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Comment Re:Once burned. (Score 1) 101

A single data point doesn't turn an irrational fear into a rational, respectable one. We can still demand more sense and an actual understanding of the risks from the authorities, instead of a fear or public panic based one. As many have pointed out, more people die on average per hour from vehicular accidents in America than have died from terrorism since 2001-09-11. I know we aren't ever going to get a proportional response to such things from authorities, media, or the public, but is being at most within a few orders of magnitude really too much to ask?

Comment No money for infrastructure, need to fight terror! (Score 1) 101

From looking at the picture in TFA, it looks like the pinhole camera was duct-taped to the remains of a light pole on the bridge. You can make out an old baseplate, and the 3/4 inch steel pipes are just the conduit cemented into the bridge itself in order to protect the wires - that were cut off and left when the light was removed. You can see this sort of shit anywhere there is decaying infrastructure, as it takes more money to properly clean up after something is removed.

What, you expect us to spend money to maintain our infrastructure? No way, we're already all tapped out with all the money we need to spend to defend against terrorism! Why, just this week there were two objects that kindof maybe sortof looked like bombs in Georgia! We can't afford to spend money on repairs or even proper dismantling when the fear^H^H^H^H threat of terrorism is hanging over our heads!

Comment Re:Tell her what you think of her decision. (Score 2) 591

While I won't disagree that personal attacks cause issues and are ethically questionable, the counterargument (and the framework under which the anonymous doxxer is likely working under) is that awareness that the wider world might come crashing down on you will affect others' actions. So even if this isn't their district, it might well affect the actions of principals and other administrators in local districts, and in general humanity would be better off if there was a counterweight to the zero-tolerance bullshit, which was that admins would fear the general public's zero tolerance for the bullshit of zero-tolerance.

Now, to be clear, I don't actually think doxxing this principal will affect the actions of any other principals, since this kind of idiocy is already showing itself to be impervious to foresight, awareness, and sensibility.

Comment But Google *does* now update components w/o OS (Score 1) 579

Alternatively; "Here is how Google royally screwed up writing their OS so that updating even relatively minor parts requires a full OS upgrade while Apple and Microsoft seem to have figured out how patching works."

But that's precisely one of the reasons why they aren't bothering to patch this; in fully up-to-date Android releases, WebView has been replaced by a Blink component which Google can update via the Play Store, independently of OS updates. Many, many components of Android are like this these days (which is a problem for anyone not wanting Play Services, but that's another story). And actually Apple is a bad example, since they still for many OS components need to update the entire OS, it's just that unlike Google they've retained tight control and thus can push out those updates whenever they want.

Comment Developer mode (Score 1) 648

Actually, Chromebooks do indeed have a shell and a default text editor. I think it's VIM? I forget now, and I left my Pixel at home and normally have it booted into a normal Linux desktop. The trick is just that you have to flip it into developer mode, which then gives a scary warning screen every time you start it up, and you're giving the kids a lot of leeway to muck up the system then I suppose, but on the other hand resetting it entirely is as simple as hitting spacebar and then y (if I'm remembering correctly) upon boot one time, and giving the kids who want to fiddle the ability to fiddle is probably the best education you can give many of them---figuring out how school computers and networks worked so I could install Doom and play it with my friends taught me more valuable lessons and skills for my current sysadmin job than any actual classes did!

Comment Cygwin to the rescue (if it's even needed) (Score 2) 648

The argument goes both ways -- I've spent hundred hours of my life learning POSIX, and if my boss wants me to run a POSIX program in Windows, I'm pretty much doomed.

Aha, but see, that's another reason to argue against proprietary systems and stacks. When things aren't proprietary, it's nearly inevitable that crazy, determined people will port it to everything you'd want to run the stack on; if your boss wants you to run a POSIX program on Windows, Cygwin certainly provides a pretty damn complete environment for doing so. Nearly every CLI programs I've ever wanted to use on Windows that I can on Linux is already in their repos, even, so the chances that you've written a POSIX-compliant application that can't run through Cygwin seems quite small.

And hell, a lot of the time these days things aren't necessarily so low-level, so stuff like MinGW are all that one needs to compile a Linux/BSD/whatever-aimed CLI program for Windows. And Free toolkits like Qt supply all you need to write and compile full GUI programs that'll run on POSIX-ish systems just as well as Windows, and hell, the few things you're for some reason doing low-level enough to require POSIX somehow can probably be #ifdef'd with what little WinAPI you know.

Comment GnomeOS! (Score 1) 592

I'm not even kidding, that's literally what the systemd camp have proposed. (I actually think systemd is pretty snazzy on my smartphone, but I'm extremely skeptical of it as a sysadmin.)

Comment Safe Search is never 100% off now (Score 4, Informative) 155

Turn off safe search?

Actually, back in December 2012 Google tweaked things so that SafeSearch is, to a limited degree, always on; unless you explicitly search for "pornographic" materials they will generally filter out such results. As a Google rep put it in a statement to the press,

We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them.

Comment Disparity in anonymity is a major factor (Score 3, Interesting) 189

A lack of anonymity means people are held accountable, but that "accountability" is in the eye of the beholder, so it cuts both ways, and it definitely cuts against the person who isn't anonymous if others going after them are anonymous. The first thing that comes to my mind, then, is to have some degree of separation between anonymous/pseudonymous areas of communication and debate and "real name" ones. I'm not sure that's feasible (how to really draw such hard boundaries in such an interconnected age?) and I worry there'd be problematic results from such segregation. But it does seem to me like some of the more recent issues have been as bad as they've been due in no small part to a disparity of where the harassers and the targets are on the anonymous->pseudonymous->eponymous continuum.

Comment Yes, it is the cause (Score 3, Interesting) 155

TFA almost says as much, basically, with Google losing 2.1% share, Yahoo gaining 1.8%, Bing gaining 0.4% and all others combined losing 0.1%. It's a pretty dramatic win for Yahoo and considering it occurs right after Firefox switched, I think it's pretty clearly that.

I had to help the non-technical staff around my office because they were utterly confused when suddenly they started getting Yahoo results rather than Google, and sites they used to find so easily weren't showing up in their searches. I too had thought it was only going to be for new installs; was a bit of a rude awakening.

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