ncphil

17 ms·

121.
by ncphil 5y ago
Retired lawyer (from the 80s and 90s). Second career as a sysadmin now with the lofty title "enterprise architect", which in my case is more like "a senior guy who can do all kinds of stuff". Back in the day DisplayWrite
122.
by ncphil 5y ago
... I actually use rclone mount _instead_ of sync for cloud storage. Tried syncthing a long while ago after finding nextcloud unreliable. Then stumbled acrosss a comment somewhere that talked about the mount feature in rclone ( https:/
123.
by ncphil 5y ago
Probably not if they're a staff officer or above. Check your damn phone at the gate. What's so hard about that? Having said that, there are way too many secrets out there. Maybe if the system was more open we'd have a fightin
124.
by ncphil 5y ago
Oh yeah. AI are definitely going to replace us all. Bring it.
125.
by ncphil 5y ago
... and then kick the residents out when they finally get zoning approval to redevelop for luxury housing: from politicians whose votes are surprisingly cheap (most elected municipal officials have ties to the real estate industry, or are t
126.
by ncphil 5y ago
The irony, of course, is that the US Bankruptcy Code provides you can't declare bankruptcy again until 7 years have passed. So creditors theoretically have less risk during the period they generally refuse credit to the newly bankrupt.
127.
by ncphil 5y ago
This is a major change from the original NIST guidance that MS & dog previously followed. It turns out the author of that guidance admitted not so long ago that it was basically rubbish: just like the half dozen or more boxes that secur
128.
by ncphil 5y ago
Google even lets you enroll more than one key, in case you lose your primary! AWS doesn't, but at least they accept Yubikey's budget U2F keys. Can't recall if MSFT does yet.
129.
by ncphil 5y ago
Not entirely accurate. Many years ago someone in the DOJ joked about how Bill Gates's billions were a "rounding error" for the US government. The problem isn't that the FBI is afraid of going up against the Sacklers. The
130.
by ncphil 5y ago
Had a low star review pulled the same way recently. In a pique, I went in and deleted all my reviews. If AMZN isn't interested in preserving honest, critical reviews I'm not going to lend my name to legitimating them. Best Buy, B&
131.
by ncphil 5y ago
Over 30 years ago, when still in my mid-20s, periodic visits to a local shoemaker shop (now long ago gone into retirement) for re-soling were part of my young urban professional routine. When one pair was finally too far gone for repair, th
132.
by ncphil 5y ago
... and it hasn't actually flopped. It just reached its level of... usefulness. As others commented a few weeks ago in a different conversation, Swarm had/has significant utility for smaller deployments, but K8S has sucked the air
133.
by ncphil 5y ago
IMDB management thought it was their brilliant editorial work that drew people to their site. Morons. It was the comments all along. Of course they also believed they could create gravity-free zones by sheer force of executive will (and may
134.
by ncphil 5y ago
What? You think Dick Cheney was the only shareholder of the major military manufacturers and suppliers who would (literally) make a killing after 9/11?
135.
by ncphil 5y ago
Or just use email for stuff that isn't sensitive. "Let's meet at my house" to your brother on where to celebrate your kid's high school graduation, versus to local activists on where to form up before going over to
136.
by ncphil 5y ago
Lavabit was (and is, they're back in business as of 2017) physically located at imperial dead center, in a state where most people were fully supportive of their country's imperial ambitions. It was naive for its founder (or its c
137.
by ncphil 5y ago
Because it is the phone manufacturers' suppliers, specifically the SoC manufacturers, who have created this mess for all the reasons previously stated upthread. Bright line regulations like those proposed (with some of the suggestions
138.
by ncphil 5y ago
Agreed on all your points, especially the last -- only I'd include a shorter patent term as well. If the phone is going to have an artificially limited life of 3 years, the 3 year term for both copyright and patent on its constituent
139.
by ncphil 5y ago
Mailvelope ( https://github.com/mailvelope/mailvelope ) is an open source extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows users to use openpgp encryption with any webmail provider. Unfortunately, I have only one contact who
140.
by ncphil 5y ago
Yes.
141.
by ncphil 5y ago
Are you really so sure of that? I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens o
142.
by ncphil 5y ago
The main flaw in both patent and copyright law is that the terms of protection are entirely too long. It's now over a century for some corporate owned copyrights. That directly contradicts the goal of copyright: to advance science and
143.
by ncphil 5y ago
My experience too: until I got an X250 (i5, 2 core) earlier this year that lasts around 10 hrs on a charge. Cost $160 in mint condition. Noticeably less powerful than my old T430, but can still do some real work on the go. Screen and keyboa
144.
by ncphil 5y ago
This is an important point. I write that with no disrespect to all those FOSS developers who have devoted themselves to the work of creating new, interesting and useful things. But the fact is that usability, like intuition, is usually a ve
145.
by ncphil 5y ago
IMHO, that is the correct approach no matter the distro. The OS is a platform, the software included with it should be what works best to support that platform during a given release cycle. Anything beyond that can be addressed by container
146.
by ncphil 5y ago
"Needles on domestic record players ignored the signal, often physically destroying the delicate groove in the vinyl that produced the spoiler." Ah. The good old days: when the forces of greed and corruption were constantly shooti
147.
by ncphil 5y ago
Flat income tax schemes, like sales and use taxes, and user fees, are all regressive: striking the poor harder than the classes above them. The appeal of flat taxes (and the others mentioned) is their perceived simplicity in both assessment
148.
by ncphil 5y ago
A good argument for donating to archive.org, which is undeniably a global treasure at this point. We definitely need more repositories of open source intelligence, if only so we can tell when operators like Bellingcat are trying to play us.
149.
by ncphil 5y ago
Yeah. Nuclear may not make sense here on Earth -- even Antarctica -- where the environmental and human health consequences are practically unavoidable (especially when implemented by the lowest bidder), but space outside of LEO is another m
150.
by ncphil 5y ago
"Entrenched interests", then. It's characteristic of the postwar global economy. Big companies who made a fortune producing weapons to defeat the Axis worked hard to prevent a meaningful postwar demobilization by the US. Of c

More ›