Best posts made by CoyneTheDup
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RE: The bad jokes topic 🐴🍹👨
This little piggy went to market;
This little piggy stayed home;
This little piggy had roast beef;
This little piggy had none;
This nerdy piggy cried "Wii! Wii! Wii! Wii!"
All the way home. -
RE: 😈 The Evil Ideas thread
You heard a lot of people talking about it in 2008-09, because more than a few of the greedier CEOes (especially those that bailed just before the crisis) really looked like they had intentionally driven their businesses under with the intention of robbing the company blind, then getting out before the shit hit the fan.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if it was deliberate. A lot of those people believe heavily in the ethical philosophy of Ayn Rand. One of its core ethical tenets, expressed via the character John Gault in Atlas Shrugged, is:
"I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Why would anyone expect a CEO with this philosophy to have the best interests of the company in mind? After all, to promote the success of the company against his own self interest—to "live for the sake" of the other employees and the stockholders—is a blatant violation of the ethic.
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RE: 😈 The Evil Ideas thread
Even if he's being paid handsomely to do so?
Meh. What's "pay", when you can have all the money?
Added:
I realized a bit later what you probably meant. But you're thinking he should have a "misguided" sense of loyalty. But loyalty—showing constant support or alleigance—is a violation of the ethic, because it implicitly places the person who is loyal in the position of service to another or to a cause.The Ayn Rand ethic insists the only value is loyalty to yourself; to your personal self interest. So I think it's fair to say that no one should expect an adherent to be loyal to any deal—at least not after a betrayal becomes more to self interest than loyalty.
A perfect example was presented on The Good Wife: An Ayn Rand adherent hired by a company had been caught traitorously planning to sell the company trade secrets—industrial espionage—presumably he planned to improve his income. But he was caught and terminated. Then the company became involved in a merger, and the traitor sued the company, alleging racism, and thereby threatening to torpedo the merger. The company could do little but settle to get rid of the lawsuit.
My thought is, what else would you expect an Ayn Rand adherent to do? This story was a perfect example of perfect self-interest on the part of the traitor; who cared for nothing but what benefited him personally.
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RE: 😈 The Evil Ideas thread
@antiquarian said:
What I've noticed about
objectivism, and libertarianismall systems of thought in general, is an influx of adherents with only the most superficial understanding of the philosophy
FTFY
"We take what we want and leave the rest, just like your salad bar." -Egg Shen, Big Trouble in Little ChinaExcept...why is it they (people of the past) seemed to take the best, while these modern adherents always seem to take the worst; for other humans I mean? The most selfish option...whatever happened to altruism?
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RE: 😈 The Evil Ideas thread
This nostalgia, it is not yet ripe: please replace it with some from an earlier batch...
"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization." —Sigmund Freud
Long ago, we formed a human civilization—an advanced stage of social development and organization—that, among other things, required a high degree of cooperation. Today, we seem to have people who want to revert to the period before that time...
(Ripe enough yet? That's about as far as I can go back...)
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RE: The Official Good Ideas Thread™
They need to carry it to the next logical step: a virus that identifies and tags creators of viruses and reports them to the authorities. Only fair, right?
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RE: Old New gnu [Object]
Oh.
Heh, I have your non-
<hr>
'd version of the raw in my screenshot :PI know. If you look close enough, you'll also see a non-balanced * in there.
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RE: This is why we can't have nice wireless things in the USA ....
That depends. If they're using a separate SSID and that gets routed so that you don't get charged for the traffic generated, do you really care that your ISP's device is doing this extra work?
It's not the SSID that concerns me.
I'm paying my ISP for 6 mbps, and given their normal proclivities ("We proudly offer up to 6 mbps!") I'm probably getting as little as 3 or 4% of that most of the time. Call it 10%, 600 kbps,
And now I'm going to have other people hooking their 14.4 mbps phones to my modem and sucking my bandwidth? Great, their phone's performance will suck, but so will my internet connection--probably at half the already sucky rate. A cellphone would hurt my performance even if I was getting the full 6 mbps, which I'm probably not.
And I had to pay for that. I was probably on a "1.5 mbps connection" and upgraded to 6, which cost me another $20 a month and now the bystander's cell is going to knock me back down into the basement again.
At least that's what I'm thinking AT&T will do to the people using its modems.
If you RTFA (or posts from people who did) they say that this stuff would be used inside buildings. Which is also apparently where most mobile data is consumed.
See above. Where did you think the bandwidth for those cells was going to come from?
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RE: It's 2016 and software ***STILL*** has problems with spaces in paths!
I'd think it would become pretty difficult to name 1,000 classes, say, with different pictures, and even more difficult to find the desired picture among a thousand others.
There's a reason we gave up hieroglyphics in favor of alphabets.
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RE: How can anyone be this stupid?
Are you sure about that one. After all we know that gravity didn't exist until Newton invented it. Imagine the monster it took to invent spiders.
You're saying some moron invented spiders? Who? His name must live in infamy forever. couldn't he have invented something good, like gravity?
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RE: This is why we can't have nice wireless things in the USA ....
They're unlicensed. Anybody can use them for any purpose, that's the point.
Licensed means that no one has to have a license to use a transmitter, so long as they meet other regulatory requirements.
For example, citizens band is unlicensed, but to use it there are requirements you have to meet, and you can't use it for anything but voice radio. You couldn't just shove cellphones in there, even though it's unlicensed.
I'm not very informed on this issue, but it looks to me like it is a move by AT&T and Verizon to take over more spectrum space, to drive competition out. It's not surprising: They envision a world where every device connects as a paid wireless (cellphone channel) with them being the ones being paid, of course. That's tied in with the same reasons they have defrauded the government on subsidies for wired connections; and the reason that Sandy Point still has no wired connections even now, years after the hurricane.
In the end, I think this will be fine, so long as the FCC follows through with plans to declare wireless a utility space.
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RE: The Quixotic Ideas Thread
@fbmac said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@CoyneTheDup well, you're the guys with all the nukes...
Who needs nukes when we have stupid laws?
Ummm...stupid laws in general, not the one @anonymous234 proposed in particular.
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RE: COBOL Quick Guide
All in all, that machine [CDC] was a major WTF in its own right...
It's word design (6 bit characters, 60 bit word, 10 characters to the word) was strange alright.
But WTF?
Up until the first Cray, the CDC series machines were the fastest in the world. CDC-6400? Record. CDC-6600? Record. CDC-7600? Record. I.e., not a WTF.
I sort of became disassociated with the products so I don't know what came after that. The CDC-8600 was faster than the 7600, but I'm not sure it ever sold. The CDC-Star-100, sold a few I think, and it was faster than the 7600, but not sure if it was faster than the 8600.
Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray machines was a principle architect at CDC.
Then there was the whole business about zero-padding (that is, colon-padding) to the end of the word meaning end-of-line, 12-bit ^-prefix encodings for lowercase characters and other delights.
Yes, those were fun, but I think you forgot about the fact that 12 bits of zero-padding was end of line. Which meant you needed another word if your string ended on the ninth-character boundary.
And I think everyone forgot another oddity: CDC was the only machine I know of with a 3-address instruction set. So a single instruction could do something like "add register 2 to register 5 giving register 3".
Imagine trying to write C string processing
functions on a system with +ve and -ve zeros!Everyone always brings that up because, yes, CDC did support a negative zero. However, no instruction produced a negative zero as a result, though they all handled negative zero on input. If you wanted negative zero, you had to force the value with a load. So I don't see a string issue with that--the 12-bits zero to end a string would be much more painful--it would only be an issue if the programmer made it one.
It never occurred to me at the time (not creative enough) but there's no reason a language on CDC couldn't have been built around 12-bit characters, or even 10-bit. I can't find an instruction set reference, but if I recall you had to use bit masking to access the characters anyway.
I remember once fielding a code change to support someone who was using my code on some sort of Cray system. The change? Removing the assumption that void * and char * were types of the same size. That weird Cray had char * be actually a structure saying what machine word the character was in, followed by what the offset within the word was.
That such a thing might even be conceivably standards compliant is the scary thing. (These days, I just say that architectures other than ILP32 and I32LP64 are essentially unsupported. Very few people care about that.)
That bit about word + offset would sure break all the library routines, wouldn't it?
But it's not hard to understand it being standard; C standard is pretty forgiving. I can't find it now, but somewhere there was an extensive list of misconceptions about C. Here's a few misconceptions I remember:
- null == 0
- pointer addresses are sequential
- pointers are the same size as int
- pointers for different types use the same addressing scheme and are the same size
- characters are 8 bits
There were others, but these are the ones I remember right off. Odds that C on the CDC proves the last 4, if not the first.
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RE: Old New gnu [Object]
wait, where tf did that
<hr>
come from??????????I had to edit to fix a couple of problems because I lost my temper at the non-compos-mentis software and threw a fit.
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RE: No ■■■■■■■ For You
I don't know why they didn't just use
.brotli
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RE: No ■■■■■■■ For You
Because they want to shave off 4 bytes
Oh, -- as a DBA at my company says, "Don't save me bytes." What do they think this is, the land of 5 megabyte drives and 8 KB memories?
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RE: Don't quote me
Wow, being able to give advice like that to a developer who doesn't know the difference between
==
and!=
... almost makes one give a bad advice or two, just to watch the fun.(Of course, you can't really ... it'd be like the little boy who cried wolf.)
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RE: Application prefs, the Adobe way
Well the Cancel button does work: It sends a Cancel message to a process that is frozen solid. It's not the button's fault that the process froze!
I can be pedantic, too. When I click the "Cancel" button, I want the process it is supposed to stop, to actually stop. It is insufficient for the "Cancel" button to depress and then return to normal.
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RE: Su Moo Nein The Belgium Comeex Foliatet Hist Wat Is Leepking Ingin Thes Tifler
BBC wants people to be scared of terrorists. And they want to make British people think their neighbors are all terrorists waiting to happen. And there's an implied "to become ISIS terrorists and so we're all going to die!!!" after every sentence in that article.
FTFY
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RE: The Howler
Yet another website shows why i run flashblock.
Flashblock, huh? I just disabled Flash, period. It was always failing...and something that fails a lot due to bad scripting is a potential security risk. So: Gone!
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RE: 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@coldandtired said in 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@anotherusername said in 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
You're right that all the states allow right turn on red... although in some states, it's prohibited on red arrows and only allowed on a round red signal. Other states don't differentiate between different red signals, allowing a right turn after stopping on any red light.
Is there anything in the US that is actually standardised across the whole country?
I could discuss how standards were invented here (even though I don't know that one way or the other.
I can show the xkcd comic on standards:
But the only answer that is really relevant...
@coldandtired said in 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
Is there anything in the US that is actually standardised across the whole country?
No.
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RE: 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
I'm... somewhat familiar with that idea. Just don't understand how it's possible for someone to take it to that extreme without being impressed by a clue-bat somewhere along the way.
If only there were such a thing as a clue-bat. Sadly there is not: people can believe any fantastic, inconsistent, BS that they want.
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RE: Let me just get Andrew Wiles for you
for less WTFy posting or to colourize and use as an avatar...
I don't know...I appreciate the effort, but the paste-it-on-a-table, take a picture and upload seems like the kind of WTFy we'd want here in TRWTF land.
13 + 03 = 13
Violates a condition no one bothered to report here. From Wikipedia: "No three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two." Mathematicians do not consider 0 a positive integer.
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RE: Pretty Aggressive Code
Their response: "No. Don't add another column to the view. It will break our process.""Process" being the hereto unknown jargon for "routine that consumes the view".
Really? Break the process? I can't help but think that this "process" includes code which:
Queries the view (potentially a Select * From ClientView)
Count the number of columns returned (Bonus points if it compares the names of the columns to what it expects)
If the above yields a number different to the actual amount of columns it wants, then throw an exception.I've seen third party providers do that BS: We had a badge printing application that required a simple one-row-per-badge table that only permitted views with pre-designated columns. They didn't care about the names though, only position/content. My guess was it was coded to use
SELECT * FROM view
, but the fetch was apparently hard-coded: we couldn't provide a column list, we could only name the view and database connection to be used as a source. Since it was third party, we couldn't make it better. -
RE: I can name all the States!
Well, it's actually an internal System call that may not have been vetted when you were learning.
That's hilarious.
But frankly, I suspect it has something to do with the insufficient interest factor returned by my LearnList() function during history and geography classes.
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RE: Let me just get Andrew Wiles for you
150 pages long, so I declined to copy it into Y!A.
Just copy something from Mathgen. He'll never notice anyway.
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RE: 😈 The Evil Ideas thread
You forgot to mention the downsides: pop-up ads, system file hijacking, and activity monitoring
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RE: The bad jokes topic 🐴🍹👨
Yeah, so when the chief engineer orders his operators to do exactly that, and they then scram the reactor in a blind panic to stop the resulting runaway reaction, it would cause a teensy little power surge.
I'm sure the graphite tips had an effect, yes. But it's small...and in this case, given the "runaway reaction" in progress, it was sort of like throwing a lit match into a forest fire.
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RE: UFO Blogger 'Discovers' Belgium On Mars
Those particular "flows" or similar structures seem before, were thought to be flowing sand. Sorry, no reference. But as you noted, they don't look like flowing water.
But a short time ago NASA did report evidence for flowing water in at least one location:
NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars
Their evidence is the presence of hydrated salts (crystallized soluble compounds containing water as part of the crystals). Those could only exist on Mars in the presence of a water source, because the atmosphere is so dry the water would quickly leak out of the crystals, leaving behind an anhydrous powder.
The salts are perchlorates, which would be a source of oxygen, independent from the water.
The lineae (dark lines) in Garni crater also look more water-like, to me at least:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/15-195_perspective_6.jpg
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RE: New (to me) Windows Internets Security Feature
I've never seen Word react to the flag in that way. Usually it opens the document in "reader" mode with a little notice that says it's read-only and you can use "Save As..." if you really want to edit it.
Okay, yes, it puts it in reader mode. Right now, if I save it I can edit it, but that's apparently changing, isn't it?
Your company should be on a domain, and this would be a non-issue.
It flags files that come from some domain/internet location your computer doesn't trust. If it's all internal business-y stuff, it should all be on the same trusted domain. Or your admin guy done fucked up gud.
We are on a domain, and it forces the documents to reader mode anyway. That's on the same domain; and then there's the parent company domain...guess how that works? I don't know about the fucked up part, but I doubt it since we had people from Microsoft from France and Germany learning how to fix their domain bugs off our setup.
Generally, my uncle has remained a teetotaler, excepting occasional getting smashed like a Messerschmitt.
So why do you persist in saying that uncle is a terrible uncle, while you're ecstatic about the uncle who's a complete sot?
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RE: Poll: Which smartphone OS do you use?
Windows Phone is like the guy that comes just before the end of the party, and he didn't bring any beer
So...not Tim, right?
So because Android 2 sucked, it's ok for WinPhone and iPhone to suck too?
Well, no. But you have to understand that the is not high here. Easy to jump over and pretend you're a better solution.
Fast forward to their tepid attempts to enter the phone market, and you wonder if it is the same company being discussed.
Well, I think you have the answer right there: tepid. They really didn't want to be in the phone market at the time they entered, I think. Major player in games and PC, that's our forte, why fight for a share of a phone market already dominated by other players.
It's really interesting to watch corporate reasoning sometimes. After their tepid entry, what do they do but decide that all PC's should look like cellphones--one app at a time, touch interface, no mouse. It's like :WTF:?
E_DUMB_PHONE_NOT_FOUND
Time to upgrade, maybe?
Majority of money/profits, because that is all that matters:
But look who they're selling to. It's like that commercial about people that don't have to worry about wasting their money.
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RE: I'm getting mixed signals here
Well, I tried my CSI-fu but it's just not very good...no facial recognition on this. The raindrops probably didn't help.
If we knew where it was, we could probably get your height though, and a decent guess as to your weight.
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RE: Steam "Support"
Am I the only one who does not understand "international version" <-> "your region"? Which country on this planet is not part of "international"? That sounds quite a bit oxymoronic.
There are many idiots here in the USA who use "international" as a synonym for "foreign". In their view, there is them people in the USA and then there is them foreigners. But foreigner became a "bad word" a while back, after which those same people started substituting "international".
So his friend gave him a game intended for use in some country(ies) outside the USA, and that game cannot be used inside the USA, probably because Steam charges $ for the foreign country and $$$$$$$ for the USA version.
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RE: The ironic ideas thread
So. I'm not sure if my idea is ironic enough to post here. Is that ironic?
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RE: The bad jokes topic 🐴🍹👨
Okay, okay, @blakeyrat , @Lorne_Kates I'll never quote a comic strip in here again.
Sheeeeeeeeeshhhh!
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RE: Credit card surcharge -- implement *that*, suckers ...
It was supposed to be fact. But looking at the sentence, well, it should have been "fact" (with quotes). Two mea culpa.
And...how do you know that all @accalia mistakes aren't actually made by me?
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Could you pass a US citizenship test?
Could you pass a US citizenship test?
Active test on The Christian Science Monitor. Very long, 96 multiple choice questions, you need a while to complete it.
I missed 5 questions. (Actually, 6, but I don't count the one where my mouse double-clicked...who doesn't know the father of our country?)
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@boomzilla said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@ben_lubar said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
How much is a Mo? WHY DO YOU PEOPLE THINK THIS GIBBERISH IS FUNNY?
Some people do, because of their GUI Privilege.
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RE: Credit card surcharge -- implement *that*, suckers ...
Never mind that AVS is a to international travelers...
Well that just makes it a bigger than I even thought.
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RE: Cable geniuses at my school
(Pre-note: I'm assuming this is a government school; it doesn't actually say that but...it seems likely.)
That's moderately unlikely - I've had to do requests for tenders myself (for my physics equipment) and it is an umitigated pain in the ass.
But bid rigging and fraud it is a daily thing, isn't it? See, on one hand you have government with poor accountability and essentially unlimited money; and on the other hand you have people who want that money and to not have to give anything in return for it...
I mean, they automated everything? What's wrong with pull-string blinds? And lights that you switch on and off manually? I'm surprised the toilets don't flush on schedule. It's a textbook case of stuffing in everything they could possibly collect a buck for and, while I have no proof, I'll bet all those little devices were marked up...into the stratosphere.
And the result? An unworkable and frustrating experience.
I guess Hanlon's razor is right again.
When money is at issue, some malice is almost always present. Nevertheless, Hanlon's razor is right because malice in maximal separation of [government/suckers] from their money does usually require stupidity.
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RE: Cable geniuses at my school
Sounds like a tech company made a gigantic profit, though. That's what really matters, right?
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RE: Back in the day - instruction fun - data center manager: WTF
Did you also add it to a mission-critical application? If not, not a WTF.But still, very fun, I salute you.
That was back when even an amateur hacker (I didn't even know that word) and student like myself wanted to do useful things on the computer. That's why it had to run in bottom-feeder priority--that way it didn't disrupt real work. Putting it in something mission critical never even occurred to me.
Nowadays, though...if there were still a CIR, a company would make this part of the app and make you pay to turn it off. ("Oh, you need better performance?...")
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RE: 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
Maybe it was a bit low key. It was this part:
[Hoda Hawa, policy director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council] and others interviewed were particularly troubled by a question that she said asked the user to identify which of four or five posts on social media should raise alarm. Among the choices were a person posting about a plan to attend a political event, or someone with an Arabic name posting about going on “a mission” overseas. The correct answer was the posting with the Arabic name.
Because obviously, only an Arab-Muslim rag head can ever possibly be a terrorist, right? An Arab-Muslim would never be in the U. S. military and so a mission overseas must always be a rag head mission of terror, right? And no one with a good-old-boy American name like Jared Lee Loughner would ever be going to a political rally to commit a terrorist act like shoot a U. S. Representative in the head, right? And now one with a good-old-boy American name like Timothy McVeigh would ever blow up a building and kill 168 people, including 19 kids, right?
So, and quite clearly, and because the FBI is dumber than a bag of rocks, the FBI edutainment program for students teaches them to "identify the rag head name" because that's always the terrorist, don't you know?
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RE: Could you pass a US citizenship test?
@xaade said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:
Let's let everyone run, and everyone can vote for whoever.
But, how would we convince the majority of the nation to trust the President if only 13% of the nation voted for him, followed by the 99 other guys that earned 7/8s of a percent.Well then we'd just use one of those new-fangled plurality systems to decide which candidate should win.
I can't find it right now, but I read this article by a mathematician. He laid out five candidates with variant minority vote counts and showed how, with different plurality rules, any of the candidates could win.
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RE: Plane not actually commandeered by wi-fi that was not actually hacked
While I stand behind the security principle arguments, I find that part of the reason there is so much confusion is because I mixed up a previous system, ACARS, with the current system of discussion, ARINC-664. They are both avionics systems but have entirely different purposes. The security argument is old and ongoing. If you read this, please keep the qualification in mind.
Good grief, this fallacy again: "Oh noes, one system has been proven insecure! That means everything else must be insecure too!"
Security is only falsifiable. Break it, and we've proven it is not secure. But even if we fail to break it, that doesn't prove it is secure, merely that we have not found a technique by which it can be broken. Admittedly, re your statement above, it is possible that no such technique exists, but it is impossible to prove no such technique exists.
So because security is only falsifiable, because it is impossible to prove security, it is a fallacy to claim any system is secure; logically, such a statement means nothing. You can evaluate a system and rate its security, but not prove it is secure.
Now with respect to the plane avionics all statements from all the different parties and agencies agree and boil down to, "This system is secure." That statement is a fallacy, meaningless. Since security can only be rated, it would be better for them to be able to say something like, "100 hackers attempted to break this system for a month and found no insecurities."
So give the plans to 10 or 20 or 100 hackers and let them have access to the system, try to break it for a month. If the system survives the challenge, at least we can say X very smart people tried hard and didn't find any way to break it: it's probably secure enough. Publish the plans on the web and set up a public test system; let people continue to try to break it. There's nothing to fear, after all, because the system is secure. Right?
Some mechanisms are inherently more secure. We're not talking about encryption protocols, we're talking about hardcoded routing tables, airgaps, and communication lines to the cabin that are one-way down to the electrical level.
In theory, that should make it more secure, yes. It is the shared endpoints that would be the concern. It will be the implementation details that will be the killer: Did some engineer in some company decide to make a router's configuration accessible to an unrestricted port? Did the information sharing component open an avionics system to attack from the passenger side? Is it possible to block avionics communications by having a passenger-side router jabber at an avionics router? And in the future: Will they someday decide to give the pilot access to the avionics via the passenger WiFi, so he could keep track of things from his cell phone app?
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RE: Silicon Valley is horrible shit
I don't know, but after looking through her analysis, I think it can be summed up simply, "Don't eve think about it."
(The best one is, "We want someone financially independent [and a while later] but not so financially independent they'd buy a Rolex. We mean, we want you to pay your bills, but you shouldn't have anything left over for 'personal luxuries'." And, no doubt, "Shared luxuries are fine, though.")
I mean, with all those restrictions, why even advertise? Is there some kind of mandate that they advertise for roommates?
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RE: Windows 10 automatically installing :shit:
Every time my dad starts up his laptop, he gets a huge popup that says "WARNING: YOUR PRINTER'S YELLOW CARTRIDGE IS EXPIRED". I told him that as long as he doesn't try to eat it he should be fine.
Seriously, what is it with HP and having ransomware come with a physical object that you bought?
Hewlett Packard (and most other printer makers these days) do not sell printers. They give away printers and then sell ink or toner cartridges. If you use your printer enough to use one per month, you'll probably pay at least three times the price of your printer for cartridges in the first year.
And, yes, that is a bad idea...for us. Great for them, bad for us.