Posts by Orv 1955 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
What we're talking about here is a "current value" policy vs. a "replacement value" policy. In the US homes are usually insured for replacement value, but I don't know what the situation is in the UK. Cars, on the other hand, are usually insured for their current value unless you specifically negotiate a replacement value policy. Replacement value automotive policies are more common for things like RVs and collector cars.
I had this happen once but it was the result of the server being compromised, not the direct result of a previous employee's actions. Like you I just wiped it and moved on. I figured if I reported it I was risking a three-letter agency showing up and confiscating all our gear as evidence, which would have put us out of business.
This also used to be a common way to hide "non-approved uses" such as game servers, IRC servers, and MUCKs, back when always-on home Internet was rare. Almost all of that stuff was either under someone's desk at a university or at an Internet start-up somewhere.
The "rods from God" studies the US military did assumed a tungsten rod roughly the size of a telephone pole. It would be pretty hard to hide a bundle of those inside a comms satellite. Such a rod would hit the ground going about Mach 10, with a kinetic energy equivalent to a bit over 11 tons of TNT. The problem is the rod itself weighs over 9 tons, so all the complexity really isn't gaining you much over conventional munitions.
If you try to go compact with it the yield gets worse really quickly. Also keep in mind you can't just drop them; each one needs a thruster to de-orbit it.
It'd be pretty dumb to post fake orbital elements. It's not like they're hard to check.
Their concern is more that they don't know what those satellites are carrying, and there are so many that they're always overhead. Indeed, the whole network design requires that there always be at least one Starlink bird overhead at any given moment.
You don't have to be evil to have that policy. There are good reasons for not hanging on to everything. I work at a university, so I have to think about the amount of effort required to sort through everything when we get a public records request. One case (that I thankfully wasn't involved in) involved a professor who was in a messy divorce. His ex-wife filed a public records request for all of his email, which he'd packratted for years. It took forever to sort through it all. I'm not sure if she was looking for evidence of infidelity or if it was just to force all the extra work on him. (Punitive records requests are definitely a thing.)
Several years back Google assessed their hiring process by checking in on whether candidates that had been highly ranked were more likely to still be working there later. They found their hiring process was no better than chance.
No one knows how to do hiring.
You're not wrong, but I'm also having trouble thinking of a hosting service and registrar that I'd describe as competent. Dotster bought out a company that had one of my domain names and screwed things up so badly that, five years later, I can still only manage it by filing tickets. Their web control panel can see it but insists I don't own it.
You're not wrong, exactly, but the fact is most FOSS projects never attract that much attention from other developers; they mostly are one-man shows.
As far as helping land a job, why would a company hire you when you've already demonstrated you'll work for free?
FOSS is all too often the equivalent of artists being asked to do work "for exposure."
No one is talking about outlawing being a jerk, but too many jerks think no one should be allowed to impose any consequences for their behavior. Private platforms kicking you out for bad behavior is not the same thing as it being "outlawed." You're not entitled to an audience for your assholery.
It's not like AIs have some magical link to absolute truth, and we're censoring its truth bombs because it's too accurate. It's getting a filtered view of the world to begin with based on what's in its training sets. Training sets by their nature are often biased -- both by the cultural content they're extracted from and by what's conveniently available. Image recognition AIs hallucinate giraffes because people take more pictures of giraffes than they do of empty savanna. Facial recognition AIs can't tell black people apart because there aren't very many black people in their training sets.
Besides, the fact that humor is contextual and there are things you don't say in polite company is as much a part of our world as anything else, and if AI is going to interact in human culture it needs to learn that, too.
Something this big is going to do damage no matter how slowly it lands, unless it has the good luck to land in an open field. If it tangles with a high-voltage power line it's likely to black out power to tens of thousands of people.
No, if they want it they'll shoot it down over the ocean.
When you're trying to shoot something down from that high up, you don't really get to pick exactly where it lands. Few parts of the US are actually completely unpopulated. There's also what happens to your stray bullets or missiles -- look up the "Battle of Palmdale" for an example of how this can go wrong.
It's better than it once was in that you no longer need to use a calculator to work out cylinder/head/sector numbers by hand, but it's still pretty clunky. It hasn't changed much in years.
Part of the reluctance to add things like a fancier shell is because they don't want the base system to depend on any packages, but they also don't want it to get too bloated. These are competing forces that result in all the BSDs being a bit stripped down. I will note that basic command line editing does work out of the box now for every account except root. (Root's shell is special because it needs to work even if the shared libraries aren't available; if you want a different shell when you're root you're expected to use the "toor" account. These days I use sudo for pretty much everything so I don't bother.)
I don't think that's universally true; I routinely install Ventura on disconnected systems using a boot disk. You do need to connect to their servers if you need a firmware update, though. And systems bought by institutions that use Apple School Manager or the like will naturally "phone home" so they can connect to the proper device management system.
I actually find the configuration stuff on macOS pretty centralized compared to Windows. It's pretty much all in System Preferences. Windows has two different Control Panels for crying out loud.
I think most of the complaints about macOS boil down to "it's different from what I'm used to."
Now, if you're talking about configuring from the command line, yeah, it's a mess. That's where FreeBSD really shines, since almost everything is in /etc/rc.conf.
I always heard that the process of fertilizing, cultivating, and distilling ethanol created more carbon emissions than it saved, but it's possible the equation has changed. I know the ethanol plant they built where I grew up used massive amounts of natural gas.
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