Posts by Micha 11 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2012
Instead of turning nuclear power stations back on, Germany builds new coat plants and turns off modern civilisation amenities.
When will this madness end? We need safe environmentally friendly base load energy generation to power or civilisation which does not beholden us to rogue states. We've had the technology for 80 years, it's bordering on the criminally insane not to use it and cling onto fossil fuels instead for dear life.
I beg to differ on the ease-to-install bit. The default install (at least on the laptop I'm using) just used TPM, or a recovery key. No password required at bootup. Sure, the drive is encrypted, so if someone rips it out of the laptop it's useless(*), but if someone has access to the whole laptop, there's no protection at all.
Had to spend quite a bit of time researching and finding the right Group Policies to edit (I don't use/admin Windows all that much) until I got an option in the control panel allowing me to specify a bootup password.
Completely fail to understand what the point of the default install was.
You can download Microsoft Windows ISO's for free. Just make sure you have your product key! And that you verify the MS-published checksums to ensure you really did get the MS ISO without any crapware.
Took seconds to find this link; I'm sure there's ISO's for non-Ultimate versions as well..
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/where-can-i-download-windows-7-iso-i-have-a/7d964b05-2be9-4800-bc7f-3ca30356fc3d
Hmm, well, I hadn't really heard of the debate before (despite being a long time Debian user), but this now explains why my desktop and laptop both refused to boot sometime earlier this year after a more or less standard upgrade (one runs SID, the other Jessie). Removing systemd on both got them working again. I just put it down to systemd being something new which was trickling in through unstable and wasn't really going into final production for years.
I guess unless Debian manages to recover from this gaffe I'll be cross-grading to Devuan. The one great thing about *nix is that it's usually possibly to work out what's going on and fix it. Binary logs and opaque monolithic pieces of software are not conducive to that.
Oh, and despite systemvinit, my machines boot up (to lightdm's login, yes, I ditched Gnome when the Gnome3 abomination was enforced) quicker than the BIOS POSTs complete, so I'm not sure there's much that can improve on that.. but yes, they both boot from SSD's. Still, so does Windows 7, and that still takes half an age despite all the boot time optimisations which have apparently been put into it.
Maybe the developer(s) were hacked off that quite a large sum of money was raised quite quickly to pay security professionals to audit TrueCrypt, and only small amounts trickled in to support the developers of TrueCrypt?
Why do most stories keep persisting the myth that the new binaries are signed with the same keys as were used for older releases? The signing keys were switched well before the new 7.2 release was made, and combined with the rather amateurish website this lends more credence to a hack job rather than an "official" end-of-line for TrueCrypt.
I'll wait and see; for now 7.1(a) is still as (in)secure as always. Almost certainly more secure than BitLocker anyway!
The paranoid android in me smells a verification system - checking whether or not the data in the botnet is "live" or not. The system allegedly only emails you for positives. "No News Good News" kinda thing. But what's to say they don't bother sending the email for a hit and instead save it into a shortlist of data.
Governments resorting to phishing. Tsk tsk.
While a neat idea (and definitely better than abc123) the main problem is that most systems don't allow arbitrarily long passwords. For example, one of my online bank accounts restricts me to 6 characters, numbers and uppercase letters only. I kid thee not.
Also the entropy doesn't scale quite as well as claimed if the attacker knows the pattern (a selection of (4 common english) words).
of a gravity well, and developed the technology to survive in spaaaace, why would any intelligent species go back down (even assuming they could after spending a long time in microgravity).
Of course, after we have finished our initial bumbling about and start getting serious about space habitation we will probably develop artificial gravity on our craft (not as in Star Trek, as in spinning). And once we have a reasonable energy source, gravity wells won't be as costly anymore either so even if we spend the majority of our time in space, we'll at least be capable of returning.
But still, something to throw into the equation - once we're in space, what use do we have of planets (except as raw materials / protected environments for indigenous species). And ditto for any aliens. So even if some have passed our way they may not actually have any use of the planet except for curiosity.
There's more details on /. - apparently the McD's in question has had trouble with media harassing them recently and the staff may have been under the impression Dr. Mann may have been working for them. Add on top the language barrier, and, well, shit happens. There's supposed to be a 'no cameras' sign on the entrance door too, so he can't claim complete ignorance.
Still does not excuse the rough treatment, but apparently it wasn't a case of ignoramuses hitting on a "cyborg".
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