I call shenanigans.

I just left teaching IT at the collegiate level (a trade school). There are two issues:

1. Not many black students enter IT programs. Don't ask me why. I have theories, but to voice them might open me to charges of racism. Suffice to say that I heard a black commentator recently bemoan how some black people denigrate other black people who try to better themselves. They call it "acting white."

   IT is bettering yourself. It's "acting white."

2. The vast majority of High School graduates are now outright illiterate. They cannot read nor write nor perform the most basic math.

   Want real fun? Try teaching binary logic and arithmetic to students who can count to ten if they remember to include both their thumbs.

   I had students that were unaware that books had page numbers. Consider the implications of that, for a moment.

We have raised an entire generation of illiterate ignorami. Small wonder that this might include black people, who tend to be hurt even worse than whites in situations like this.

We have raised an entire generation of illiterate ignorami.

It's not the work schedule that makes me unproductive. It's corporate policies and standards.

"Work harder, not smarter," could be the company motto almost anywhere I've worked.

Guess I'll be looking for a VPN provider overseas.

I was in the industry for 20 years and now teach at a technical school. I constantly tell my students about the dangers of government involvement in IT:

The guys we send to government aren't really that bright. Those who are bright are also universally attorneys. They've spent their lives learning the law, not technology.

Consequently they have no idea what technology is. This makes them unfit to regulate it. This is a good thing.

They regulate at the speed of law. We innovate past the regulation at the speed of light.

It's Time To Send the H-1Bs Home

I have a blog on the subject, if anyone cares:

It's Time To Send the H-1Bs Home.

Well, considering the number of security cams that I can control simply by Googling for them, I can't say that this impresses me a hell of a lot.

Get rid of the cams directly on the Internet with no changes from the factory defaults and I'll be a bit more impressed.

Apparently none of those jokers ever read Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It's overkill to lob nukes from the Moon. Simply throw rocks.

My fear is that, literally, he who gets to the Moon and has a permanent base first will rule the world. I suspect it'll be the Chinese or Russians.

Seriously, if somebody took up residence there and put some boosters on a few boulders, there'd be absolutely nothing those Earthbound could do about it.

... knowing when we've found it.

Real extraterrestrials will look nothing like human. They might be super-intelligent shades of the color blue. If we're lucky.

Differentiating them extraterrestrials and the landscape may be problematic.

In any case, all the exoplanet talk is entirely speculative. During my lifetime, scientists expected to find life on both Mars and Venus -- and those planets are infinitely closer to Earth than any exoplanet. It was only after sending probes to Venus, for example, that we discovered it was a hell-hole incapable of anything resembling terrestrial life.

Anyone who tells you they've found an Earth-like exoplanet is flat-out ignorant. We've found exoplanets in roughly the right orbits to possibly sustain human life -- but the same could be said of Venus and Mars, and look how that turned out.

I'm sorry, but in June I'm getting 100GB as part of my $36-annually MetaARPA membership over at SDF. Not to mention the UNIX shell account I've been using there for fifteen years. And the private Minecraft server. And Gopher. And dev tools. And VPNs, VPSs, a boatload of other stuff ...

Not to mention I'll be able to mount the SDF 100GB to my Linux box using SSHFS under FUSE.

Three million accounts intrigue me, so naturally I went looking for the posted list.

I can't find it. I find endless references to the story, but no list. I can't find Zarefarid's blog. This strikes me as odd, since the list was supposedly publicly posted there. Usually by this time, there are downloaded copies on all the file-sharing services, torrents, etc. There's nothing.

Knowing as I do that the majority of stories on which the press reports are wildly sensationalized or at worst entirely fictional, the lack of a list makes me think this may fall in the latter category.

Box's DAVfs is only useless if you have an OS that doesn't speak DAV. I have mine configured via davfs2 under fuse, and it automounts when I enter the mount directory (using AutoFS).

Of course, one needs a Linux distro to make it work ... ;)

Dakota Smith

The better part of a year. I'm extremely pleased, having had my account converted to SSHFS free of charge.

However, unless EchoFS does something differently very soon, I think they're going the way of the Dodo Bird. They aren't marketing themselves well, and I expect services like Box.com to overtake them shortly.

It's a pity, because they're very, very good. But if nobody knows about the service, they won't survive.

Dakota Smith

There are a number of file managers on Android that can read a variety of network shares. I use FX File Explorer, and I have SSHFSes, Box, and two Windows shares configured.

I also use FolderSync Lite to automatically mirror files. Though to be honest, with 30GB to 50GB storage to play with, I store a massive amount of data in the cloud and use the file manager apps to copy them to my Android when needed. I mostly do this with my ePub library since I'm keeping my music and videos with Google (30GB).