Posts by Pascal Monett 19134 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And if the Earth stopped turning tomorrow the Sun wouldn't rise any more. Let's keep the comparisons in the realm of the possible, shall we ? Google is an ad broker, whatever we use is just a vehicle for those ads. As such, it's ecological stance is a PR stunt, nothing more.
I believe that, given the toxicity of this whole affair, anyone putting their support behind Battistelli must be aware that they could very well be caught in the downdraft when the hammer finally falls.
Because the hammer is on its way, now.
Shenanigans like that make me feel that I am reading an article from the 80s about some Soviet guy praising the Politburo to get some much-needed brownie points.
Then, the week after, there is a footnote in the news about a regrettable accident in the metro, and the guy disappears from all the official photos.
So, looks like there is still room for "improvement".
Meaning, a company that has the means and resources to ensure that something like this does not happen.
Which, subsequently, makes the breach absolutely inexcusable.
Then, of course, comes the laundry list of technical questions, including the most important : was the data encrypted and, if not, why not ?
Given the number of people affected, it would be proper to see the board resign in its entirety regardless of whether there is a proper explanation or not. That, of course, will never happen.
I don't know about England, but in France when you are working for the Government, you have a duty of restraint. The fact that the account is personal makes no difference to the fact that, as a Government worker/contractor, what you say reflects partly on the Government you work for.
It is in that sense that I completely understand the Home Office's action.
Great ! Now we just need a way to transport a person one atom at a time in said nano craft.
That should probably allow the pieces to survive the 28.41 years it should take to get there at that speed.
Oh, and we shouldn't forget to build another laser array on the other side before we get there, to slow the nanocraft down.
Then all we need to do is use a 3D printer to put all the atoms back together.
Childs' play, I tell you.
Um, Mr Comey, I do believe that at least priests are not going to agree with you.
And, as far as blaming Snowden, that is just shooting the messenger.
In a way, it is comical how these types keep trying the same argument, and blaming everyone else for not "playing along". It doesn't matter that you want a backdoor, Comey, what matters is that if we admit that you do get an encryption scheme that has your precious FBI/NSA/CIA/MI5/KGB-enabled backdoor, everyone in the world will migrate to an encryption scheme that does not have one.
Of course, at that point I fully believe that you will shout at everyone to obey US law. Good luck with that.
Apparently I missed a page, but Wikipedia does not agree with you. It states that Blue Origin made its first test flight in 2015, not 2010.
The article clearly indicates that "the first developmental test flight of the New Shepard occurred on April 29, 2015", and I should have checked that out before firing off my original comment.
So I stand corrected, Bezos has launched a test vehicle, which means that he is a lot farther than I thought he was. I had never heard of Blue Origin before this article. Having brought the launch vehicle back right next to the launch pad obviously means things are under control and progressing well enough to make the Eutelsat statement viable.
So I am now looking forward to seeing yet another launch vehicle in space in 2022.
Absolutely. Building rockets that work is just about the hardest engineering challenge there is. So I'm a bit dubious that this announcement will actually result in a successful launch in 2022.
SpaceX was founded in 2002, and has only managed a successful launch since last year. That's 15 years of (intense) work.
Bezos thinks he can do the same in less than 6 years ? Nope. Even if he poaches NASA scientists and SpaceX personnel, 2022 will not be a launch year for Blue Origin.
On the other hand, it is interesting to note that there is now another billionaire intent on reaching orbit. I guess that means that space is getting less expensive, which should be a Good Thing (TM).
From what I've heard, greylisting only hits the first mail that arrives from an unknown address. It dynamically adjusts when it recieved the mail again and that address becomes basically whitelisted.
So the marketing department will gnash its teeth the first time, not afterwards. And they should be happy about it, because it's that much less of a chance they'll click on a bad link.
Well, if your face hits the sidewalk after having jumped from the top of the Empire State Building, then yeah, it's a bit like that.
I'm guessing that any collision in space is going to have rather disastrous consequences, and a collision with a moon is more likely to be called "pancaking" than simply "colliding".
Fair and rational in this case being "keep our privileges active". Talk about having blinkers . .
The whole visa thing is going the way of the patent office. Suspending options that allow abuse can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, there's a good chance that said options will be reactivated.
Those are the golden words that instantly make me put a company on my personal black list.
Congratulations, CloudPets, I will now and forevermore not only not purchase any of your products but I will additionally express my opinion of your shoddy handling of this issue to everyone within earshot.
Remember : mistakes can be forgiven, we are all human, but sweeping mistakes under the rug of silence cannot. That is a sign of a specific behavior : the inability to own up to one's mistakes. And if you can't own up, you'll never correct them.
I completely respect the fact that you have an average vehicle ownership time of "a bit over four years". Obviously, in your particular case, my analysis does indeed fall down.
Now, for my analysis to "fall down" globally, you'd have to decide that most people have the same average ownership time. You will allow me to doubt that, if only for the fact that I know people who change vehicle every two years. In my particular case, I have owned an Open Kadett for 11 years, a BMW 330d for six and a half, and my latest is an Audi A5 which I bought in 2012 and I am nowhere near thinking about selling it. That is among a few other cars that have passed in my hands more briefly, I freely admit. So my average is significantly higher than yours, even considering the Laguna 2 I only had for 3 years.
I will not, however, consider that my ownership times are common either. I base my opinion on the fact that are more poor people that own cars than there are rich ones, and if the rich people do indeed have the means to change cars regularly, poor people don't. Rich people can choose how long they want to own their car(s), poor people make do with theirs until they don't have the choice any more.
I do believe that that tends to bring ownership times to significantly over a presidential mandate. I will be quite happy to be directed to some actual statistics drawn from a population study that demonstrate that this belief is wrong.
People in a given socio-economic are show their preferences by their lifestyle and vote accordingly. Last year's presidential election was thus correlated by the study. Interesting.
Now explain how the government changes sides every few elections and how to predict that despite the fact that people generally change cars less often than they vote for president.
It's prison, there is no justification for functioning mobile phones. Guards have their radios, prisoners have a wall phone in the dedicated area they can get to when they're authorized to. Blanket the area with jamming, no reason not to. No rights are being infringed thanks to the presence of the wall phones.
As for theaters/cinemas, I'd agree but apparently there, there is a question of rights, namely the right to annoy everyone with a phone complaining about how much it costs to be there trumps the right to benefit from the play/film you paid the same bloody amount to see in peace.
Um, sorry but putting car sharing in the same basket as taxi driver is not, in my opinion, justified. Car sharing is something you organize with people who have a common destination and, upon arrival, everyone disembarks until it is time to go back. It is generally a round-trip affair. A taxi is there is take a few people to a specific place and then take another fare to somewhere else (in ideal conditions). It is a series of single-trip drives by a driver who has no specific interest in going to any of those places outside of the money he makes.
Personally I think it is blindingly obvious that a taxi driver, being in a professional capacity, should bloody well be able to speak the language of the country he's working in, if only for safety reasons. How is he going to call for an ambulance in case of accident where he's the only one conscious ? Not to mention the more common understanding-your-customer day-to-day stuff that does make things go better, generally speaking.
That Uber is against it is not a surprise ; Uber is against anything that costs it money, including paying their taxi drivers - but they have trouble wiggling out of that one (not that don't try). Taxi companies everywhere need a bit of competition, but backstabbing Uber is not that.
This is great : a cloud service falls down so hard it can't even notify customers it is down. And, way down the line, thermostats can no longer be changed, mouse settings are frozen and God knows what else.
This is absolutely perfect and should happen a lot more often until people finally get fed up and demand things that work ALL THE DAMN TIME, like they used to before this happy-happy age of sharing everything with the NSA whether you want to or not.
IoT ? Not while I still have a functioning brain, thank you very much. My light switch does not depend on the Internet and never will.
So it is totally their fault, no reason to rollback at all, nosiree.Yes, it is quite obviously their fault, but maybe you could offer a rollback option anyway, just to show how l33t and magnanimous you are while letting over 16000 people get on with their lives ?
Just an idea.
That is not the question. Obviously, the rules should apply.
The real issue is why haven't the rules been applied properly up to now ? Why is it that suddenly there is a flurry of activity around actually applying rules ?
If these rules had been applied from the start with proper oversight, then this situation would simply never have happened. One more case of government failure causing more pain than usefulness.
I think that laws should have the same shelf life as stuff you keep around the house : if you haven't used it in the past three years, you never will and you should throw it out.
fscked by SHA-1 collision? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds
That may indeed happen.
I totally trust Torvalds to quickly learn from the experience and do the right thing. Actually, I'm certain he is already considering alternatives. For all his outbursts and temperamental postings, Torvalds is unquestionably intelligent and reasoned. You might fool him once, but you won't get a second chance.
Agreed. When I read that I thought "ZIP file" immediately.
I'm always happy for anything that speeds up rust storage, and it's a good sign that the people involved seem serious, but there's got to be something more than a basic encoding of that kind, otherwise Windows would be a damn sight faster than it is.
Here's to the future of SIO anyways !
Thank you for that link. I learned that I had totally belonged to the group that imagined that the Moon orbited Earth, but it actually orbits the Sun with a bit of gravitational perturbation from that ol' ball of Earth.
A disturbing perspective. I might, with the good help of my friend Jack, be able to drink that away and consider that lizard men are once again trying to conspiracy-theory influence reality, but that will take some time.
In any case, I cannot shake the belief that the discussion around the planetary status of Pluto is more down to the fact that it is the only planetary body discovered by an American than any truly scientific discussion. Typical New World nuisances that have to have something important to their name since they only have a quarter of a millennium to show History.
Personally, I find it much more logical to imagine that Pluto belongs to the undoubtedly large Kuiper Belt Objects group rather than consider it a Planet. Maybe adding another rule, something along the lines of "a planet cannot have a moon larger than one-half its mass" would quell the discussion (yeah, right).
All of this will not keep Planet X from being called a Planet, though, as soon as we find where the bloomin' dale it is.
I can believe that ; unlike any claims about cabon-nanotube whatevers that have been trumpeted for the past decade at least and there's still nothing on the horizon.
I'm sure that there are just as many billions involved and the potential is just as enormous, but somehow the entire storage industry seems to have a rocket strapped to its R&D, whereas energy is putting along in a golf cart.
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