* Posts by Grunchy

661 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015

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UK government to set deadline for removal of Chinese surveillance cams

Grunchy Silver badge

Security is trivial

All you do is isolate the cameras, to communicate exclusively with one Network Video Recorder.

Then, you control access to the NVR — over a separate interface.

Anybody who has configured a router and can grasp the difference between Local Area Network LAN vs Wide Area Network WAN has enough background to foil any of these rogue cameras.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Grunchy Silver badge

I preserved my copy of “MPX”

https://archive.org/details/mpx_20211104

You can still run MPX in “DosBOX” but the problem is the authors only ever let loose this “hobbleware” version.

Which is too bad because it looks like a real cool program!

Somewhere, somebody’s still got the diskette with an actual working copy… !

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Grunchy Silver badge

Aw, Hell Yeah!

I still got me Google Glass except my perscription is a couple years out of date already.

Funny... seems as only yesterday..

(I only kid, I got my Google Glass as a deeply discounted 2nd hand item from a disgruntled sucker.)

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

Time travel really works but the problem with going very far into the future is this tiny problem of the Earth hurtling through space at about 50,000 mph.

(You’ll get there ok but you may find yourself either in outer space or else soaking in lava in the Earth’s interior. Maybe be more careful about what you wish for? We may never recover any time-traveller’s body, if you think about it.)

Grunchy Silver badge

Ogopogo != Nessy

You could invent a “game” camera and stick em all over the woods and lake shore and such, but you know why the right pictures never get captured? It’s because of the Fermi paradox, i.e. how do you take photos of faster-than-light phenomena. Answer: well, first of all your Polaroid probably isn’t up to the task.

Aggressive PC discounts might not be here for long, says HP

Grunchy Silver badge

Lenovo P310 for $82

Sure it “only” has E3-1230 V5, but for $82 I guess I could wring a little bit of use out of it.

I’m not proud.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Grunchy Silver badge

We got Granny a new M2

No not an “M.2,” but the new “M2.” Though it also has a ridiculous teeny “Tim Cook”-size M.2. That’s the new Mac Mini for 2023.

The last time we got her one was 2014 and whereas that still works just fine, people been jazzin up their web pages and the old tech is rather abandoned.

Like a great silly ass Tim Cook sells ya the M2 all right, but (permanently) welds on the most pathetic M.2 money can buy. If you want an adequate storage that’s another $800 Cdn. No, Tim.

Thankfully I can rummage in my tech box and rustle up a 500GB SATA SSD + USB 3.0 SATA adapter cord. Tim’s nefarious plot thwarted. Nice try there ya villain.

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

Grunchy Silver badge

I don’t think I really get it

I tried the Linux subsystem and found it a hacked up broken mess. I don’t really “get” Linux to be sure, I find it fragile and finicky at the best of times. For example my PS3 “may or may not” suffer some kind of crash when activating “HEN,” the homebrew enabler, which in turn requires a “hard” shutdown, followed by an exhaustive and time-wasting disk assessment. In fact Linux fundamentally sucks in that it produces this extraordinarily verbose dialog of self-conversation that flashes past at each and every bootup, before vanishing to show a login prompt. What in the Royal Hell is all that garbage? I find, if I try to catch a glimpse of what’s flashing by about 1/4 appears to be in some kind of error condition. Is there anything to pay attention to there, well presumably because it all goes whipping past, and presumably not, since it’s all cleared away before you can see it.

But the frustrating nature of the Linux CLI is you carefully construct each command to issue to the software, and if there’s the slightest typo it fails with the most pathologically useless error message describing what went wrong. Entire batch jobs are one bit-error from massive pile-ups. But I digress.

Running Linux subsystem simply so you can run RPM seems crazy to me. Packages, containers, really?

Because I run Windows itself as a virtual environment — not the other way around. As far as I’m concerned Windows is merely an environment for running a desktop application. Though I may use it to “run” a primitive emulator for a long obsolete system (nostalgia purposes only).

If I want to open up a Mac environment or a Linux environment then they get their own, separate and distinct, sets of resources. Also, they, too, are only good for running some other, different, desktop applications.

And that’s all it is.

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

Grunchy Silver badge

I am IBM customer

I got 3x X3550 blades for $30 apiece at auction, I mean whatr ya gonna do with all that?

But seriously: I own the product, I am a customer.

I’d say IBM should listen to my first-hand customer account except I haven’t gotten around to doing anything with em yet?

They are nice equipment though. Good enough for $30, anyway.

AI is great at one thing: Driving next waves of layoffs

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: So what exactly were all these laid off employees doing?

“In the 1980s many men had skilled "traditional" jobs like machinists. CNC replaced (most?) of them.”

The 1980s…? You might be surprised for how long we have been mechanizing all these different jobs. Luddism draws its roots from developments prior to 1800s!

https://youtu.be/TnsKj1Hwf7o

Grunchy Silver badge

I have a passion for the colour yellow

So far, modern A.I. reminds me of Fu Manchu’s magnificent clockwork spider that he designed and was using to steal all the world’s Crown Jewels.

(Ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Also, requires a lot of “facilitation” to keep it on task…)

Grunchy Silver badge

I hate lawers

When Jennings lost to Watson back in 2011, I had assumed ibm would use the technology to train a “super-lawer” with 100% knowledge of all legal precedent and which could out-argue any human alive.

Instead, they e-o-l’d it, and the real entrepreneurs have been mercilessly trying to replace taxi drivers and truck drivers for gosh sake.

Somebody needs to make it a priority: run all humans out of the legal profession.

(Ultimately I would like it to be that any human tries to enter the legal profession automatically gets sued for incompetence until they are all exterminated, permanently. But that’s just my own ‘druthers.)

SCOTUS rules Google and Twitter didn't contribute to terrorist attacks

Grunchy Silver badge

Shades

“To me, returning online to Shades after months away, with friends in both camps, it seems that the players are behaving like members of a paranoid cult. A closed, self-referential culture, with shared experience of addiction, shared conventions of behaviour, thought, and expression, the use of purpose-made clichés to stop thought, a jargon incomprehensible to outsiders, a revered leader whose word cannot be questioned, the bitter hatred of renegades: these are hallmarks of religious cults.” (Cybergypsies, 1999)

Alibaba plans to spin off cloud division within 12 months

Grunchy Silver badge

I don’t like cloud

I don’t like relying on anything online. All of that stuff is just one single bit-flip away from catastrophic failure. The international cloud team could be the same group of mafia-hackers who’ve been trying to steal your same precious data for years, that you’re now willing to entrust to some unknown entity. At any second some calamity can befall whatever data warehouse you let yourself get swindled into trusting with anything.

Meanwhile I can buy old servers with dual 12-core cpus and hundreds of gb of ram for $30 apiece, and brand-new 5tb enterprise drives can be had for about $100. It truly is a case of “cheaper to buy than rent.”

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

Grunchy Silver badge

100 million degrees!!

What is that, Celsius or Kelvin?

You know what, either way I don’t like it.

We should focus on the Cold Fusion. It’s the same imaginary technology, but at a more palatable temperature.

Microsoft decides it will be the one to choose which secure login method you use

Grunchy Silver badge

Reminds me of the convenience store down the block

I started shopping at this one convenience store, the one down by the laundromat? I’d go walk the dog over there, then pop in for a slurpee & lotto ticket and then back home. Well, the guy had enough of that b/s, and said so. He said, “ you come around here and all you buy is slurpee and lotto, and it never fails, you pay all the time with credit card. Whatsa matter, you never heard of cash?” So I’m like, “that’s right, I don’t carry any cash whatsoever, in fact I never carry any cash.”

So he says, “well that’s not the way it works anymore, you can’t buy anything here with credit anymore, from now on it’s cash only. You have been warned and now you have been told.”

So that’s it! Now we have to swing by the circle k ever since, or, I guess I could go to the drugstore because they too have slurpee.

I’m not saying the guy is gonna go bankrupt imminently, but it’s never good for business when you deliberately drive your customers toward your competitors.

Ehhhh whatever, it’s not as if I’m any kind of Microsoft customer anyway. The only thing I bought off them in the last 10 years is flight sim 2020.

Ransomware corrupts data, so backups can be faster and cheaper than paying up

Grunchy Silver badge

Virtualized

I can confirm, at my current employer they got stung last year and paid $60k in Bitcoin (geez) to get >50% files recovered.

It was a PDM vulnerability, the solution was to shut off automatic email notification for state changes or whatever.

(Plus sloppy backup hygiene, come on, guys. I swear I’m gonna figure out Proxmox and switch permanently: you’ve got compartmentalization of the OS environments plus rolling, iterative backups with that ZFS scheme. Add to that inherent immunity due to 0.5Mbit upload and Win95 environment that nobody uses no more, or remembers how to crack. Come at me bro!)

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

Grunchy Silver badge

Is this a thing in Thunderbird?

I use Thunderbird because I don’t care about new things with arcane psychurity holes built-in. But on second thought, is this possibly also a thing on Thunderbird?

(To be honest I’m so far behind the curve I’m still on Seamonkey, because I truly just don’t care about new things with all their unwanted psychurity holes they are riddled with. Also: they ain’t anybody left in the world trying to hack my Win95, let’s be perfectly honest about it. Ain’t even one Win95 hacker left on the planet. They all died out!)

Microsoft puts the freeze on employee salaries, CEO pay still as hot as ever

Grunchy Silver badge

I don’t care

The last time I ever paid Microsoft for anything was 2020 (you know, the flight sim).

Once a long time ago I used to play Xbox 360 and I got swindled into paying $1.99 for one month of Xbox Live, with the stipulation that they would charge me regular rate for all subsequent months until the day I logged in to cancel the recurring payment scheme, which I attempted to do the very next second. Well I never was able to cancel those payments, short of telling PayPal they’re not allowed to grab any payments without authorization. So sure enough next month came, they triumphantly went in to grab another month, were denied access by PayPal, my Xbox live service was instantly shut off, and I have never been allowed to buy another single thing from Microsoft. Well you go to call in & the Microsoft lady says “nuthen can be done, any payment you send for anything will apply first to the outstanding balance, and you’ll probably have made only a partial payment for your purchase, which you won’t get until the full amount had been paid.”

(Honestly, I stopped caring years ago. Except for 2020. I had to buy that one through Steam I do believe. I guess if any other worthwhile product arises some day I might spend some time sorting it out, but I can sincerely predict that Microsoft never produces such worthwhile product ever again in my lifetime. I really do believe it.)

Capita admits some pension data 'likely' to have been accessed in March breach

Grunchy Silver badge

Stupid

In “where the red fern grows” is described a trap for catching a raccoon (without a hunting dog) so you can harvest the fur to train your dog so that you can hunt raccoons “fairly.”

What you do is you climb up a tree and you bore a hole down partway into a branch. Then, you place a shiny metal disc into the hole, just small enough to fit. Then, you drive a nail into the branch, but angle it so the pointy end protrudes into the hole.

The upshot is that the raccoon can reach into the hole, and he can grab the metal, but he won’t be able to pull it out past the nail. He can drop the metal and pull out his paw and escape if he needs, but he can never pull out the metal: he can only touch it, and grab it, but can never have it.

In the book raccoons are dumb enough that they won’t let go of the metal, and you can blast them in between the eyes before they give up the sparkly treasure.

I feel that data security specialists have never yet been smart enough to figure out a way to use a similar technique to reliably secure precious databases.

There’s raging dumb out there, for some reason.

(I’ll even spell it out, if anybody cares. You put your data into a “hole” that has only one public way to access it, which is through the opening, and you can see that all the data is in there, but there’s a nail blocking the opening and you can never get the whole data set out at once. The exact way this is done is a supremely trivial exercise which probably involves a completely isolated server and a single pipe out by just one query protocol that is accessible by one single device. I’ll even describe my own personal security measure, my entire household is serviced by the absolute cheapest, slowest connection commercially available, which is 5 Mbit download, 0.5 Mbit upload. You’d have to continuously saturate my upload bandwidth for several years before you can steal all my data. Security specialists: are you seriously so stupid, you cannot figure out this trivial issue?)

Slack adding generative AI to interact with colleagues, so you don't have to

Grunchy Silver badge

I remember a time when…

Back in 2011, when IBM was still involved in artificial intelligence technologies, they put up their latest “Watson” software against humans on a quiz show about arcane trivia. And for its final, on-air answer (not long before it became retired For Good) it spectacularly guessed “Toronto” as a “U.S. City” which had its largest airport named after a WW-II hero and its second-largest named after a WW-II battle.

(Hint: “Toronto” ain’t a “U.S. City”, not even to this day.)

Methinks A.I. is not yet ready for mission critical tasks that it isn’t liable of committing Stunned Blunders on, ye jest don’t trust et!

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sheila/384/w11/why-toronto.pdf

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Grunchy Silver badge

Release the source code?

I use the SPA2102 myself, you merely enter command 7932# and 0 to disable the WAN access. Simple enough.

I still run my trusty old DNS-323, and the reason is because D-Link released the source code which allowed the enthusiasts to take over development of “Alt-F” alternative firmware. It has become a really useful device, you can put big drives in there, format with EXT4 if you care to, run ftp torrent nfs all sorts of different servers and services. Lately I even put AdGuard Home on there, a light-weight alternative to Pi-Hole. Just the cats pyjamas kind of device, and all because the source code was opened up one grand day. Thanks D-Link!

Anyway my SPA-2102 runs constantly (well of course, when do you ever turn off your telephone?) and the only thing that went wrong was I had to replace the 5V adapter a couple times.

Too bad they don’t open-source it, I bet there’s all sorts of wizard things it could do if they’d cooperate with customers for a change.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Grunchy Silver badge

I’m switching to Proxmox

I’ll just run whatever as a virtual machine.

I’ve got Ubuntu server, Win 7 ultimate, win 10 pro retail, Monterey… open step, solaris, we’ve got Amiga OS, even geos if I care to.

The nice thing about compartmentalized virtual machines is I can run whatever virus I want & completely eliminate it from my system whenever I feel like it, just delete & restore.

They’re busy installing fibre to every single house in the city because they intend to control everyone by their online activity. No deal. HTTP and HTTPS are merely a type of protocol. Anybody can invent their own protocol, be it xmodem ymodem zmodem kermit “punter,” or torrent, or dark web. If HTTP becomes too commercialized I’ll just switch to something else, I don’t care. I don’t need Microsoft anymore, now they are merely another environment to choose among on my Proxmox cluster.

Stop OpenAI training its models on your chats by turning off history

Grunchy Silver badge

ChatGPT got Juice

Chat GPT got to go on the Juice mission to Jupiter ‘coz it said it had the ‘greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission’ or whatever.

CLASSIC butt-kissing sentience.

Russian hacktivists DDoS hospitals, with pathetic results

Grunchy Silver badge

I’m burning the Quran 24-7

I have a script that copies the digital file, scrambles its contents randomly, and then erases it bit-by-bit. It runs in RAM exclusively so I’m not needlessly wearing out HDDs or anything.

I was thinking of releasing it as a RAM/CPU burn-in freeware.

(Actually I have done no such thing, but of course it wouldn’t be hard. Plus I’d make it optional which work to mutilate: the Quran, the Bible, the American Constitution… Groening’s “Life in Hell” comics… or supply your own hated document! Whatever you want for an empty, futile gesture.)

It's a matter of when, not if, customers move to the cloud, SAP tells investors

Grunchy Silver badge

I’m moving to the cloud imminently

I finally figured out how to put my old Raid Array into HBA mode, also how to enable IOMMU. On my proxmox cluster. So I finished setting up my ZFS “RaidZ” array and am about ready to begin deploying a whole mess of VMs.

(To me, the “thin client” scene royally kicks “the cloud” in the trousers’ backside. I’ve got NAS backups out the wazoo, I can’t wait to get hit with ransomware!)

Amazon CEO says AWS staff now spending ‘much of their time’ optimizing customers’ clouds

Grunchy Silver badge

“The Cloud,” eh

I just picked up my 3rd DL380P-Gen8 for $20, plus another 3 IBM blades (X3550 M4s) for $30 apiece. Plus about 1,400 GB of ram modules for similarly cheap.

(Yeah, I’m never gonna be logging into AWS pretty much ever again…)

Move over, Google Earth. Caltech's here with a fresh 3D tour of Mars

Grunchy Silver badge

FlightSim 2020

I think I remember a way to use Google Earth map data instead of Microsoft Bing in FlightSim 2020. Hopefully we finally get some good UFO airframe models to go with.

(Like, finally a modern version of Space Invaders - would be nice.)

Canada sticks a privacy probe into OpenAI's ChatGPT

Grunchy Silver badge

So, roll your own

Gizmag has Stanford’s “how-to” roll your own Alpaca equivalent. That’s what I’m gonna do. Who needs chat gpt anymore? Nobuddy that’s who.

https://newatlas.com/technology/stanford-alpaca-cheap-gpt/

Samsung takes $3.1B gamble on OLED displays for tablets and notebooks

Grunchy Silver badge

I heard that the digital transition is nearing to $2 trillion industry, per year.

(It ain’t worth it!)

You can get way more mileage out of your existing PC by overwriting it with Linux. Potential savings: $2 trillion? Yeah I’ll give Linux a whirl.

Australia takes its turn to kick TikTok off government kit

Grunchy Silver badge

Tik Tok, nothing

You know what, I still never got around to trying out Facebook yet. Or even “Friendster.”

I’m still getting used to my Sharp PC-1500!

Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out

Grunchy Silver badge

I love the idea of UBPorts

I dislike Android, Google has no incentive to support any manufacturer that isn’t Google, so Android is perpetually out of date and buggy. I have a Planet Computer PDA, it’s stuck on Android 7. So is my T95Z media box, so is my blackberry Keyone stuck on older Android. My 2016 era Apple iPhone SE 1st gen is still fully supported, so I keep on using it!

I still run my DLink DNS-323 boxes, why? Because DLink gave away specs for free and Alt-F “alternative firmware” was created, and it works great! I can’t get over how tidy “BusyBox” is as the main Linux command repository, it just works great, man.

I’d love to get rid of Android forever on everything.

Smugglers busted sneaking tech into China

Grunchy Silver badge

I just bought 4 cpus from vendor in China, the 12/24 core units, cost me $36 apiece (completely obsolete 22nm devices). They were delivered via postal service and didn’t even trigger customs charges, Same with my $95 Tesla P4s I received last week. If I were to guess “why,” I’m pretty sure customs are amused by my toy supercomputer installation :)

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Grunchy Silver badge

And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

Loaded up on some more e5-2697 v2s for my $35 HP blade, cost me $36 apiece! 12/24 core units.

Technology prices are simply getting out of hand. “Moore’s Fault,” is more accurate.

Where in the world is Terraform Labs villain Do Kwon? Montenegro, actually

Grunchy Silver badge

It’s just as well, the only good time to visit Dubai is during Ramadan anyway. Well, because that’s the only time the attractions aren’t completely overrun by tourists, isn’t it. Just don’t let the po-po catch you with any food or water, or anything. Wrigleys? You can get chucked in the slammer if you can’t live without your chew.

… but outside of Ramadan, the whole place is a non-stop zoo.

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: The decision to use open source code isn't always made at the highest levels

… a lot of billable hours on the GPL, “copyleft,” and so forth !

Grunchy Silver badge

I don’t buy John Deere nuthen

They are hostile toward their customer so we should all endeavour not to be their customer.

Even easier since I was never in the market for John Deere nuthen!

Those guys comprise a colony of animalculous …

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

Grunchy Silver badge

Sony Home for PS3

I heard those guys were still trying to resuscitate the Sony Home service. It’s basically what Meta is trying to be, except it had become abandonware since about 2015. Maybe some laid-off Meta staff could jump on the project and help bring it back from the ashes?

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/11/26/playstation-home-revived-by-fans/amp/

'Robot lawyer' DoNotPay not fit for purpose, alleges complaint

Grunchy Silver badge

I love the idea because I hate all lawers

They shoulda paid extra for Watson (IBM) because he was mighty effective at beating up Ken Jennings.

I’m just waiting for the day that Watson humiliates all human lawyer parasites — IN COURT AND SETTING PERMANENT PRECEDENT.

(Open source only, of course. As far as I am concerned, IBM can go dry up & blow away.)

GitHub rolls out mandatory 2FA for loads of devs next week

Grunchy Silver badge

You are (generally) not allowed to use a VOIP cell number nor a VOIP SMS number as your 2FA account, why is that, well supposedly it’s because any hoodlum can create a new free one of those at any second. But yet the very same sysops have no problem with 2FA Gmail addresses …

Refreshed from its holiday, Emotet has gone phishing

Grunchy Silver badge

How could you find out you’re part of the botnet?

Is there a way to figure out if I’ve got a compromised device in my midst?

'Thousands' at Meta face layoffs this week

Grunchy Silver badge

I used Facebook once

This one time I found an iPhone 4 in the electronics recycling bin they used to have at Staples, so I snagged it.

But then! It was account locked. However, the owner thoughtfully put their personal details under the “Medical ID” portion of the emergency dial function. All I got out of it was their Facebook info, but it was enough to hound and pester them into dropping their iPhone 4 off their iAccount.

… and that’s how I got a free iPhone 4 to turn into my downstairs AirPlay receiver!

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

Grunchy Silver badge

No longer a product

Software isn’t a product that you can just buy anymore, now it’s become a subscription service.

Likewise the “agile” development scheme isn’t a Project Management technique. Instead, agile is more like a Service Management technique.

That’s because projects are supposed to end, and a final work product delivered. “Normal” software used to work like this, but now software projects never ever end. Well, they do, but only after some competitor came up with some new technology that made the old software obsolete. It’s not like the project ended so much as the service was abandoned.

“Abandonware.”

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Grunchy Silver badge

Pi-Hole in Alt-F

Well no, Pi-Hole won't work because my old DNS-323 (running Alt-F) doesn't have the necessary resources to run APT.

But I did find AdGuard Home for Arm5 runs magnificently within the 64 MB ram! It subscribes to any/all of the Pi-Hole filters and does daily updates and adds just 115 ms latency to any DNS lookup. Memory utilization holds to about 90%, CPU to about 15%. Swap file only 1 MB.

Works good and I did not have to buy anything or even do much config. I was already serving HDD over Ethernet (NAS) so why not host a freeware DNS filter too?

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Maybe they're expressing an opinion BECAUSE they are an intelligence organization

“If they have in their possession some internal Chinese government documents/communication that indicates a coverup..” well if that existed I would expect the FBI to say something a lot more definite.

This whole “gain of function” weaponization research theory doesn’t make any sense. Just making that stuff is a crime against humanity, you’d have to be a psychopath to do it in the first place, there’s no way funding for a disease that threatens all humans on Earth equally can possibly get funding.

Preposterous!

Grunchy Silver badge

Yeah but

Yeah, but it was stupidity that spread it so wildly. In fact I think Trump got a certain satisfaction from calling it a China Hoax in order to see how many of his moron followers he could kill.

Telus source code, staff info for sale on dark web forum

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Wait, what?

“Robbed,” when somebody doesn’t physically take anything but instead makes a perfect copy of your whole household except in their own household.

Which reminds me of the time I asked the security guy at Iko Industries (shingle manufacturer in Calgary) how come he even has a job, it’s like, who gives a toss about the security of asphalt shingles. You could wander around the entire compound and maybe find one or two things worth your while to pick up, and they are empty apple juice containers outside the smoke doors.

“Well!” offers our hapless hero, in full conspiratorial mode. “This one time in the 1950s there was this whole gang of Japanese visitors visiting from deepest darkest Japan, and they all had their finest Nikon Canon Fuji Konica Kyocera Minolta cameras out and they toured the whole plant and they shot the whole place to smithereens (on film, that is) and then they left leaving nothing behind but footprints, and two months later they had their own Iko Industries asphalt shingle plant, perfectly replicated in every detail, and so that’s how come we have such tight security to this day.”

I was like, “are you joking me? Man it’s friggin shingles who gives a toss,” and just like that he was fired and the security shed burned down, and now I can sell photos of those apple juice jugs without getting hassled by some id-10-t who has nuttin better to do, for heaven’s sake !

Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands

Grunchy Silver badge

Crashing into overhead power wires will 99% of the time crash you face-first into terra forms, and they are a couple orders of magnitude weaker than subsea cables. What level of malevolence are we recognizing here?

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Punk Programmers?

Yes but what if this is your only possible chance — in your entire lifetime — to collect on a portion of a (hypothetical) $17 billion windfall?

I mean, hey. Get real.

Grunchy Silver badge

When I was delivering for Amazon most times the customer would explicitly forbid any form of disturbance, especially by doorbell, and usually because the infants and pets had finally achieved peace in the household and the customers would tolerate no disturbance of that uneasy truce. However there was a sizeable contingent that insisted that the doorbell notification be rung, and most especially so if it were the “smart” doorbell security monitor that had already alerted the occupants of the invading presence by SMS delivery of the offending video footage!

I never touched those monitors on the grounds that a) the customer already acknowledged delivery over the loudspeaker, and b) who’s to say these aren’t fingerprint sensors out to gather and investigate my precious biometric data in order to learn all about my criminal past?

I say fuckem.

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