In my opinion, all professionals are obliged to have an opinion of the system within which they operate, and a sense of whether dysfunctions exist which could be better resolved than endured.

The excessive influence of money on the American Congress was well understood. What did the politicians do? They went ahead and made the whole problem worse.

All too often politicians fail to publicly criticize the dysfunctional nature of the political system, preferring instead to revel within the obvious dysfunction, because the game-theoretic Frank solution (as the system is presently constituted) is paved in rivers of green.

I'm impressed by a heroine addict doing a good job at keeping the worst of their heroine addition at bay. I'm fundamentally more impressed by a heroine addict making any kind of progress at not remaining a heroine addict in the first place.

Politicians style themselves as leaders (leaders of the free world if an aircraft carrier is visible in the backdrop), and as such they deserve to be judged in the largest available frame.

From what I've read, a great number of politicians in Lincoln's era regarded avoiding a civil war as the business-as-usual Frank solution. Does that make him the worst American president?

You left out not getting to meet John Candy.

Just fifteen minutes ago I realized that my script to refactor the primary file server (newly converted to ZFS) into more sensible datasets had an irritating detail wrong (a path element was being duplicated in some paths).

I said to myself "oh, I'll just roll that whole thing back to the snapshot I made 30 minutes ago".

Then I go "zfs list -t snapshot" and discover that my snapshot was holding onto 0 GB because I forgot the -r switch to make the snapshot recursive.

Oh, well. By some impossible-to-separate mixture of good management and good fortune, it turns out I had a set of (different) snapshots from the last two days covering all datasets in questions. I lost very little work (only scripts were executed against these datasets and I still have all the scripts).

My real screw up?

Back in my second co-op workterm job, I managed not to notice that a system I was backing up changed the order of the listed drives between two very similar screen requests that I made almost immediately one after the other. Unfortunately, on the second pass I selected the active system drive as the recipient of the system backup, picking from the position in the menu where the desired destination drive had appeared moments before.

I had become accustomed to my home system being deterministic in the order it listed things. My bad.

This is back at the very beginnings of the 4.77 MHz era, so my PC was actually not yet what we now know as a "PC" (its father had an S-100, and its mother had a itty-bitty CRT).

Thirty years later I still can't type dd of=/dev/ada3 without making three trips to the metaphorical bathroom.

Whenever I type a disk-level dd command, I leave the sudo off, until after the third proof-read and several console consultations in which at least two different programs give me the same view of the drive name.

In dollar costs I couldn't say. In psychic cost, it's indelibly etched onto my permanent record.

I had a co-worker once (EEng) who claimed that as a junior intern during the late 1990s back when laser gear for fiber optics was all the rage, he routinely fried extremely delicate $2000 DUTs while the old hands just shrugged their shoulders. Dotcom dollars. Who really gave a fuck? It was considered barely worse than ruining a nice chair.

The vast majority of slashdot users are not americans, the editors know and don't care.

I downloaded a Windows 10 preview from Microsoft last week, it works, sort of, feels slow and MobaXterm keeps launching new windows for some reason...

Pretty much my reaction, too.

Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works, so we can hardly teach a machine how brains work. At best, Google is programming (not teaching) a computer to mimic the conversation of humans under highly constrained circumstances. And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition.

We don't even know enough to make the assertions quoted above with any confidence. Where's the precise boundary between programming and learning anyway?

The prudent AI researcher takes a rain check to get back to you on that one, and meanwhile doesn't denigrate even the smallest achievements, humbly possessing far too little insight into what sequence of small achievements will ultimately end up advancing the main cause.

If you think France isn't spying on the US as well then you are naive and haven't read any of your history books. Countries don't have friends, they have interests.

Yeah, and sometimes those interests are best served by making agreements with your G8 next-of-kin and remaining true to your word.

Here's a question for you. How often does your wife bug-sweep your bedroom? People don't have marriages, they have interests within sexual alliances.

There pretty much is no such thing as "trustworthy encryption" you didn't do yourself.

Does retyping the Tarsnap source code count as "doing it yourself"?

... challenged ourselves to remove barriers that prevent adults and children from enjoying our cereals ...

Should have thought of that a year ago.

New York Times, April 2014

When 'Liking' a Brand Online Voids the Right to Sue

Let me share this:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
.comment-bubble, .popularity {
          display: none !important;
    }
}

Nothing speaks louder than a deafening silence.

Going live in 3, 2, 1 ...

The missing micron is quite a bit funnier if you've just skimmed another recent story submission:

[Philae's] seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

We don't even need to bring up Tepco, which is just as well since plutonium is a different beast. We are talking plutonium, aren't we?

Mars Climate Orbiter

However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbfÃ--s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (NÃ--s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, causing it to pass through the upper atmosphere and disintegrate.

No worries. Better theirs than ours.

If News for Nerds still can't handle Unicode in 2015, I think the human race needs to pull in their horns, and stick to long baths and the companionship of bright-yellow rubber duckies.

Currently I have a business level account account that I write off 100%.

Is that a synonym for costs nothing? Sign me up.

I dearly love my old Compaq keyboard, but he's a gap toothed beast ever since the "pivotal" moment where I hooked my fingernail under the exposed edge of my right-hand Windows keys and the key cap went catapulting through the air.

Another "pivotal moment" in my career was when I finally learned how to quickly hack together a user style to eliminate annoying bling on any web page I happen to visit.

I have close to 150 tiny user scripts in my inventory now, and no longer see any "social" buttons on any web site I frequent or any slider animations. As I don't actually use any social networks "share" decorations are just a visual plague so far as I'm concerned.

The worst web sites I've visited come up completely red with a giant profanity across the screen (those that pretend to offer something useful, but the hoops exceed any possible utility one might derive).

Just half an hour ago I coded up this user style:

body a {
      background: yellow;
      pointer-events: none !important;
      cursor: default !important;
}

This makes all links on all tabs non-clickable, for when I want to select link text using MakeLink to copy into my wiki. It's damn annoying trying to select clickable text. I pretty much always use double-click drag (whole words only) for the main selection gesture. This simply doesn't work on links. Correction. It simply didn't work on links. Of course, I have to turn it on and off manually. I'll work on a button later.

Oh, yes, another pivotal moment was when I took control over USB insertion events to prevent a certain device from auto-mounting every time I put it on the tit to juice up. That initiative required several freakish lines of syntax, but at the end of the day was entirely worth the effort.

Huh. That's funny. There seems to be a pattern here. All my pivotal events, pretty much, are when I finally suppress some irritating pimple-glint love child auto-bling from imposing itself on my happy cocoon.