mr_overalls

We have a small IT department and are running on extremely limited funds. We literally had two unlicensed dev databases, and Oracle threatened to sue us for millions of dollars, unless we bought a subscription to their shitty cloud product.

The whole process was shitty, predatory, and abusive.

I work for a government agency in a rather poor flyover state. We ran Oracle databases and a few other products for multiple decades, until Oracle conducted an audit and decided to shake us down for everything we were worth. We migrated away from their products, but only after being forced into expensive multi-year subscriptions for products that we didn't need.

I will never forget the arrogance and greed of their legal/sales people. They are bloodsucking sociopaths.

I find the comments in this article very accurate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

> Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely.

> They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem.

> ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.

Buddhist philosophers would agree with you. See Yogacara and Madhyamaka schools, who both agree that the ordinary appearance of the world is akin to a magical illusion.

Right. R's killer feature is its ecosystem.

I'm wondering if most statisticians or researchers deal with data big enough that massively better performance would be enough motivation to switch.

Julia seems like such a superior language compared to R. What would be required for it to supplant R for statistical work (or some subset of it)?

With the growing awareness that tech giants possess intimate knowledge of our preferences, activities, and lives - and use that influence to literally addict us to technology, sell us things, influence us politically - who the f*ck wants another fantastically wealthy corporation "woven into our lives"?

I mean, honestly, does anyone else yearn for the pre-2000 Internet? It sure feels increasingly like we're living in a tech dystopia.

He kept claiming that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the leaked DNC emailes (and not Russian military/GRU hackers) and that Rich had been killed as a result.

He also released actual CIA hacking tools (Vault 7), which was a monumentally stupid, destructive act.

I think it depends on your definition of constructive criticism. Assange breaking news of US coverups of war-zone crimes is useful, imho. Assange serving as a mouthpiece of Russian disinformation is not.

> It didn’t matter that there was nothing bad coming from China or Russia or Nigeria. All that mattered back then is that he had dirt on the US.

Because liberals hate America, right? This sort of thinking from conservatives baffles me. Improvement of any sort - personal, cultural, political - depends on acknowledging legitimate criticism. US citizens aren't required to be blindly loyal to their country. To state an obvious near-tautology, the only way to make things better is to encourage and facilitate useful criticism, so that bad things can be improved.

The relative lack of freedom to criticize is exactly why so many autocratic states become mired in corruption; there's no non-destructive mechanism for accountability and change in government.

Probably the most important one: keeping the roof from leaking. Uncontrolled moisture incursion is one of the quickest ways to destroy any structure.

This article explores the concept in greater detail. The most common interpretation in a professional context is "half-assed job."

    Black mold in a room? Just paint over it. Cha bu duo.
    A pinch of this instead of a teaspoon of that? Cha bu duo.
    Is the stitching around the seams crooked? Cha bu duo.

I'm speculating, but I wonder if this is the result of inflexible top-down management practices, courtesy of the historical legacy of the CCP.

https://medium.com/random-acts-of-management/cha-bu-duo-is-n...

That's just an astounding incidence rate. That kind of selective pressure makes the reason for the sickle cell mutation in hemoglobin more obvious.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html

> Inheritance of this mutated gene from both parents leads to sickle cell disease and people with this disease have shorter life expectancy. On the contrary, individuals who are carriers for the sickle cell disease (with one sickle gene and one normal hemoglobin gene, also known as sickle cell trait) have some protective advantage against malaria. As a result, the frequencies of sickle cell carriers are high in malaria-endemic areas.

> . . .It was found that that the sickle cell trait provides 60% protection against overall mortality.

Meh, everybody is a 0.9X developer in many areas outside of their specialty. I'm a data engineer who specializes in security. I only need to generate a GUI or CRUD webapp once in a blue moon. So a stack that makes sane choices for me and holds my hand a bit is greatly appreciated.

> Why would you go all the way to Earth

Perhaps we just happen to be on the route to somewhere more interesting? It's a pretty big assumption that we are the final destination for visiting alien craft.

Water is a poor medium for photons, but a great one for sound. That's why the US and other countries surveil the seas with linked arrays of underwater microphones, i.e. the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS).

https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/iuss.htm

At least several years ago, the cracked John Deere firmware was done by Ukrainian hackers. This seems like a serious vulnerability for supply-side attacks.

High-end tractors have been driving autonomously for years, with precise GPS, multiple cameras, Internet connections, etc. It's not unthinkable that hostile nation-state actors could hack the firmware to simply direct a 25-ton combine to leave the field and drive through the nearest population center (or high-voltage transmission line, oil storage tank, etc.)

A concordance rate of 40% actually points to a near-even split between heritable and non-heritable factors.

At this time, it's becoming clear that the GOP establishment is in favor of de facto one-party rule. They are seeking to overturn the results of a democratic election, and many of them are encouraging voter disenfranchisement and even stochastic terrorism to retain their grip on power.

I don't care if my personal information was leaked. I followed discussions, posted a comment or two like, "What evidence do you have for that?" There seemed to be tons of other accounts that did the same, along with accounts by obvious Lefts who were there to troll. I highly doubt there will be blowback for the kind of participation I did.

I am absolutely a privacy advocate. However, in the case where the continued existence of our democracy hinges on rooting out violent domestic terrorists, I am willing to make tradeoffs. At this point, you should think about Parler as a jihadi forum for rednecks.

> media told me

I create a Parler account myself out of curiosity's sake. The platform had basically no moderation, and was rife with open calls to violence. It was absolutely serving as a recruitment & coordination site for domestic terrorism.

Come on, man. Are you 15? Hacking in the spirit of curiosity & experimentation shouldn't be illegal. Hacking to destroy computers, bankrupt companies, and dox journalists should certainly be.

This is victim-blaming.

Security incidents, viewed generally, are the conjunction of two factors: threats and vulnerabilities. It is a massive over-generalization to view all cyber attacks through a lens that focuses only on one factor.

Sure, there might have been vulnerabilities in the software or processes of Funke group. But it's a dishonest analysis that ignore the threat actor (a criminal in this case - let's not mince words) who exploits the vulnerability.

It could be incredibly expensive to clean up.

Remediation and recovery for most threats involves OS/app reinstallation, perhaps restoring from backups and images. However, if your threat is a sophisticated state actor based out of Russia, it's hard to rule out that they're got hooks in your server's firmware, that they've corrupted your backups as well, etc, etc.

One wonders how Russia could exploit the systems they've penetrated. Brick every gov't system on Jan 20th? Shut down SCADA systems? It's a cybersecurity nightmare.

"Paradigm-breaking" and "kooky" are different. Pais's language is gibberish, refers to yet-unsupported effects named after himself, and betrays a lack of understanding of basic principles in the field he seeks to revolutionize.

It is overwhelmingly likely that he's simply a crackpot.

> but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.

This would positively affect my perception of the plant's operators. They handled the crisis, and now are laying out the post-mortem for the public in a transparent manner. A culture of secrecy conceals incompetence, and that can lead to disaster. See: Chernobyl

Attribution is tricky, but nation-state actors have resources that no other threat type (organized crime, hacktivists, etc.) can muster: multiple 0-days, advanced tools, obviously deep field of programming talent, inside info about targeted networks/apps, etc.

Not to mention, that forensic analysis of tactics, tools, etc. often clearly point to borrowing/surveiling of other APTs.

Materials research is an exception to your claim. Aviation and weapons research depend heavily on exotic materials that are almost certainly NOT found in civilian applications. E.g. nuclear weaponry, stealth coatings, metamaterials cloaking devices, camera systems, hypersonics, directed energy weaponry, plasma generators, etc.

> Society divorcees and scandalized people in transition, politicians from remote ridings, elderly widows, downwardly mobile sons of establishment families, mistresses, professional artists and musicians who needed to be in the city but could never raise enough for a down payment - these characters and archetypes form the mythology of cities. . .

I found this description very evocative, to the point that I was starting to imagine a story set in a building of these characters. I was very pleased to click on your profile and see that you're a writer, and are not letting that talent go to waste!