intransigent

Political quagmires like this only get untangled by terrifying psychos, unfortunately.

People only shut their mouths when they get threatened into a fearful silence, and/or sometimes if they get bribed enough.

Otherwise, you'll always have a substantially sized group of complainers dragging down a project this big, and the complainers leech into operations and mysterious expensive mistakes erode the budget of an already expensive operation.

There's just enough shrug factor here for people to not care about how much gas they burn driving to places that might not be very exciting to begin with.

Many would just as soon not have to travel at all, and even more would prefer to not be taxed so as to pay for trips they personally don't want to take to begin with. Most people just want their actual lives to be generally easier.

Without confrontational intimidation, bribery is probably the only other political lever to press in the United States.

Yeah, in a way, this sort of thing is indicative of a turing tarpit.

It's not obvious which, among all the moving parts, is responsible for any of the outcomes, just by looking at the commands themselves in isolation.

If someone did a similar thing in Brainfuck it wouldn't be entirely surprising that such a thing is possible, but the practicality of being able to getting it right every time, extemporaneously, is low.

It's interesting to know that this is possible, in case of emergency, but just because it's possible doesn't make it desirable.

If someone wrote an article about how to do the same in MS DOS batch files, circa 1996, it'd be an interesting proof of robustness, but an undesirable standard operating procedure.

Because many developers don't honestly believe that SQL represents a code execution boundary. Much of the time, the tendency is to think of SQL as simple I/O with a disk. And one rarely needs to worry about escaping interpretted expressions when streaming into and out of an I/O pipe.

They don't think of it as "executable code" because of the limited and monotonous nature of CRUD operations typically associated with data persistence.

They just think of it as yet another inconvenient form of declaritive data already at rest. Perhaps akin to mark-up. Raw data, like XML.

With JSON, some developers innately clue themselves in, because JavaScript, but they don't honestly understand the root of the hazard. They're just thinking FIRE BAD! Then they hack some JSONP into place because it's fun to do that sort of thing.

Most novice developers (my younger self included, tisk tisk) strongly resist protections against even HTML injection, until they see a massacre play itself out in the real world, when someone drops the ball.

Well, the idea of global doomsday for all, beyond mere tactical retaliation, is probably drawn from the media, with movies like Dr. Stangelove playing the part of the primary narrative.

As to how much any world power has actually strategized and mobilized resources toward such an end (deliberate global suicide that destroys both sides by design) is likely to never be fully revealed, since it's a slightly alarming idea.

Even so, some of the plans that have been revealed really are quite terrible. Bad enough, that the difference between deliberate and accidental nuclear winters could be considered an argument that splits hairs.

Since when is Social Media participation a compulsory activity?

Old people aren't quite as tuned-in to the technical realities of the internet and its in-groups and out-groups.

The premise that "there is no anonymous" escapes 4 out of 5 people I talk to. It takes very careful explaining, to bring people to the understanding that their are hacking teams with names, that get away with things, and the things that those named sub-groups manage pull off are perpetrated by "some unknown, anonymous group of people" until evidence demonstrates who done it.

Because of this, The Proles (people who aren't paying close attention) often confuse the premise being a simple anonymous tipster with being affiliated with the fictious premise of an organized, regimented imaginary hacking group that possesses a rightful claim to the mantle of "Anonymous" as if it were Batman.

Then media outlets exploit this cluelessness, to sell advertising, by drumming up exciting click-bait that perpetuates the false narrative that there is a movement called Anonymous, rather than the prank call it really is.

Be nice and play ball, or you'll be subjected to a set-top-box appliance again.

  (it puts the lotion on its skin
   or it gets the hose again.)

Consider the possibility that lead poisoning inflicts just the type of mental disabilities that would lead a person to vote in such a fashion to begin with. With that in mind, is this really how you feel?

They are supposed to be captured from a twitter feed.

Because it kind of smells like bullshit seizing moral high ground, and not actually changing anything.

Religion promises everything and delivers nothing.

My arguments are not irrelevant. You seem to be hinting that I'm a forum sliding paid mercenary shill on a mission to gaslight political opponents blah blah blah...

I am not some political interloper out to dilute conversation or discourage the action of others. I only outline my own rationale for why I think this is a pointless feel-good activity. Take this comment as my pledge. I am not being sarcastic.

Pledges don't require signatures. I've taken the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America...

Specifically, though I was pointing out flaws with respect to the part about "having teeth":

  with actual teeth (violating it means you 
  can't commercially build software any more).

Taking a "pledge" sure ...but then also recording names, and then beyond even THAT enforcing violations, violations which carry penalties. But not just any single penalty for some transgression, a PERPETUAL penalty that blacklists a person.

There's an escalation in the magnitude of authority hidden in this idea, which starts with an ideal, and can quickly spin into ideology. And maybe delves into impossibilities, at best. At worst suspends disbelief, and convinces people things are fixed when nothing has actually changed.

Crimes are crimes. Incidents involving civil damages are recognized by state authorities. Meanwhile the by-laws of a subculture, fraternal guild or trade association are something else entirely. Without passing the bar exam maybe this becomes cult-like.

Okay, industry self governance is a thing too. Agreeing to ground rules, when regulatory iversight is dubious. Is the intent to provide protections against situations which legal state appointed authorities cannot legislate or perhaps fail to grasp? That sounds like a tall order which carries realities beyond a simple pledge or civic association's intentions.

If the intent is to somehow apply dogma to adversaries whom already flout rules and willfully undermine codes of conduct, those people will assuredly happily lie, sign the pledge, infiltrate and destroy whatever beautiful thing that had yet to hatch anyway. With falsified identities, no less. So, then what?

Making promises is nice. Communication of expectations is good. Codified guidelines are even better. Maybe the idea is for something like standards and practices departments within television networks, or the PMRC which tried to take stand against foul language in music, according to opinions regarding morality.

Software, isn't simple artistic expression, but still there would need to be enforcement, and a registry of good children who get presents from Santa, and bad children who get coal.

Who has the teeth? Who gets to bite? (hint: the words "everyone/anyone" does not belong in the response, because the buck stops somewhere real)

  - Taking the hippocratic oath
  - Passing the bar
  - Obtaining a pilot's license
  - Completing series 7,(63,66) exams

Yes, these are things people do. But these things are each different from each other, and different from a petition.

Some of them are not centralized lists, and others are not calls to political action.

Meanwhile others are discriminatory, in that they distinguish those who have proven proficiencies, as capable practicioners of valuable skills.

Simply affirming a willingness to act in a certain way only means so much. Refusing to act means less. Indicating an intent to prevent others from acting is yet another behavior.

Advertising any political intentions, regardless of actual skills or rationale, may carry sentimental value, and that's nice, I guess.

Meanwhile the possession of technical skills, which rest on the firmament of electrified silicon substrates, with open-ended usage patterns, which may eventually lead to these objects ...behaving with some semblance of ...sentient free will? Deciding thier own ethics? In ways not obvious to the inventor?

Are their parenting licenses?

Just kidding. That last part's a can of worms all its own.

Isn't the petition itself a kind of database, naming and identifying specific individuals?

What if the petition itself is abused as a source of information?

Wouldn't that require the building of a database that is used to discriminate against individuals listed therein?

VGER.

If it helps, there are probably wi-fi, mobile broadband, and cellular telephone providers that probably won't ask for your name or address, although you'll probably get gouged for bandwidth.

It doesn't matter what I think, because the inexorable tide has washed over this question long ago.

Anybody willing to outspend their rivals with enough money to bury the world in obfuscated asynchronous callback hell, just to lock people out of any hope of understanding what their machines are actually doing, did exactly that over the past decade.

I definitely get the sense that this was a situation where a guy made too much money way too fast. Like almost overnight.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he had been pent up, and when an effectively unlimited budget reared its head, it open the floodgates for so many bottled up urges.

By the time he had graduated to drunk driving convictions, other habits had been so firmly established that he was never going back to his old life.

It reads like a medical study of addiction models in animals. When granted unlimited push-button access to an addictive stimulus they push the button compulsively, without stopping and kill themselves from sheer lack of self control.

And about that writing of the tell-all cringe blog. I'd reconsider if I were you. Definitely do some writing. Write on paper. Not on a computer. Not on the internet. Lock it away, and then proof read it when you're in the best possible mood, and try to imagine how it would change your mood to realize others had read it, and cringed over it.

So, magnetic fields can be used to confine fusion plasma with "five nines" reliability?

Jesus, that really does sound soul-crushingly abominable.

I remember working night jobs surrounded by that sort of crowd. Everywhere you look it feels like you're witnessing the distressed underpinnings of all civilized behavior disintegrate in the throes of abandon.

To wit: Comes the day that I find out 9 in 10 people found this one particular night job (which shall remain nameless) because they had all connected at narcotics anonymous meetings. A month or two later I'm at the book store reading up on (what else?) computers. I had developed a crush on one of the girls I worked with, and I glance across the store, and there she is, sitting on the floor with a book in her lap.

A nervous compulsion to go say "hi" creeps in, so I consider how to strike up conversation and start in her direction. I see she's with someone. The brain-damaged guy, who sits next to her at work. He speaks slowly, with this lazy, distant gaze, and the hypothesis is that he was in a car accident, since he's physically normal and healthy. We catch eyes, but given his situation, there's no hint of emotion. Just a lost half-sleepy nod hello from him. I'm surprised they're hanging out outside of work. I'm steps away, when she slumps over into the book in her lap, then startled, staggers to her feet with this absurd, slurred giggle. She almost walks into a book case when Damage Case catches her around the waste, and they sort of stare into eachother's eyes. We have crossed into uncharted territory, and I'm disturbed at what's all-to-obvious. I buy my book and leave.

Monday morning. I reassess the situation in the office. Damage Case is brain damaged as usual. A handicapped person. Clueless, and incapable of normal social interaction. At the printer I bump into "It Girl" and ask if she finished that book she was reading. Confused and searching... What book? She does not remember being at the book store. At all. I make a joke, and she laughs harder than necessary, and I notice for the first time that all her molars are gone.

Over time I learn that everyone in the office had lived lives ravaged by a managerie of drug addictions, and "It Girl's" life was in the process of being unravelled by herion. She was a prostitute on the down-low, especially for anyone who had access to heroin.

Thanks to everyone else ruining their lives outside of work at that place, I looked like some kind of wunderkind model citizen. And with that I was promoted well beyond my experience or qualifications, and paid handsomely, all because of the disparity between me and the human wreckage I shared the room with. I made that much work out in my favor, and got the hell out of there as fast as possible.

No. The premise of what if we only had a single monolithic email service, run by a single corporation as a public utility.

Not gmail specifically. Insert any named service into that role as placeholder. Yahoo, hotmail, gandi.net.

That entity becomes The One Ring, when they control the monopoly, and can read everyone's mail.

I would have thought my euphemism was obvious, but gee, I guess not.

I think it's a sphere packing thing. [0] Equally sized circles touching on edges "like" to pack into a six-up orientation, not unlike a revolver pistol.

My hunch is that it's an artifact of pi, somehow. Six being easily factored to three, which has close proximity to pi.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing

Patterns:

  The email message contents say the sender
  is joe@example.com but the originating
  mail server is owned by advertiser-d00dz.net
  and was routed through cdns and isps that 
  example.com is not known to operate, based
  on a wide swath of reliable analytics from
  several million other messages previously 
  processed and known to be legit example.com
  messages.

Those are patterns that very large email providers know about.

But if you are running your own mail server, and using squirrel mail, you, a lone individual cannot analyze mass traffic patterns.

One Ring To Rule Them All:

  Everyone only uses gmail, and there is no 
  other provider, resulting in monoculture,
  and we all get spied on, not just by the 
  NSA, but The Corporation too, but at least 
  there's no spam. That last guy that tried 
  spamming was turned into soylent green.

As for pixels, uh, images don't automatically load for all people. I haven't permitted a banner image to load in eons.

I also don't visit links that I cannot understand, especially for domains I don't recognize, but that's because I know better.

Yes, yes, cookies, web mail, javascript, event bubbling and capturing, hovering, ajax, json, oh noes. I get it. We get it. We all get it. But grandma does not.

A lot of people simply don't understand what little integrity email actually has.

People like to think that they can rely the sender address as an unspoofable source of truth, and do not understand that the message is just a text file, and you can make it say anything you want.

No one inspects the delivery servers or the message routing, and even that can be sufficiently obfuscated.

Using too-big-to-fail services like gmail, that attempt to provide analysis and alert you to suspicious patterns is nice, but it doesn't solve for the actual realities of handling email. Furthermore, if there were one email ring to rule them all, we'd be haunted by a more ominous problem.

Still, the level of confusion and misperception about common technology, and what is and is not possible, is clearly as big a problem on its own. It sucks that people are left with such superstitious paranoia, because they don't understand how naked they actually are.

Have you considered possible interference and noise introduced by other rival devices competing for the same spectrum?

This has been my hypothesis, considering the disruption patterns I've noticed.

At home, well removed from other possible bluetooth sources, I rarely experience signal cut-out, or choppy reception.

When I move into high traffic areas, the amount of signal loss skyrockets. The worst areas are areas with lots of cars in motion.

My hunch, is that noise, destructive interference, and fortuitous signals result in dropped packets. And cars especially, tend to broadcast stronger signals that outshine an handset/headphone channel, cause both ends of the connection to drop packets.

This is just based on observation. In crowded train stations and near busy roadways my headphones act like shit. I get the feeling it's the old "poorly shielded blender appliance ruins the t.v. reception" business, except the interference drops out in the same way progressive scan HDMI monitors glitch up without shielding.

I have no proof that this is the case though.

Watch, and TV aren't defensive "moat like" structures intended to reinforce or barracade.

Defense, in an industry like this, is vertical integration, so more like tools such as Xcode.

The Apple watch is a luxury item and fashion statement. An advertisement and status symbol. It does not insulate or protect the appeal or practicality of other products.

As an accessory, the watch promotes deeper investment, but it's adoption is niche.

The walled garden and business partnerships of the app store to provide desirable mobile media and content that motivates actually using an iPhone for anything at all is the true moat and fortification surrounding the iPhone.

As for attacking itself as an evolutionary leap forward, Apple would need to obviate its current product line with something better that reduces dependency on said products. Phone service and phone numbers may eventually become anachronistic. At which point, phones cease to be phones, really, but the name and the digital broadband connection will still be there.

Maybe personal orbital satellites and sub-orbital high altitude personal drones will obviate today's concept of a handset? Does that sound silly, because I can't tell anymore.

Clojure or Closure?

What language are they talking about?

Considering that all our eggs are in one basket, right now, any topic of discussion in the vein of colonization is a good one, as long as it keeps people thinking in that direction, I'd say.

In the short term, their are still the intra-solar-system planets and satellites, and those are something we should push onto quickly. Once we get to those, permanent artificial platforms will arrive all the faster, if at all.

Pffft!

Astounding to see that some goofballs took the time to encrypt an SD card partition, and then hide the password in immediate proximity to the ostensibly secured resource.

Thumb to the wind, and the author MITM'd it in minutes?

Ah well, I suppose it's better to anticipate the SD card becoming separated from the device chassis with the original eeprom password or some such blah blah blah.

Strap yourselves in for what the future holds.

Internet of things, hurr dee durr...

   ...and yet for some reason 
  there are a lot of programmers 
  who believe their job is to
  produce more code. Fuck those 
  guys. Seriously.

I hope this isn't a potshot at languages that tend to be verbose.

Coming in cold on a program that someone else has written in a terse programming language that you know well, still sucks. You can know the language, but if you don't know the person doing the writing, terse code can be all but opaque.

With some languages you need some apriori information before attempting to read a thing. Whether it comes in the form of a vulcan mind meld with your best friend, or cultural mores and in-group conventions like managerially enforced coding practices.

Sometimes this is less of a problem with verbose languages, which promote habits and tendencies to be adopted by the author which attempt to indicate intent within code, although any turing-complete language can disappear down a rabbit hole, if the author willfully tries to confuse the reader.

Consider the expressions:

  var _something = (data isNaN ? "string" : -1);

In this first example, who the fuck knows what that asshole intended? But there really are people actually expect a declaration like that to be useful?

Compare to:

  private static String something = "string";
  private static Integer aNumber = -1;
  private static boolean numericDataType = false;

Okay, possibly also terrible, and apparently redundant at first glance, but maybe there's a mud pit ahread of us, and some redundant tethering will come in handy.

At least I can see indications of intent, and a separation of ideas.

Maybe the second example involved more keyboard activity, but I can understand it at a glance.

The first example, while shorter, is something I might re-read 3 times, question why anyone would do that, and then find myself re-reading it 10 more times while I debug the all-but-guaranteed garbage that comes immediately after that albatross.