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Comment Frustrating for those who know directories (Score 1) 16

I hate the modern users who can't organize their files and are fine with the cloud just storing their stuff for them. This creates two problems:
For me having microsoft automatically store things where I don't want them to store it (and my current version of word at work won't let me change this), means that when I restart my work I have two copies of my work. The one I stored on MY machine and the one microsoft stored for me. More than once I've started using the wrong one and had to merge my work later.

What is worse though is what it has done to colaborative work. Where I workwe store stuff in 20 different places. Finding the information I need is a nightmare. Knowing what I need to know is even worse. Even if I find a document it likely isn't the latest version of anything. People resort to sharing files by attaching them to emails, or teams or ....
I really wish I was allowed to beat my coworkers until they grasp the concept of heirarchially organizing information.

Comment 4:1 US to EU immigration (Score 2) 223

There are 1.1M Americans living in the EU, there are 4.7 Europeans living in the USA. Net migration trends seem to counter the Slashdot crowds assessment that the EU is a better place to live. US unemployment for youths is 7.4% vs 14.8%. Yeah, money can't buy everything but it sure helps.

Comment you want more (Score 1) 159

...the myth that endless growth is not only possible, but necessary

And yet if I ask you, you would admit to wanting more. More healthcare and mental health for the poor, more money for vaccines for people in Africa, more research for cancer and heart disease. I'm sure you want a bigger house, more vacation time... We all want more, some of just admit it.

All western governments are pyramid schemes. We have promised our elderly retirements that they didn't have to save for, we have promised healthcare for aging populations. We can't do that unless then next generation is more productive than the last. Most of what we consume is services that have to be produced locally. No matter how much money your country has in the bank those services can't be out sourced, they can't be bought from a foreigner. So either the costs of the services goes way up or the rest of the Norwegian economy is hollowed out, so that the country only produces services for itself and imports everything else. Probably not a good long term plan.

Comment you got the economics wrong (Score 1) 249

A trade deficit is caused by a country consuming more than it produces. That's it.

Americans collectively don't save and their government spends more than it takes in in revenue. The extra consumption has to be imported.
You can argue about the "why" but the deficit is about consuming more than they produce.

Comment Re:Institutions are victims of identity fraud (Score 1) 110

To be a victim of fraud you would have to have been lied to or decieved and been deprived of something. If someone pretends to be you and an institution doesn't validate that they are really talking to you then the institution has been decieved. Saying you are the victim allows the instituition to pass the blame and inconvinience on you for their mistake. It is an excuse for the institutions to not pay you for inconviniencing them.

18 months ago someone walked into a bank branch 3000km from where I live, didn't show ID, social engineered the teller over the coarse of 3 visits and took 40K from a credit line I no longer had access to. The bank paid for my time explaining to them what the did wrong.

Comment Institutions are victims of identity fraud (Score 2) 110

Let's correct this fallacy when someone impersonates you to an institution you are not the victim of identity fraud the instititution is. You are should only be merely inconvinienced. And f@#K the banks or who ever who ask you to jump through hoops to fix their mistake. It is up the institutions to ensure that they gave the aid/loan/whatever to the correct individual.

In this case it looks like the colleges didn't check people's identities very well knowing that the federal student aid program would eat the cost. This is a moral hazzard. The college's want students paying tuition, they have no incentive to check identities because that would mean turning away someone who is paying. The federal student aid programs likely had no way to physically meet the students so they delegated the work to an unmotivated party, the colleges. The easy fix is to put the colleges on the hook for the faud. They should also be on the hook, at least partially, for students who don't pay back the loans. That would quickly eliminate degrees that don't lead to jobs that pay well enough to pay back the loans. If colleges don't like the deal then they don't need to accept students on federal aid.

Comment It is more difficult than the article discribes (Score 2, Interesting) 87

The cables aren't the bottle neck. It is getting approval to buy them. The electric utilities in most of the western world are guarenteed a return on any capital investment usually of between 11% and 13%. In return they have to go to the public regulators to get approval for any capital expenditures. It is the regulators that won't approve the spending of money on new transmissions. The public regulators are the dumbest institutions on the planet. If you think you have delt with the stupidest government regulators in the world you still won't be prepared for the utility regulators. The power outages in Texas, blame the public regulator for forgetting to have any incentive for insuring power supply during a cold snap. PG&E's power lines fail, start forest fires, people die, blame the regulator for not allowing PG&E to replace them. OG&E raising your rates to pay for 2 peaker plants when they instead had a plan to cut your median rate by $50 month by shifting demand, blame the public regulator.

Here is John Oliver explaining the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just ignore the last 5 minutes where John forgets everything he said for the previous 20 minutes and goes on his anti capitalism rant.

Comment late stage capitalism? (Score 1) 88

How is this a capitalism problem? The problems are all created by a dictator manipulating markets, building what didn't need to be built, creating the wrong jobs and no internal demand for goods. The only capitalism here is a free market creating and charging for a good that is in demand.

Comment upper class is not your enemy unless you make them (Score 1, Informative) 22

Being a dick is independent to how much money you have. You should like the rich, they pay far more taxes in absolute terms (and usually as a percentage of earnings), they invest and take risks. They own the means of production that makes the poor more productive. They buy/build and maintain the housing that most of the poor live in. If you don't like the arrangement you are free to get together with others in your "class" and create your own communist paradise. Heck you can collect welfare and have your kids educated by the rest of us while you try. The fact that no one ever does without trying to take the means of production says all there needs to be said about communism.

Elon Musk, the guy that proved electric cars could be profitable, was always a dick, the left though chose to make him their enemy.

Comment ASN1 is not a programming language (Score 1) 95

ASN1 is the encoding method for X509 certificates. No, it is not. It is a very high level programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It looks a bit like a mixture of Pascal with EBNF.

It usually gets compiled into C or C++

Read the wiki you linked. It is a way to serialize data structures. It defines how the data is moved between machines and it is terrible for parsing. It is {type, length, value} triples on steroids where your values can be be a series of further {type, length, value} triples. Now think of how you would write a parser. You are going to recursively parse the triples. Now what happens when the outer length doesn't match the sum of the inner triples lengths? Depending on how you wrote your parser you will either use the outer length or the inner one. (some triples can be variable length so this does get confusing). The result is different parsers are now parsing differently. I could then create a cert that to a CA looks harmless, have them sign it but my target might parse it differently and give me an incorrect permission.

Comment This has been a problem since the 70s (Score 1) 95

Some people used to say be liberal in what you accept and very strict in what you send. That is you should be willing to accept some errors or messages that don't exactly follow the protocol but always adhere to the standards when sending messages out. Unfortunately this leads to all kinds of security problems. Problems that can't be fixed because the errors are in legacy devices, or problems that the discoverer of the problem has no ability to fix.

The worst example is ASN1. The legacy parsers are terrible for accepting malformed messages and still outputting what seems to be valid output. Except different parsers will output malformed messages differently. Fixing this won't be easy because it would mean rejecting many legacy data structures. For those of you who don't know, ASN1 is the encoding method for X509 certificates.

Comment Americans consume more than they produce (Score 1) 262

It's that F#@King simple. Americans consume more goods, services and government services (the American military is a service), than they produce. So Americans collectively must get more services and goods from the outside world than they export to the rest of the world.
This isn't a class issue, this isn't a moral problem or a decline in productivity. It is a choice by individuals. Why do Americans spend more than they produce? Because others will loan them money at near 0% real interest rates, Americans are generally secure in their futures and don't feel the need to save for a rainy day and finally Americans get good value for what they buy. (yes the poor might not be totally secure but in the grand scheme of a trade deficit the middle class is all that counts).

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