rmtodd
28d ago
Yeah, saw the same thing, with the same error message. Annoyingly, as a curious technically minded person, I couldn't seem to find a quick way to get any of Chrome, Firefox, "openssl s_client", wget or curl to tell exactly what the "VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH" being complained about was. I expect Chrome and Firefox to be anywhere from useless to actively hostile in debugging problems, but openssl, curl, and wget are from Unix developers from whom I expected better debug logs. I admittedly didn't spend a whole lot of time looking...
rmtodd
30d ago
My thoughts on hearing all this talk about putting compute nodes in space is that they're more likely to be sufficiently cooked by radiation -- the cosmic ray sort, that is. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I'd guess that a top-line NVIDIA GPU with its as-small-as-modern-technology-can-create transistors is about as far as one can get on the silicon-design spectrum from the concept of "radiation-hard design".
rmtodd
1mo ago
And as someone (I think it may have been later SSC poster John Schilling) pointed out in a long-ago argument on Usenet, it's possible that Petrov may have made war more likely -- now every time things are all quiet, there's always the lurking possibility in the leadership's minds: "Are things really peaceful, or is there really a missile launch and another Petrov-wannabe in the radar center is playing games with our inbound data feed?" Soviet leadership knew, or should have known, that military hardware can be flaky, but raising the possibility that the underlings can be lying is not a method likely to lower upper-level paranoia...
rmtodd
1mo ago
As I recall it, it wasn't food allergies, more that it was requirements related to provisions for mounting facilities on the ceiling for the lights for the light show and for the electrical connections for the lights and the bigass sound system, in both cases with really serious safety implications -- improperly secured hundred-pound lights can fall down from the ceiling and hit the band or the audience, and the electrical connections can be pulling hundreds of amps. The brown m&ms clause was just put in the contract so that if they saw the venue hadn't got that right they'd know the venue hadn't been paying close attention and start raising a fuss/inspecting everything more closely....
rmtodd
1mo ago
If this video is to be believed, such an incident (poorly secured cargo shifting on a plane) was responsible for a Tu-104 crashing and taking out 16 of the USSR Pacific Fleet's top admirals in a single shot.
rmtodd
2mo ago
Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world).
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
rmtodd
3mo ago
Not that prescient, as the net in AFUTD was heavily inspired by the early 1990s Usenet computer network, and the phenomenon you describe existed just as much on Usenet back then as on Internet fora today.
rmtodd
7mo ago
What I still wonder is why the heck that law firm had a security clearance in the first place. I mean, I can see why people in DOD and CIA have security clearances, ditto Boeing and Lockheed-Martin and whatever random contractor gets the contract for making bits of the radar for the F-35 etc., but why does some random law firm need a security clearance?
rmtodd
8mo ago
The Confederate States of America also held congressional elections in 1863-1864 while Grant's and Sherman's armies were busy trashing the place. I think that counts. The CSA didn't hold presidential elections because IIRC the CSA presidency was a 6-year term and the CSA didn't, um, last long enough for Jefferson Davis to have to worry about elections....
rmtodd
8mo ago
You don't even need that; as anyone who's looked at the unauthorized youtube downloader tools out there will know, youtube's protocols allow access to the audio-only and video-only portions of a recording as separate stream. All Grok would have to do is request the audio-only stream.
rmtodd
9mo ago
A pity that we're not making this public event "smaller" and "more selective" on the grounds that when your country is 36 trillion dollars in the hole, it's frankly obscene to be spending anything on a glorified public party. All that's needed for the inauguration is the President, the VP, and the Chief Justice to administer the oath, and maybe a BBC camera crew to show the rest of the world that the inauguration actually happened, plus the usual Secret Service security that'd be there anyway. Anything beyond that is frivolity.
rmtodd
11mo ago
They didn't talk in terms of "users customizing the algorithm" back then, but Usenet certainly supported user/client controlled presentation order/selection of articles since even before the development of the Usenet network protocol NNTP in RFC 977 in 1986. Usenet clients/servers had this as working technology even before there was a world-wide-web (HTTP didn't start till 1989 or so).
rmtodd
1yr ago
Well, they already handed a Peace Prize out to Obama while the country he ran was simultaneously fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, so it seems that actively being involved in one or more wars is not considered a disqualification for the Peace Prize.
rmtodd
1yr ago
He may have accidentally dropped some words and meant "don't drink [alcohol with] acetaminophen, at all, ever."
rmtodd
1yr ago
That and, well, there's more kinds of expense than just the purely monetary -- IVF is inherently a somewhat invasive medical procedure (apparently involving a good amount of being poked with Big Honking Needles while the doctor watches on ultrasound to make sure that the right bit is being poked, as well as dosing with hormone treatments with occasional interesting side effects) and even without the current multi-thousand-dollar medical bills this is a "cost" that people may reasonably decide they don't want to pay.
rmtodd
1yr ago
Oklahoma axed them some time back: https://oksenate.gov/press-releases/mandatory-vehicle-inspections-abolished-repeal-will-save-oklahomans-12-million
rmtodd
1yr ago
It's on amazon, both as kindle format and paperback. Oddly, they also list an audio book available for the sequels Logan's World and Logan's Search, but the only books available are from used-book sellers.
rmtodd
1yr ago
I think it's been tried before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Jerusalem .
rmtodd
1yr ago
Six main novels, yes. I kind of forgot how many side stories are there, maybe I should read them.
Yeah, there's the 6 main novels (Empire of Silence, Howling Dark, Demon in White, Kingdom of Death, Ashes of Man, Disquiet Gods) with the 7th/final one in progress, three short story collections (Tales of the Sun Eater Volume 1/2/3) and three auxiliary stories (The Lesser Devil about Hadrian's younger brother, Queen Amid Ashes about Hadrian on a planet recently freed from the Cielcin, and The Dregs of Empire about one of Hadrian's underlings getting sent to prison after the events of book 5).
rmtodd
1yr ago
Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?
That was the approach taken by Isreal in Dean Ing's novel Systemic Shock, book one of the Quantrell trilogy: when World War IV [1] broke out, America was too busy with other concerns to worry about helping defending Israel from its neighbors, and Israel eventually ended up doing a hurried evacuation to Cyprus as temporary residence while they prepared their ultimate destination colonies at the L-5 points.
[1] What about World War III? Well, that was in somebody else's book,,,
rmtodd
1yr ago
Eh. Oklahoma IIRC doesn't allow write-ins at all, and comes damned close to not allowing third-party candidates either -- last time I looked, the requirement was that they had to gather petitions with signatures of 3% of the voting population to get on the ballot. (I recall an old SSC open thread where someone from Romania was complaining about how strict the election laws were there, where it took signatures from 1% of the voting population to get a new party on the ballot. When even ex-Commie-Block countries have more liberal election laws than your state does, that says something.)
Personally, if I was in charge, I wouldn't allow write-ins either (having preprinted ballots that can be scanned by machine is a good thing), but I wouldn't have any requirement other than "the candidate meets whatever eligibility standards (min. age etc) are set for the office and pays a fee to cover the share of costs printing the ballots attributable to adding his entry."
rmtodd
1yr ago
I was and remain of the opinion that with Contragate, Oliver North should have been shot as a traitor to the uniform.
And I'm a conservative, so that's my view on doing things that are indeed a threat to democracy.
More libertarian than conservative here, but I'm with you on this one.
I still find the response of Our Nation's Leaders to Iran-Contra to be intensely surreal. The Republicans IIRC thought everything was just fine, and the Democrats were mostly upset about Ollie funneling the proceeds from the arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras, and nobody seemed to much care that US military officers had been selling US military hardware out the back door to an enemy nation.
rmtodd
2yr ago
That and, if the conversations in question are of any sort of sensitivity (if not necessarily "classified" under one of DOD or some other agency's Top Secret/Secret/etc. schemes, just something you'd like to keep quiet), you probably don't want to leave those emails lying about on systems admined by a third party (Google, in the case of gmail). While I gather Google/gmail is somewhat better than average as ISP goes when it comes to admin access controls and keeping audit trails on admin access to user data, there's still the possibility of such admin-snooping happening. If the President really needs a second email account under an assumed name, he should probably be doing this on an account somewhere on a system run by .gov IT.
rmtodd
2yr ago
Surely a "danger man" would be a secret agent . Just don't try to resign your position, or you might get imprisioned in a village somewhere in Wales....
George Takei ran for LA city council in 1973, and the local TV stations did take reruns of Star Trek and new-run episodes of ST:TAS off the air apparently because of this.
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