Posts by Don Jefe

Re: Oh dear

On the contrary, other governments and their suppliers will use this as value add to, say the UK, who has a more proficient and robust IT sector and who would never allow something like this to happen to them. The biggest problem is that the Denmark Govt went the cheap route. We can prevent this from ever happening to you, but it will cost more than the bottom dollar they paid.

It'll all be rubbish of course, but I can already smell the thousands of 4-color charts being printed to 'prove' it.

Re: Ships full of Terrists! Pirates! Podophiples!!

Improved emergency responses are part of the idea behind transmitting the cargo data, but the entire concept was fatally flawed from day 1.

Publicized cargo manifests are so (in)famously inaccurate that they are generally regarded as fiction. On any given cargo vessel from any country there is a near certainty that things and/or people are on the ship that aren't supposed to be. Nobody in the industry takes those things seriously and any concerns about accuracy fall of in direct proportion to the size of the destination port.

As far as open water assistance goes, it isn't like calling the police to a known address. 'Official' first responders on the surface can take days to reach a vessel in distress. They'll fly over and wave, and tell you how fucked you are, but timely, organized responses can't be counted on. At sea you depend on a lot of serendipity and the goodwill of anyone nearby. When responding to distress calls you assist anyone and everyone regardless of what's on their ship. By the time official people arrive everything will be known about the cargo already.

Regardless, as everyone knows the manifests are bullshit anyway, any boarding is done with a worst case scenario mentality. The entire idea of 'well informed' first responders on the open sea was dumb from the get go.

Yes, artificial underwater noise is an issue, but this project supersedes those concerns as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This experiment is related to the undersea communications challenges anticipated in the Leonard Nimoy documentary The Voyage Home.

Unless this technology is developed and deployed prior to the arrival of the probe, Earth will certainly be destroyed in retaliation for the sustained Human assaults on marine mammals. Should this project ultimately prove successful we will be able to successfully spoof bi-directional communications with the probe at far lower costs than developing warp capable spacecraft and the equipment necessary for advanced temporal computations.

Re: stroll on

To be fair, looking at the 'recorded' acts of Jesus with skepticism is what real Biblical scholars do. There is no first hand recording of anything he did, it is all after the fact. Even assuming the original authors tried to stay close to the known facts (highly unlikely anyway) there is a 100% certainty that things were altered simply through the 'telephone game' effect.

Most educated religious people will say "I don't know" a lot more than you'll ever them say "yes, (x) is absolutely true because the Bible says so". Again, even the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Bible isn't a verbatim fax direct from God and is a physical construct of Man. It's kind of hard for them not to acknowledge that, seeing a how they were the original editors and simply destroyed information that didn't jive with their purposes. The Church knows this, scholars know this, it is still the same subset of loons who refuse to acknowledge the facts and big up their own fictions. There's nothing to be done for those people except ignore them.

Re: Why didn't he answer the question?

Indeed, neither a TV camera nor the presence of an official inquiry committee has no effect on the degree of dishonesty spewing forth from politicians.

There jobs do not require honesty. In fact they've gamed the system so hard it is against the law for them to disclose the truth of 'national security' related matters.

You do understand this article is addressing future manufacturing capacity right? Maybe you don't.

When you manufacture anything at scale you forecast your future supply chain capacity requirements based on present product velocity. The issuance of near term guidance with a decrease in anticipated 5C unit production means that, based on present demand, Apple overestimated the product's popularity and does not see the potential for increased rates of adoption going forward. Therefore they are scaling back output of the 5C and increasing production of the 5S because they are seeing increasing demand for it. That's how manufacturing works...

Re: Cost effective .....

'Weed junkies'? Really? Really?

Christ on a tractor. Our education system has failed in so very, very many ways.

Re: Can you see where this is going?

Thanks for your tireless efforts Frank. Without people like you spouting off with insanely convoluted anti-foreign anything statements I wouldn't have to live up to such high standards when I travel abroad. Statements like yours set a rather high bar that requires me to do a lot of work to prove that not everyone from the US is a complete horses ass. It is a rather sisyphean task, but I will carry on, doing my best to offset the damage my fellow countrymen do overseas.

Re: Electrodes.

It isn't exactly 'a lot' lot of people who have had that kind of surgery. Since the late 1960's there have been about 80,000 total brain implant surgeries and the outcomes generally haven't been great.

The implants generally don't perform as well as anticipated, they are extremely high maintenance to the point of installing 'quick access' ports permanently in the patients skull and the side effects are often intensely bizzare and difficult to live with. Infection risk is also extraordinarily high and usually fatal or at the least results in chunks of the brain having to be removed.

At present, brain implants are the last hope for the desperate and courageous. It'll be quite a while before such things become commonplace. We simply don't have the knowledge or technology necessary to make such procedures practical for widespread use.

Indeed, "Customer perception of our products has been directly, and negatively, impacted by disclosure of mass global surveillance by the US Government. Revenues in the last full quarter since the information became public have fallen x% with a $M reduction in bottom line revenue."

They can not only do that, it is a fantastic way for a CEO to address a less than stellar quarter or year. They can actually blame the government and not come off as complete nutters.

Re: Industry Standards

You don't understand the difference between practice and theory do you? The entire point of the article was that authors have to use Word, even though it isn't the best option.

Every publisher I've ever worked with in the US and Europe required me to use Word documents for every step from concept to final post-edit manuscripts. Obviously the format gets changed when actually going to press, but up to that point authors with any decent size publisher work in Word. That's the way it is, that's the industry standard.

Re: Unproven allegation

That's the 'worst case scenario' bullshit talking and/or what the US would do if the situation was reversed. The Russians have their own means of getting information but rarely do they get a chance to so publicly poke the US in the eye. The howls of enraged Congressmen alone would have been worth it. The Russians get to look like the good guys? That's PR gold!

Re: It is fascinating to see how ignorant the stripy shirted sharks can be........

It isn't the mobile market that benefits the biometrics industry as much as it is consumer acquiescence. Now that biometrics are in a highly popular consumer product the general public will quickly become comfortable with the tech. In fact, they'll demand the tech in anything that's supposed to be secure. You can already hear the masses saying "My iPhone knows who I am, why doesn't your (x) do that too?"

Consumers will push the tech upstream which is fairly rare and is a dream scenario for providers of biometrics solutions. They won't even have to sell it hard, people will beg for it. Now's a good time to invest in the industry. I wouldn't base my investment decisions on press releases though...

Re: Total Overhaul - Really

Modular building is most certainly results in the better end product, but does not provide the best options for expensive billing. Vendors don't want to built a part of something because obviously, the total costs are lower, but they also miss out on making themselves the complete system experts. Kind of building their own monopoly.

Re: And very nice goods she has too!

People offended by boobs are too far gone to be educated. We'd all be better off if such people were all just sent to some isolated place where education isn't important and that doesn't like women to begin with: Texas maybe?

Re: Just because they have money…

You're correct, but like most any agency that's flush with cash, they overpay for even the simplest things. Not having a practical budget spells doom for financial and operational efficiencies in any organization.

If Google, for example, wants to overspend because it is easier, that's fine. It is their money and the money of investors who trust them with dispersing it. For a government agency to do it really sucks because they aren't spending their own money and generally don't have a lot of trust from stakeholders.

Re: Pointer dogs?

Pointer dogs point themselves by stopping and 'pointing' with their muzzle in the direction of their prey, not in response to a Human pointing for them. Pointer dogs point and Humans look. The opposite of what is discussed in the article.

Re: Colour me skeptical...

People who want to make everyone else miserable isn't unique to MMO's. It is rampant within all civilization. The world abounds with people who are so fucking miserable that the only way they can find their version of happiness is to shit in someone else's pool.

They are incapable of doing the hard work required to make a bit of happiness, so they take the lazy way out and just destroy it for others. Bunch of cock suckers they are.

I think the entire premise is why it's fallen flat. The actual information published by WikiLeaks was of negligible importance, especially considering how much if it there was. All the attention they've received since then has been because of Asange's antics; not his glorious mission. Like watching a movie about the internal workings of FIFA that focuses completely on Gennaro Gattuso. The clown steals whatever interesting parts of the story were there.

All in all, nobody much cares for perpetual antics. They can occasionally be funny or interesting, but they wear thin. Like the class clown who doesn't realize people long ago stopped giving him attention and he now has to take it, at the expense of everyone in class. After a while people just want to move on but the clown won't stop acting up. You can't take a person like that seriously. Someone who has no respect for anyone other than themselves and will take advantage of every person who gets involved with them. That's just not good movie material. Everybody knows at least one asshole like that at the office, who wants to go see a movie about it when you live with it everyday.

Re: Majoring???

It's hard to get in the program though. It takes a very special type of person to terrorize your fellow citizens by directing your nations top military intelligence resources at them. Most people stand a better chance of winning a lottery prize than they do of getting accepted into the Terrorize Your Countrymen graduate program.

Re: @ Don Jefe

Your posts all seem to be about my posts. I suggest you address your content issues first.