Necromnomicon
Mr. & the Glōbabiez
Service Top
LARGE HAM
Dr. Lucifer’s Patented All-American Greaseless Five-Cent Instant Baptism Remover
Phactory Pharm
Sweet Virgin Studmuffins
B.L.Z.Bubbles
Desmond & Molly Jones
The MDMAliens
The DMTeenagers
A Sea, A Bee

It means ten days.

Wiktionary seems to disagree.

But tenday is a good word for that.

In today’s example of a garden path sentence …

https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.

People pay for this?

Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

This has been going on for over 25 years now.

The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.

Good public art.

“one who pays too much for speaker cables”

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

If you allow comments at all, you are gonna get spam. That spam will range from “please buy good vitamins from my holy web site” to horribly illegal eye-destroying things.

I’m sure you would have done great in the Roman Empire!

Recognize that a lot of what you’re suffering from is, well, suffering; that it’s part of the human condition and not really specific to one historical epoch, country, or economic system. Sickness, poverty, cruelty, envy, selfishness, domination, and other woes have been with us for much longer than economic or political modernity.

People have been investigating how to alleviate suffering — in the general sense — for a very long time. There are whole philosophical and social movements about it, which have proposed strategies such as —

• “Love your neighbor; forgive those who have hurt you. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the afflicted.” (Christianity)
• “Avoid killing, stealing, lying, raping, and getting drunk. Seek out wholesome companions. Maybe do some meditation.” (Buddhism)
• “Pursue a simple life. Try to avoid pain rather than seeking out pleasure. Don’t worry about gods or politics.” (Epicureanism)

21st century, meet 18th century; apparently the Barbary Wars come around again but on a different corner of Africa?

I’ve had a lot of autistic friends; including a childhood friend, someone I dated, and a current housemate. (For clarity, those are three different people.) So I have a pretty positive general impression: these are folks I’ve gotten along well with, often better than I’ve gotten along with other people in the same social environment.

One recurring theme I see is people who are often deeply into writing, one way or another. All three of the people I mentioned above fit this pattern: whether with an interest in writing-systems (like runic, hieroglyphics, or shorthand), calligraphy, computer font design, asemic writing, or other variations on the theme. Two out of three are also ambidextrous, and make use of that in writing.

Another thing I see is people who tend to have been run-over by schooling and other institutions, even more than the rest of us “weird kids”. One of those three people much more so than the others; they went through institutionalization and a range of wrong diagnoses (schizophrenia, really?!) before getting better medical & life help.

Two of the three people mentioned above went through periods of being really into psychedelics, often with powerfully positive experiences and few or no bad trips. (In one case they got curious about psychedelics because NTs kept asking them if they were tripping when they weren’t!)

I’ve encountered the stereotype that autistic people can’t or don’t lie. This is not really true, but seems to point at something. I’m not sure whether it’s really an inherent tendency towards non-deception, or whether it’s from learning that lying doesn’t work out very well for them. Autistic people are as capable of self-deception as everyone else.

Also, alexithymia is real; but once someone knows they have it they can certainly learn how to work around it with explicit reasoning about their own physiological responses.

To be clear, I’m not entirely sure I’m in the target audience for this question. On diagnostics such as the Autism Spectrum Quotient test, I get values that are in between clearly NT and clearly AS. However, I don’t have the same sort of sensory “stuff” that my diagnosed-autistic friends have had — things that those tests often don’t even ask about.

If you threaten violence to people for calling you a fascist … you might be a fascist.

When operated correctly, they’re vastly safer. But it’s still quite possible to have a double fatality from a bike/pedestrian collision at speed: cyclist goes flying; ped falls over; two brains broken. It’s important for cyclists to follow traffic rules, stop at stop signs and for crosswalks, and bike on the street rather than the sidewalk in downtown areas.

Many board games, such as chess, go/baduk, backgammon, and mancala were played before capitalism or copyright were invented; and thus have always been in the public domain.

Precursors to chess date to the 700s CE, and chess was played under recognizably modern rules in the 1400s. Go may date to the 200s CE, but took its modern form in the 1500s. Backgammon-like games are known from Persia circa 800 CE, and modern backgammon from the 1600s. And mancala games are over 6000 years old.

Every time I read the name “Donald Tusk” I imagine a walrus in Donald Duck’s sailor suit.

Sure is a better image than the Donald we got over here.