Posts by John Brown (no body) 28765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"these vulnerabilities will last the life of the product."
So, that would be an inherent manufacturing defect which the manufacturer or retailer is directly responsible for under the terms of the guarantee, yes? After all, if software/firmware is designed and "built" by engineers, then it's an "engineering" issue.
"Forget it’s a satellite link for a moment, this is nothing other than an RF connection carrying unencrypted traffic,"
This was my thought too. Few providers other than specialised ones offer in-flight encryption. Most ISPs and/or transit providers only send and receive data for their customers. It's up to the customer to decide if the want to encrypt their data. It's a non-story to anyone who has given it more than a moments thought. Anyone who hasn't given it a moments thought isn't sending anything important or is in the wrong job.
Not quite how it's supposed to work. What should happen is when they caught with their hands in the cookie jar and lose the case, they are supposed to stop putting their hands in the cookie jar. Not find other ways of getting the cookies out of the jar until caught again. FFS, even a 3yo can figure that out! But not $big_corp.
"On phoning before even dropping the customers into an ACD system as limited as the FAQs, they're played a long recording to the effect that they could get in touch via the website."
Pretty much every local Council I've ever dealt with do exactly that. The helpdesk is invariably understaffed and the attempts to stop users from phoning have resulted in culling even more helldesk staff. The solution to the long wait times when phoning is the only option? Departmental "digital champions", ie people with minimal training or a "hobby interest" in IT becoming voluntary level 1 support in addition to their own job and, if lucky, get a pittance extra in their pay packets.
The difference is that the Chinese didn't just have a strop and ban them, They may have had a strop behind closed doors, but they used their actual laws, ie they have strict censorship laws which Google et al wouldn't or couldn't adhere to. You may or may not agree with the censorship laws in China, but they are the laws in place. AFAICIS, Trump is simply going after the Chinese companies "because he can", ie they are not breaking any existing US laws.
"China holds plain-vanilla U.S. Treasury bonds. Those are bearer and fungible, i.e. the U.S. can't selectively default against a holder they don't like, not without reneging on their whole debt."
The current President of the USA has form in that department. He sees bankruptcy as just another fiscal tool in the armoury.
"Excel's import of text files has always been miserable, though this isn't helped by the deficiencies of the CSV format. But it really would be useful to be able to disable type inference as a preference and not fiddle with it, file by file."
Thankfully, I've not had to deal with the vagaries of CSV files and various programs' methods of imparting them for many, many years. But I do remember having to wrangle CSV files to get them into DBase II, Delta, SuperCalc and Lotus123, often writing code specific to a particular CSV file to make it look like what the destination program expected.
"The days of the 1990s, when companies I worked for didn't get to release new products until QA said they were allowed to, are long gone."
In general, those days are still here where the application is life or safety critical. Clearly something as critical as an election should be treated the same way. If only one of the "voting machine" builders would work that way, they'd amortise the cost over the much larger market they could command for a reletivley modest increase in the sale price.
"No doubt there will be at least a few states where he's in the lead on election night, but loses once all the absentee ballots are tallied."
Ah, something else different. Here in the UK, postal votes are sent in advance and counted on the night with all the rest. Not hours or days later.
We still do manual counting of ballots here in the UK and one of our local cities, pop. 340,000 is usually first in with their results, their record being 48 minutes after the polls closed. The election is usually a done deal within 4-5 hours of the polls closing, only the some of the more outlying Highlands and Islands constituencies coming in late due to obvious logistics issues.
All it takes is logistics and people. Nothing complex. On the other hand, we tend to hold only one election at a time. We tend not to vote for our local Sheriff or dog-catcher on the same ballot.
"it rearranged a bunch of albums incorrectly"
Sometimes, Albums, playlist, tv series etc are released in a different order in different parts of the world for various reasons. I find online source designed to list album tracks or TV series by adding metadata etc are invariably based on what was released in the USA and sometimes orders stuff for me in ways I don't it to or adds incorrect metadata to what it deems is the correct track based on the track number.
"Search defaults to online media rather than your library, and then when you switch to your uploads, it lists all the music in a random order. Trying to actually find the album is a nightmare."
It's funny how open source s/w such as Kodi allow you to select how things are sorted or displayed, have multiple options for showing lists in different ways and many, many complete new skins to changes things so you get pretty much exactly what YOU want in a media player. But most of the paid ones and ALL of the branded ones such as from Google,m Netflix, Amazon etc, with their huge dev and advertising budgets can't seem to offer even the most basic user customisation options. It's their way or the highway.
"I'd be "rather irritated" if I had to be out of touch from family, friends, people who service the car, people I buy stuff from, etc, etc, etc for 10 for 11 hours a day.
So? It's barely a generation since that was the norm. I understand your point, I just don't thinks it's as big a problem as you seem to do.
"And of course that's not possible with lots of newer devices. Taking the SIM out may help."
To echo the first quoted sentence in relation to the second quoted sentence, "And of course that's not possible with lots of newer devices." because they use software SIMs. Not that it matters, because a SIMless phone can still make emergency calls therefore it's still connected and identifiable by the IMEI.
"So China bans FaceBook, Google and Twitter but the USA banning TikTok is unfair and goes against market transparency."
Correct. Hypocricy on both sides. But China have laws on censorship which Google et al were unable to follow properly with filtering and take downs, so got told to follow the law or get out. The USA is being far more blatant. TokTok are not apparently breaking any laws but are being threatened spuriously anyway.
As people often say when defending Amazon, Google et al tax payments, if you want things to change, make the laws that you need to get the change.
"China have always been very restrictive of letting foreign companies into their market, and even those that jump the hurdles and submit to the restrictions find themselves in a biased market."
The Chinese ruling elite have long memories and long term plans. The remember The Opium Wars. That's a big reason to distrust outside powers aside from politics and dogma.
"all the big social media platforms are already owned by US companies."
..or have been/will be bought up by cash rich US tech giants. We've already seen Google and Facebook buy up competitors putatively to operate them, then shutting them down because "we wanted the IP and technology" making it harder to even begin to compete and knowing you'll get stamped on if it looks like you might succeed. And now we have Bezos admitting that Amazon staff get to see ALL the data for sales through their site so they can decide what to sell, and for how much, in direct competition with their own sellers/marketplace shops, the very people who made Amazon what it is.
This is the downside of free market capitalism with little to no regulation or oversight. Monopolistic behaviour and abuse.
You are failing to take into account the fact that even with lockdowns and/or other quite severe restrictions, many places saw their medical systems almost at the breaking point. Without temporary restrictions, the death rates would have been much higher due to lack of ICU beds, lack of ventilators etc, Just look at the USA today. They talk of a "second wave", but from what I'm seeing, they are still not managing to escape the first wave. It's still ongoing and some states are again almost at breaking point.
He was referring to my 1.7 million figure based on Long John Silvers "death rate" and his suggestion covid-19 should be allowed to "run rampant".
I too am shocked at the downvoters who clearly think 1.7 million deaths is acceptable. It may even be significantly higher since allowing it to "run rampant" would mean people who might be saved in hospital won't be due to the sheer number of cases and ICU availability. This isn't even "science". It's not even maths. It's basic arithmetic FFS.
"As of July 10, the USA CDC regarded 0.65% to be the current best estimate of 'Infection Fatality Ratio' (IFR, aka case-fatality). "
Total population of the USA: 328,000,000
You want about 80% to get infected to get herd immunity: 262,400,000
Death rate quoted by you, 0.65% : Resulting deaths: 1,705,600
You happy with that? 10x more than the current number of deaths?
"Most people had the infection already.
Total confirmed cases is about 300K. Even if you assume the actual real life figure is ten time greater, that's still a hell of a long way from "Most people had the infection already." Maybe we guess a 100x greater? That's still only half the population.
I'd be interested in where you get that from.
Clearly you don't understand the point. The mask isn't to protect YOU from others. It's protect others from YOU. ie it reduces the spread of virus through breathing, talking or coughing by someone who may be infected. If you're not infected, wearing a mask won't do you any harm but if you ARE infected and don't know it yet, it could be saving others.
"Given that transmission rates are supposed to be extremely low for those without symptoms, and symptoms are extremely rare in the young, we should NEVER HAVE CLOSED THE SCHOOLS."
Does that plan involve teachers spending all day in HazMat suits? Likewise, have you cracked the problem of identifying just how immune a recovered patient is and for how long? No one else seems to have that cracked yet and people all over the world are working on that problem. Write it up and we'll see about getting your Nobel Prize to you ASAP.
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