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Comment Re:Riiiiight. (Score 1) 233

I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.

I'll go one better, and not have my infotainment system hooked up to anything in the motortrain. That's just scary.

Ford has their own engine control computer, They're up to EEC-VII now, and they've ben running on PowerPC since the first 40x series came out in the mid 90's.

Comment Re:I used to work on SYNC (Score 1) 233

I have a non-logical like for Fords, even during the dark days, though the only Ford I had was an Escort EXP. GT40/GT350H halo effect maybe.

It always pained me for Ford to have such great quality numbers on build, maintenance, etc, then get pounded into sand by the fact that SYNC sucked donkey balls so hard. It seemed so tail-wag-the-dog. A $30000 car scuttled by lousy software. I'm so glad it's gone.

And WinCE6 + Flash? Really? Did they talk to any engineers at all about how that was going to crash and burn?

Comment What about jobs? (Score 3, Insightful) 417

AI may not kill us all in the Cyberdyne Model T100 fashion, but it may gut our economies.

Id love to see an analysis of what jobs are at risk in the next 10 years, 20 years, etc. Everybody says "well they'll find new jobs". Id really like to see where.

There's a glut of lawyers out there now, partly because of automation. Whatever you think about lawyers this is a knowledge job, one that takes a large amount of schooling and prep, protected somewhat by accreditation requirements. Lawyer jokes aside, this is a troubling change for employment.

We're not set up for a "all work is done by machines, nobody needs to work, everybody rejoice" future. Remember Romney and the 47%, or the Lucky Ducky talk. People are expected to work to gain food/clothing/shelter. If a huge amount of jobs are eliminated faster than humans can be trained to find new ones, or even the jobs that exist don't make sense (imagine a lawyer now, knowing they'll never make enough money to cover student loans) our Consumer Purchasing based economy will suffer.

Im a programmer, not a Luddite nor a Saboteur. I just wonder what the future brings for my kids. Remember that both the Luddites and les Sabot we're not protesting technology for technologies sake, they were protesting tech that eliminated jobs.

Comment Security should be #1. (Score 1) 47

Shouldn't it be "makes it more secure and perhaps allows connectivity to Internet"

With all the holes we've seen in everything, security should be thought of the first minute, not even wait to the middle of first day of design. The only thing I saw in that landing page is "uses more encryption" which may improve information (read: privacy) leaks, but doesn't do much for security and being hacked into. This with the Sony hack still on the first page.

Comment Re: Comcast Business Class (Score 4, Funny) 291

If you're not using their wireless, just put the router in a metal box.

Then Comcast will charge you a Faraday Cage container upgrade. They'll say you need to have a field assistant do the install, they'll come out sometime between 1 and 11. That being months, as in sometime between 1 for January, and 11 for November. Then a $9.99 rental fee per month. Then you get calls from their friendly techs to have you upgrade to Faraday Cage Turbo(TM) for $5 a month more, or Faraday Cage Blast (TM) for just $8 a month more!!

Jokes aside, it does suck that Comcast is forcing this on everybody. It's good to be the king, err, monopoly.

Comment SIDENOTE: how are clients authenticated (Score 1) 291

Im forced to use Comcast based on lack of options where I live. I connected my iPhone (iOS8) to xfinitywifi once to download a podcast.. Later I reset all network connection info on the phone which should have lost all authentication info. On my home net, i had to re-authenticate. But, for some reason, I haven't had to re-auth on xfinitywifi.

Do they do authentication based on some client info? MAC addr? Some Passpoint auth? Even if I just did password auth without remembering, I do know I haven't done any time recently, and I thought you had to re-authenticate daily, which I'm 100% sure I have not.

I don't have Business Class, but I do have my own modem and Wifi router. Router is free from TMobile (technically not mine but a loan for the life of my relationship with TMobile). I sprung for a modem with VOIP abilities but since dropped phone service, or my modem would have been even cheaper. Look for DOCSIS3 compatible, if you're stuck with Comcast as i am.

Comment Re:Really? .. it comes with the job (Score 1) 772

Many of the connections to terrorism were tenuous at best, That someone you pick up that is "tied to the terrorist" could be the Subway "sandwich artist" that sold them a Pastrami foot long in the morning. If you then hung said condiment artisan them from a chain and applied some voltage, they would not only admit to the terrorizing, but they'd also admit to 9/11, admit to assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, and admit to blowing up the Maine and starting the Spanish-American war. You're usually just adding more hay to the haystack, not finding any new needles.

One of the big takeaways from the torture report is not only is torture wrong, but it's useless. So you dirty yourself for not a lot of gain. The mechanics of torture work closer to terror than you'd like to think. It's effective at scaring a big subset of your chosen population and emboldening a small subset. If you're a despot and trying to control a population, you probably can handle the said "emboldened" subset. But we're not talking control here, we're talking about getting actionable intelligence in a very short period of time. I remember a story where a captive was tortured and gave up nothing - but when an interrogator gave him sugar free cookies (he was diabetic) the interrogator seemed more human and gained trust and intelligence.

Comment Re:They can go bite a donkey (Score 1) 699

That and a conduit for malware.

In effect, the site is trying a social contract, i give you free stuff and you look at ads. Whether that can be an enforceable legal contract is interesting.

In the link above, we reference Zedo. I worked there early on. The initial design was that ads were a think to be both chosen and voted on, a primitive ad Like/Dislike button set if you can think it that way. We were steamrolled by Google/Doubleclick early on and abandoned that model early on, but it would be interesting (in a theoretical vacuum) to see if the ad choice model would catch on. I particularly liked the Lego Mindstorms ad, which actually had you program a sequence to get a robot to move to a goal around obstacles. When was the last time you actually interacted with an ad? What would the world look like if ads were competing on likeability and not on how much info someone knows about you?

Comment Re:Have the Germans threaten to invade (Score 1) 699

It is a loss of freedom. And with little benefit. Every loss of freedom should come with a benefit, and their is none here. I get into line, get irradiated by an X-Ray that can't even find what it's looking for (and the irony of me "assuming the position"). It's all security theater, from the XRays that can't find the bombs that they were designed in reaction to, from the change of the uniform color from white to blue (to look more police-ish).

The USA PATRIOT Act was in response to 9/11. We don't even know what freedoms we gave up because much of the law is secret. The US should not have secret laws. How many NSA violations came as a result of laws passed at that time? Google the term LOVEINT for a small taste of violations. If i want privacy, I need to look like a kook and be completely off the grid. Or else the NSA (or some other TLA) can get data from pretty much any big corporation. There are "border" checkpoints hundreds of miles inland in the US. You can probably find a bunch of confrontations on Youtube, where the agents pretty much refuse to answer direct questions about your rights (these are all "voluntary" stoppings, but some agents don't see them as such) until you comply.

Don't reduce the 9/11 changes to taking your shoes off at the airport. We're in a much different world. We're over a decade after 9/11 and we still have a massive security apparatus probing every US citizen with little oversight.

Comment Re:Have the Germans threaten to invade (Score 2) 699

The French poured buckets of money into the Maginot line. The Germans just went around it. The Germans had tried the same end around in WW-I (though failed), so the lack of defense at the BeNeLux border was a costly strategic mistake. Hitler had it in for France because of the Treaty of Versailles, and even went so far to track down the rail car that the Treaty in Versailles was signed in, to rub Gallic noses into. Even the new tactics could be seen on their doorstep in the Spanish Civil War. The French should have seen it coming.

I think the part of the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" comes not from the initial invasion, but the puppet government that was Vichy France. The Russians fought to the last man in horrible siege conditions for years. France started to be a puppet regime paying tribute to Hitler and rounding up Jews just a couple months after initial invasion. Only later when Hitler changed terms of the agreement did the French underground resistance really form.

That, and there were two, probably more interesting "surrenders". When the French left the colonies of Algeria and Indochina (Vietnam), there were those that saw that as surrender. I call them interesting because they didn't leave because of being defeated, but they realized that the barbarism that it would take to hold these territories would change the national character. It's hard to talk about "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" when you're tossing people off of helicopters or torching villages. Was this surrender? Maybe on the ground, but to win a military would entail other surrenders of character, again, an interesting trade off.

In reality (and I'm of Polish descent) the Polish fighters lasted longer. (Compared to the French) the Polish had the disadvantage of being a new country, (re)formed in 1919 after, in effect, disappearing completely for a hundred years or so. Oh yeah, and they got attacked on two fronts.

I don't begrudge any credit to the French resistance. Their fighters fought bravely. The Poles fought just as hard against two armies, with less notice and much fewer resources. I wish they got more credit. Part of the Polish jokes were real - you did have farmers on horseback with single shot rifles going against tanks. But what else are you gonna do, let them roll into Warsaw without a fight?

Comment Re:H1-B debate? (Score 4, Informative) 398

"Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".

This. Every time I hear "we can't find enough employees" I substitute "... at the lowball pricepoints we're willing to give out". It strikes me as odd that the laws of supply and demand somehow are allowed to disappear when it comes to people/employees. If demand is so high, wages should be pushed up. They're not. Over a course of years, the tools for people to fight a more fair fight have been peeled away. As a kid I still remember the PATCO strike. Government intervention against workers collective bargaining, and then all the way to Wisconsin and governmor Walker. Suppliers can't be squeezed. Profits should never be squeezed. Lets squeeze the employees.

That and the fact that employee wages are inputs to the system. Even Henry Ford, hard right capitalist, realized you can't squeeze wages so much that people can't afford things.

Comment Re:Sony needs to invest in their IT (Score 1) 170

1) remember that computers (especially networked ones) are in effect infinite state machines. There are thousands maybe millions of ways of hacking these, and it looks more and more like an inside job. Remember that one of the tradeoffs of protecting against an inside job makes it a P.I.T.A. to get anything done inside.

2) Also remember that current atmosphere for public companies is, hell even if you're lucky, not past the next quarterly report and a good chance no farther than the daily stock price. Security (and privacy) in most firms is (are) viewed as a cost. They're not baked in. Witness the horribly hot mess that is Snapchat

Sony is just a worse than average, but sadly not atypical company when it comes to security. We're still bathing apes from the savannah, and not quite there when it comes to remote presence and the ease of which information can be copied or destroyed at a distance.

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