms Ever.

And the majority opinion on GIMP is negative because the spoken acronym describes either (a) a minor cripple, (b) a man engaged in a certain deviant fetish, or (c) an underperforming ("gimped") product, none of which can be considered very flattering. I mean, can't it help matters choosing something a little more appropriate like PIXEL (Photo and Image X-forming and Editing Line)?

And you thought the cops were bad... Civil rights group warns of facial recog 'epidemic' across UK private sites

Charles 9

Re: Counter technology

The cat-and-mouse is already at play in Hong Kong, where cameras are in play. Thing is, expect counter-counter-technology to be employed as well, such as infrared thermal recognition which is harder to mask. I'm waiting to see an endgame for this: a piece of tech no counter-tech is possible or practical.

Charles 9

Re: I believe that is what is going on at the Walgreens drug stores in the US.

"I wonder how many people in a 5 mile radius would have the exact birthday as someone else?"

You should look up the Birthday Problem sometime. Depending on how many people are in a five-mile radius, the odds of two people having the same birthday can surprise you (once you hit 23 people, the odds are better than 50/50).

As for the ubiquitous cameras, you have to figure there's at least some CYA tactics being employed here, especially with all the high-impact incidents lately.