tqk 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (2649) comment rss

  • On the post: HP Drops Support For Hacking Competition As Wassenaar Arrangement Continues To Make Computing Less Safe

    tqk ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2015 @ 07:56am

    Re:

    Why do governments think that claiming control over dangerous things prevent their use by non-government, and disliked government actors?

    When your purpose is tyranny, any silly excuse will do. Anyone's actual use of dangerous things is irrelevant. Will those who were responsible for protecting the Office of Personel Management go to jail for their laziness and incompetence? No. People like that demonstrate the need for silliness like this. They're enablers.

  • On the post: Dennys Rodriguez's Supreme Court Win Fails To Help Dennys Rodriguez

    tqk ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2015 @ 07:39am

    Re: what am i missing here ? ? ?

    WHAT was the point of 'the law', again?

    Prohibition 2.0. It enables racists to be racist without having to call it racism. Instead, they're "substance abusers", and it's just coincidence that the vast majority of police' time and effort is accosting minorities and the poor.

    The take home from decisions like this? "We're gonna screw you over no matter what and it makes no difference whether you're supposed to have constitutional rights by virtue of being born. Just accept you're the victims/targets du jour, fuck you, and have a marvy day."

    The other take home is, "It won't matter whether you're an abuser when we come to get you. You're the victim/target du jour, remember? We'll find a way. If you're not middle or upper class caucasian, the USA needs you to occupy a prison cell."

    We used to call these things pogroms.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2015 @ 09:25pm

    Re: Re: Re: Control over an OS is Power over the Users

    If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left.

    I'm not a member of "the left", and why would anyone want to be? Left vs. right hasn't had any real meaning since ca. 18th century.

    I hate tyranny. I'm not sympathetic to "the left" or "the right" or "progressive" vs. "conservative" politics. I am an individualist and wish everyone else wanted to be so too.

  • On the post: West Point Prof Who Called For Killing Of Academics Opposed To US Terror War Resigns

    tqk ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2015 @ 06:09pm

    Re: Re: Parallel Reconstruction.

    I admire your patience, persistence, and mostly tolerance. I'm rabidly anti-religious and lost all interest in debating angels-on-heads-of-pins crap long ago. I'm one of those wondering why we're not all over this BS centuries ago. There are no sky fairies, there's no Santa Clause, no Easter Bunny, Zombies and vampires, ...

    Meanwhile, Scalia (!!!) is attempting to educate Kentucky about church vs. state in the 21st century. HS!

    Aaaaauuuughgh!

    Have fun. :-P

  • On the post: Problem: Male Operators Use Surveillance Cameras For Ogling Women; Mayor's Solution: Employ Only Female Operators

    tqk ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2015 @ 05:50pm

    Re:

    This is reminiscent of the issue of men perving around purikura (photo booths) in Japan ...

    From my western eyes, it appears Japan's still in the process of getting over the less desirable parts of Samurai culture, and that of being "parented" by the US' military (MacArthur) post-WWII. Japanese culture, in many ways, is beautiful but the authorities haven't yet learned to deal with its "peasants" as free individuals yet.

    It may take a while. I think they'll do very well once they hit their stride. It may take a while though. The Germans, already being western and sort of already initiated, have picked up anti-authoritarianism much quicker (and better). The Italians just went back to being Italian. Patience.

  • On the post: West Point Prof Who Called For Killing Of Academics Opposed To US Terror War Resigns

    tqk ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2015 @ 03:55pm

    Re: Perhaps you believe in miracles after all.

    Can i first challenge you to find an incident in history in which data scooped up bt the NSA was used to identify and accuse a citizen of the US for a crime?

    Who are you, and what have you done with the real Uriel-238?!?

    Do the words "parallel reconstruction" ring any bells? The NSA has been feeding the results of its illegal slurping to any and every other TLA (including other countries' TLAs) it can for more than a decade, telling them, "Psst! Don't tell 'em we told you. This message will self-destruct ..."

  • On the post: Vice News Employees Charged With Terrorism In Turkey… Because They Used Encryption

    tqk ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2015 @ 03:45pm

    Re: You know what else ISIL uses!

    The Internet, Facebook, Twitter, gasoline, matches, knives, ignorance, credulousness, arrogance, foolishness, stupidity, ...

    Gee, the same !@#$ their targets use. How 'bout that? Son of a gun. Whatever works, right? Pragmatism wins the day! We don't need morals, ethics, yada, yada, when the goal is righteous!

    "You will be assimilated. Comply!"

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2015 @ 03:17pm

    Re: Control over an OS is Power over the Users

    With Windows the control is shared with Microsoft. With any Free as in Libre OS the full control is always available to the local Administrators.

    We Free/Libre Opensource Software freaks wondered why proprietary software was going this way when they were folding DRM (originally Trusted Platform Management) into their products assuming it was just vendor lock-in trying to sew up their customer base (ie. market based coercion). Now, in hindsight, it's easy to see they likely had no choice in the matter. The MafiAA was buying up our legislators, fouling the justice system, and hijacking the market, and they either complied or they'd get sued into oblivion for refusing.

    Now we see what they're left to flog. Windows-NSA, iBaubles-Walled Garden-NSA, or (so far legal) FLOSS.

    "Your papers comrade!" But I was just going to the corner store to buy milk?!?

    Enjoy the nightmare. Buy popcorn, while you can. Seig heil.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 01:55pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: People are switching to Mac too not just Linux

    And remember the question I was answering is "why do some people dislike the command line?"

    The simplest answer to that is they never bothered to learn to use it.

    If you've used a command before, it's stored in shell history. If you have no idea what command you need, there's "apropos blah" and "man -k blah". For long commands that you type often, you stuff that whole command in an alias. There are so many slick, quick tools to do this stuff at a command line, it's ridiculous.

    But if they never learned how, they're oblivious to all of it. GUI's the only way to them.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 01:44pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: People are switching to Mac too not just Linux

    What purpose, making changes to the system? If you're suggesting it should be used for daily tasks, that's even worse. Hardly anyone wants to do that.

    Call me hardly anyone. There's a reason why traditional *nix systems and software were configured by editing text files (as opposed to regedit massaging binary config files). It's the same reason why every *nix box in existence came with some form of vi editor.

    Unfortunately, we're now heading into systemd-land, and I'll just bail out now, thanks. :-P

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 01:36pm

    Re: Re: Re: The need to install Linux is not a problem created by Linux

    Wouldn't Microsoft removing bulk discounts just increase Linux distribution?

    For that vendor yes. The downside is they'll lose all Windows sales to their competitor across the street who's getting the Windows discount. When most of your sales are for Windows, that's going to hurt your bottom line a lot.

    It'd be smarter for that vendor to sell bare machines to Linux users, not paying the "Windows tax." MS won't allow that either. How about a refund for the Windows that a Linux user won't use? Nope.

    I just buy second hand and wipe Windows installing Linux. It's very satisfying to answer that, "Are you sure you want to delete this partition?"

  • On the post: Cop Fights State Agency For Right To Place '0INK' License Plate On His Own Vehicle

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 01:14pm

    Re:

    Well my motor vehicle branch would not let me have PHAQ.

    Looks like someone doesn't know how to spell the acronym for Frequently Asked Questions.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 12:49pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Or do you mean Debian Linux as an organization?

    Yup. I've never tried it and can't verify it's there yet, but wiki.debian.org has a page on it (last time I looked).

  • On the post: Cop Fights State Agency For Right To Place '0INK' License Plate On His Own Vehicle

    tqk ( profile ), 03 Sep, 2015 @ 07:02am

    Re: Re: Down on the farm

    OINK is the sound that pigs make and the guy is a cop.

    I wonder what would have happened if he raised pigs or had a pet pig, or was a Porky Pig fan. Stupid system. I thought they only concerned themselves with obscenities and racism, as in objectionable stuff.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 08:06pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: People are switching to Mac too not just Linux

    People use it every day without even knowing what a command line is, much less needing it.

    One of the hardest things for me to understand is why everyone learned to want to avoid the command line. It's a feature! You can talk directly to the OS and the machine through the CLI. Shell programming is a great way to learn programming, and a great way to automate tasks you do repetitively. Once you learn whichever commands do what you want done, stuff 'em into a shell script and schedule it as a cron job. Want better performance than bash? Use Korn or Z shell, or awk or sed, or perl, or python. Beats the crap out of basic.

    Microsoft and Apple just made computing more complex and expensive and less reliable.

  • On the post: Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features'

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 07:02pm

    Re:

    GNU/Linux is the only way to go.

    Not true. The BSDs are still out there and are arguably better in some situations. In fact, you can run Gnu userland with a BSD kernel. Debian Linux even offers that option.

    I watched a talk given by an OpenBSD developer demonstrating two tiny Sokris boxes running pf firewalls. He hit the power on one of them, it failed over to the other seamlessly and not a packet was dropped while the other came back to life. Slick!

  • On the post: West Point Prof Who Called For Killing Of Academics Opposed To US Terror War Resigns

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 06:51pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: CLOACA

    Hmm, well there's sweat glands and pores too, and tear ducts, nasal passages, saliva ducts, weeping sores, stab wounds, oh yeah and pee, but none of those handle solids (though the cruft around my eyes every morning and sometimes around my nose often suggest I rethink that).

  • On the post: Problem: Male Operators Use Surveillance Cameras For Ogling Women; Mayor's Solution: Employ Only Female Operators

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 06:18pm

    Re: Re: The mayor's a sexist pig.

    Maybe it's a speedos thing...

    They still sell speedos? Perhaps those women are as shocked to see one as I am to hear they're still worn.

  • On the post: West Point Prof Who Called For Killing Of Academics Opposed To US Terror War Resigns

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 02:42pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: CLOACA

    So, yes, we DO need a special word for birds' plumbing.

    You ornithologists are welcome to complexify and jargonize all you want. I think the rest of us would be quite satisfied using the generally understood anus. It's where what's left of what goes in comes out.

    I'm not singling anyone out, btw. I'd love to see mathematicians give up on Greek, lawyers and physicians give up on Latin, & etc. I don't see what anyone gains by dragging dead languages around, other than to raise the bar to entry to a field by newcomers (competition).

  • On the post: The Cable Industry Is Fighting Tooth And Nail To Prevent Cable Set Top Box Competition

    tqk ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2015 @ 02:16pm

    Illegible, sorry.

    You don't seriously expect anyone to read that, do you?

Next >>