Craiggybear

When the other board members bring charges ... Which they might or might not, depending on the true financial picture of FB.

I am certain I would take offence at 1bn being spent on my behalf without prior consultation. Its actually a criminal offence and possibly could construe false accounting. Do you know what those words mean? Spending money demands a paper trail and minuted meeting notes. Or used to.

If you can now spend that amount without due ovetsight its no wonder we're financially shafted.

He's not the Emporor. Bitch.

People used to go to jail for this type of shit.

When we had fiscal oversight and corporate law.

No. I do sometimes, but I do take the train and bus (which incidentally costs a fortune) because I'd pass out at the wheel. This has never happened but its always in my mind.

Besides there's (typically) nowhere to park. I've decided to leave in the next few weeks. Life's too precious for this sorta shit.

Free consultancy. Looks good on the CV I suppose.

And, ok, its probably quite fun -- but I was paid double this in 1991 (£10,000) for a week/10 days -- my first consultancy.

It wasn't even NASA or a mega-corp. It was documentation on the Victorian Architect, Waterfield, for a small museum.

Yeah -- no mention of a linux client. Shame on them.

Thanks for that!

Its interesting -- my little rural library is very good. If you want a book they don't have, you fill in a card and they will either requisition it from somewhere else or they will buy it.

Although I'm rural, the local amenities are actually great -- one of the reasons I'm here. We're lucky. Excellent doctors and hospitals, too.

Great neighbours who aren't weirdos, its also so quiet on a Friday and Saturday you could hear a pin drop. That might drive some people crazy but I like it.

I have a little garden which I'm making nice and a few interesting little techie projects that I want to finish (I just don't have time right now) but I will quit and then use my time rationally. Who knows where it might lead?

Like you, I couldn't even entertain this had I not an enormous load of audiobooks and a Kindle loaded with hundreds of titles. Most of which I've read. And listened to. At least twice.

It is absolutely batshit fucking crazy. And I don't even like the work.

Partly my own fault because I chose several years ago to live in quite a rural area. Still, not worth the hassle.

No, lets face it, it is sub-optimal for anyone. I'll be leaving soon anyway. I couldn't keep that up indefinitely.

Although, weirdly, there are those in there who do even further commutes.

I leave at 4.30 pm. I get in at 8.00 am, so I figure eight hours is enough -- any longer than that is pointless because I'm too tired. I have a three/four hour commute on top of this and have to be up at 5.15 am. I get back home around 6.45-7-45 pm, so, fuck it, my day is long enough.

I've got a life, my own internal dialogue and other interests. Life's short enough as it is.

> Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?

They are differently enabled. Evolution gave them all they need to thrive and be successful. Intelligence is, in evolutionary terms, very expensive, hi-maintenance and often counter-productive. So is individuality. These things are not the natural end-product of an evolutionary process like they are assumed to be. In fact, its normally the exception rather than the rule. Simplicity (seldom complexity, except for a short while and in niche settings) is the end result of a perfected organism in harmony with its environment.

You get what you need for the time frame in which you need it. After that, as soon as you don't need it so much, it will go. Like flight in birds. Dodo's didn't need it, lost it rapidly and then humans arrived. We killed them, tried to eat them and our technology (ships) brought vermin predators (rats and cats) to their world which they had no defence against -- and that was the end of them. Our `intelligence' didn't pan out too well for them. And they're just one example of this sort of thing. Its happening all the time.

When you are sitting in the shattered and burned-out remains of your world (literally or metaphorically), intelligence looks overrated. The same will eventually, inevitably, happen to us. An AI, or our own avaricious greed and ambition, will probably finish us all off.

Big brains, language and tool-making abilities are not necessarily the best or inevitable end outcomes in evolutionary processes. They happen because they need to. Then again, sometimes they don't, and that can pan out OK as well. When it does happen it also tends toward the self-limiting, as well. Just what you need and no more.

The evolution of an AI will be as much an accident as a design. And that's good because it won't be forced into a form that is trying to mimic our own imperfect intelligence.

You may have assets that are worth, or potentially worth, a lot -- now or in the future.

The reality is, for some, the value of their digital dabblings will be worth as much, if not more, than their tangible assets -- if not today then several years down the line.

So establishing legal ownership on these is potentially very important.

I know. Some things (years old and forgotten) have benefited me greatly.

Actually, only about 5% is. The rest has more local origin.

Small cell, granuloma, take your pick. The data is available world-wide. The fact is that lung cancer is one from which there is never a good prognosis regardless of type. People can expect 4-5 years on average (although I know people who have gone past ten and have a good quality of life).

It also is one where heredity and genetics plays an enormous role (as opposed to purely environmental conditions).

Like I said, molecular biology is something we've only just noticed far less got a handle on.

Ars Longa Vita Brevis.

The longer you live the less like "cosmic woo-woo" it gets. Believe me. It becomes a mundane certainty. And if you can't give people the benefit of the doubt when you are well, then when it comes time for you to bear whatever cross comes your way (as it certainly will) then you will have no tools at your disposal to deal with it.

Be kind to people and don't prejudge. Grudge and jealousy are hideous, crippling afflictions (and its half of what's wrong with us as a species) and they don't help you in the time of your own need.

Because, like AI, molecular biology is complicated and there are no quick hacks.

Some things are meant to take time and be right. First time.

Survival rates are spectacularly better than they were fifteen or twenty years ago and they are getting better all the time.

Also there is no one type of lung cancer, brain tumour or bladder or bowel cancer either. There are many different types. Half the battle is identifying (and successfully treating) the right sort.

I still think there will be cancer in fifty years time. But we won't have to die from it. We may never eradicate it though, because it is a tough, complex bio-engineering problem, closely allied to programmed cell death and immortality. That's another tough nut to crack for the same reasons, inexorably intertwined as they are.

“Well look at her, she’s beautiful, she’s rich, she’s smart, she’s an amazing cook, and did it all with with kids. No one should have all that.”

She also watched her husband and father of those children, John Diamond, die a long, slow lingeringly horrible and miserable death from mouth cancer.

In life, no one gets off scot-free. And no one deserves to be on the receiving end of stupid, sour, ignorant, sweeping statements like this.

There are no legal definitions for being a programmer. There are for being a medical practitioner or a civil engineer. Only practising doctors who are certified to practice may prescribe. Only legally certified civil engineers who after prerequisite training and certification are permitted to handle high explosives and blow things up. Having a degree alone in either of those two professions does most certainly NOT on its own qualify you to do either. Or anything much. So maybe a bad example.

But that's a whole different argument. At present it is "programmers" (self-taught or academic or industrially trained) who make things and routinely test them for hardness. You can't suddenly invent rules that say only certain types of programmer may use and deploy "hacking" tools. That won't work because there is no defined path to test suitability or career fitness in the majority of people who define themselves as "programmers". Too broad a church. Too many disciplines and areas of specialisation. And too few people qualified to legitimately or meaningfully assess that either way. Or are we going to say, for example, only Microsoft Certified Pros are allowed to test? God in heaven forbid!

Reputation (from both peers and clients) and demonstrated output that works is the only test for whether someone is a good or bad (read, fit or unfit) programmer.

And no, in answer to your question, we don't allow only certain government regulated individuals to have legal access to perfectly ordinary systems analysis tools. They are probably the last people you want doing it.

Ah, of course. How stupid of me to think that they would have an empirical definition or set of legal definitions that actually was robust and made coherent sense.

Why bother with the hard stuff when opinionated prejudice gets you where you want to go?

"Think port scanners, password crackers, vulnerability identification and exploitation tools. Any reasonable person would consider these to be 'hacking tools'"

But, once again, these are all perfectly legitimate system engineering tools and are essential for hardening commercial or government or military sites, for example. You can't make something secure unless you know how easy or hard it will be to get past that.

It is like making dynamite illegal for civil engineers or morphine forbidden to medical practitioners or hammers and chisels denied to cabinet makers because they might hurt themselves. Ridiculous!

Everything is a hacking tool. Every programming language and every pre-existing piece of software, every computer and every phone is a potential hacking tool. Thought itself is the biggest hacking tool.

How are these fucking morons going to define legally what is and isn't a "hacking tool"?

It is full of excellent advice. But, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Somewhere along the line my fear is that it'll get forgotten and bad practice will start slipping in. That not everyone will be singing from the same hymn sheet. That person A's interpretation of something is not going to be person B's. That involves training and vigilance. Adherence to one's own standards. Frankly, this isn't something I associate with Government IT projects.

It is really good stuff. But I'll reserve judgement on it till I see it translated into real-world results -- one way or another.

Thanks for this. It concisely and exactly sums up my feelings in a nutshell.

Nice!

I've not used Perl in any real way for years but I am now brushing up on it again.

You can do neat one-liners in Python or Ruby but I've always liked Perl for this kind of thing.

I also have a weird penchant for using BASH scripting to do quite complicated things. Just because it can.

Who needs actual "enemies of the state" when you have Senators like Joe Liberman?

I wouldn't go out of my way to support it either.

If it happens to work in IE, then fine. If not, tough Rocco's.

What I can't get my head around here is how these employers know someone has a FB (or any other) account, and what Earthly bloody business they imagine that it has to do with them?

Next, are they going to be asking for your bank card PIN numbers?

Tell them to go fuck themselves! And if they fire you, sue them. Better still, don't have an FB account. And if you do it certainly isn't going to be your "real" name.

A few test cases will soon put a stop to this business and take down a peg (or three) these "employers" with an inflated sense of their own importance.

Such impertinence!

My original point was merely that FTP is far from dead for general purpose file transfer. It can still be quite safe if precautions are taken with encrypting the data first. Anyone looking at it will see nothing but gobbledegook, naturally.

It isn't dead and yes, of course, I know the difference between FTP and SFTP.