Posts by Drew Scriver

Re: a failure to follow standard procedures

I have first-hand experience at a Fortune 500 company where merely doing a thorough peer review could get you a reprimand from management for "not being a team player" or "being a roadblock". Finding actual problems and rejecting a change request could get you short-tracked for dismissal.

Rubber-stamp it or else... In some cases managers would simply approve highly technical and complex change requests to key infrastructure themselves, even though they had absolutely no technical expertise in that area.

Re: Bullies

That sounds a bit like saying that the US wants to ban Russian oil so it can sell its own oil at higher prices.

Re: PLease stop this...

Interestingly, horses are generally thought of as a typical Native American mode of transportation. However, according to scientists the original American horse became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Horses were re-introduced in the late 1400s by Spanish conquistadors.

Re: Musk. Great ambition, great showmanship, but often a failure to deliver.

Downvoted due to apparent inability to use people's proper names. It has been my experience it is not really possible to have an intelligent discussion once names are replaced like this.

That applies equally to people on the right (e.g. those who cannot bring themselves to say "Al Gore" and instead use a last name that rhymes) or people on the left who think it's cute to to describe players they disagree with in this manner.

NIST states that "SHA-1 has been undermined in recent years" - linking to an article from 2006.

Since they obviously believe that 16 years ago is "recent", 8 years from today (2030) would constitute a mad rush indeed.

Re: prove it!

The (presumable) author wrote, "The good thing about code is that you can swiftly tell if it's bad. Just try to run it."

If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, "just run it" has been a pretty common way to "ensure" that bad code "works". Who cares that the programmer submits 37 round individual statements to the database server to store the information he collects in a single web form? Or that a record is copied in its entirety every time a single field is updated in order to create a history of changes?

Re: Back in 'Ye Olden Dayes'

Want to bet that the DoJ is already getting calls from politicians about ensuring that the need for transparency only applies to businesses - and then only to businesses that don't provide services for them?

Some years ago I attended a keynote speech by Colin Powell. He said that when he was Secretary of State the the department was a bit behind technologically, but that the department made great strides since. "These days Secretaries of State are running their own mail servers", he quipped.

Re: increased positioning accuracy is deemed to be worth the cost

Legislators could outlaw it if they wanted to.

Given how helpful location data has been in determining who exactly was present within the geo-fence around the US Capitol building on Jan 6 2021 it is doubtful they'll ever limit location tracking.

Re: "Fun & pro, that's our motto!"

One cannot help but wonder if the issue with the minor would have been avoided if the he had been fired instead of being allowed to resign.

Along the same lines, how many more victims did he make at subsequent jobs because he was able to hide the reason for leaving the job where he was caught?

This is incorrect - the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (and amendments) does in fact deal with both primary and general elections.

Re: It had to happen

This type of result of rent control is not uncommon. In areas where landlords have a limit on the annual increase they have little choice but to increase the rent by the maximum - simply because they can never catch up if they don't.

In areas without rent control it's not common to see annual increases, because the tenants will move if they're squeezed too much. That leaves the landlord with one or more months of lost rent, additional costs for advertising, cleaning and fixing up the place, and so forth. It takes years to catch up from that loss and thus tends to provide a pretty strong incentive to not increase the rent - or at least limit the increases.

Barbara Boxer (D-CA) stated on the Senate floor that this would happen "as soon as the big toe has left the birth canal".

Re: BOFH vs PFY?

Note the "Press any key to continue" at the bottom.

I was wondering if this kid were going to be calling the help desk to demand a new keyboard - one with an "any" key...

Re: Must show loyalty constantly

In the US of A it really depends on the state where the employee works (or resides). For instance, some states requires (lunch) breaks whilte others do not. Some states require employee access to their personnel file, others do not.

Then there's the distinction between hourly and salaried workers. In many regards hourly employees enjoy more protections than salaried ones.

Re: Mmmm, Ok

You're probably right about Jesus not being all too welcome in conservative areas, He wasn't too popular in leftist countries either (e.g. China, USSR).

Many of His teachings aren't exactly acceptable in progressive western countries either.

Re: The first blow has been struck...

@Philip - a well-written reply, but the premise seems to be flawed nonetheless. While Doctors did indeed regulate themselves (with even heavier government regulation on their profession), they have also been known to be shortsighted, slow to acknowledge the validity of new information, be fraudulent, engage in conspiracies (e.g. Tuskegee), plagued by misplaced pride, and a host of other maladies.

All from real Doctors...

Re: Good

I take umbrage with the comment about "really willing to spend over $100 for internet [you can use 4G mobile broadband]".

When I purchased our (rural) home 8 years ago I checked with both Comcast and Verizon. Based on my address they both assured me that they provided broadband service there. Closed on the house, only to discover that did in fact NOT provide service here - just in the census area our address falls under.

Ended up getting DSL-service from Verizon - $60 a month for 3Mpbs. The cost is now up to $105 a month and the speed is down to around 1Mbps.

Mobile service is very spotty, even with a booster. In addition, virtually all mobile plans (including 5G) available in our area have a data cap of 50-100GB, after which the user is throttled to "3G speeds" - which generally means less than 512 kbps.

So, $110 a month instead of $105 for 150 times the speed is not bad at all. As for the $600 customer portion of the dish, that's quite a bit less than the $72,000 Comcast wants from me for running a cable to my house.

My situation is not unique, and in fact not as bad as it is in many other (mostly rural) areas.

The company I work for had just spent tens of millions 'upgrading' the offices to 1950s open work areas (long tables, sometimes up to 80 people in a single area). Then came the pandemic and virtually all 50,000 employees have been working from home since then, vacating the 'upgraded' work tables the company was so proud of.

Time and again the company announced mandatory "return to the office", but SARS-Cov2 didn't cooperate.

The longer it lasted, the more the workers balked at 100% return to the office. In a fairly recent staff survey more than 90% responded that they would not accept mandatory time in the office.

The latest decision has been to "encourage" (vs. earlier "compel" or "mandate") people to work in the office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The offices will be more or less closed on Mondays and Fridays.

Re: @Dwarf

It shouldn't be that hard to use pattern matching to count platelets. It could even number the platelets right in the image them for human verification.

Re: "We have no plans to operate iRobot differently than how they operate today[...]"

Depends on their definition of the word "plan".

Re: Another aspect to this

West Virginians already seceded once. There are a lot of people in rural Virginia who believe it should be done again.

Doesn't help either that 40% or rural Virginians don't have access to broadband internet access (or even high-speed internet access).

Of course, once they do have broadband (in the next 10-20 years or so) they'll be using it for social media and to watch TV - which is projected to take more than 25% of the global power supply at the data center level.

Re: Do like Yamaha pianos

I used to really like Yamaha digital pianos, until the keys on our Clavinova started sticking.

Replacing them is expensive and Yamaha has steadfastly refused to stand by its product from the very beginning when owners started having this issue.

It's possible that the problem has since been corrected, but I have lost faith in Yamaha's digital line-up.

If you can find a hospital bed, that is. If you do get a bed you'll be laying there thinking of the poor chap whose scheduled surgery got bumped (again) and hope he doesn't perish in the meantime.

Re: Why give it house room?

Only one gets to the be smart: the device or the person. But not both.

Re: Disgusting..

"User demographic matters".

I remember a project about fifteen years ago were the target group was "older people living in mobile homes in Arkansas who only have dial-up internet access".

The Millennials (who were hip, modern, and should be listened to by us geezers, according to the brass) went to work and created a hip and modern web site with all the whistles and bells available at the time.

Lots of joking about the target group by said Millennials.

Eventually the site was launched. Bounce rate on the home page was over 90%. They seemed to be unable to understand why the "older people living in mobile homes in Arkansas who only have dial-up internet access" never got past their 5 MB home page.

Re: RE: "And the word RUSSIA on envelopes"

This begs the question of what constitutes appropriate actions to counter a move by an instigator.

Would Japan have surrendered with the conventional bombings and dropping two nuclear bombs, which combined killed between 300,000 and 900,000 civilians?

Would Germany have fallen without the bombing raids by the allied forces, which killed 570,000 and 800,000 civilians?

Today's (western) culture no longer accepts this as ethical or acceptable. Unfortunately, adversaries tend to abide by different ethics. Worse, they make the western reluctance/refusal a key part of their strategy.

As for "removing the word RUSSIA on envelopes", one would expect great support for such initiatives given the removal of anything from western societies that is even remotely linked to its troubled past.