I could not agree more with Daisy here. This often bothers me, that we hold people who lived 50, 100, 200 years ago to the same standards we hold people to today – despite the fact that they grew up in vastly different social milieus.

I think a lot of you young folks have NO IDEA what we grew up with in the past, especially if we came from the Midwest or South.  I imagine those of you growing up with highly educated parents or on the coasts, didn’t have to deal with backward rednecks (I am a redneck myself, so I am permitted to use this word), but I did, and John Lennon did.  We were products of our place and time.  If you do not understand the influence of socialization on humans and culture, your radicalism and organizing efforts will suffer, so please get a clue.

As most of you already know, I also grew up a redneck, doing redneck things – fishing, hunting, roaming around with BB guns and regular guns. I am in many ways still a redneck and a Southerner and always will be one, no matter my political beliefs, my support of feminism, etc.

A person can do one of two things with their past: pretend it doesn’t exist, and suffer from that mental denial as the past never really goes away – not really – or they can interrogate it and integrate the best parts of it into life and attempt to eliminate the most negative bits.

Saying that someone who lived in 1700 anywhere in Europe was racist? Good job, fucking genius, as nearly anyone alive in Europe then was racist. Congratulations on your insight.

That said, it doesn’t invalidate their contributions, their thoughts or their existence. Obviously. Applying social standards and the trends of today to someone born long ago is historical obliviousness.

Mainly I just can’t take these leftist “purity balls” were you demonstrate you are into all the latest chic radicalism while willfully ignoring anything that will actually progress the world.

Activism as performance art and cliquish glee club is some bullshit, is all I’m saying.

Here’s why.

While the apocalyptic predictions for the end of the world were completely overblow, the Y2K problem was very real.

It was only because millions of programmers the world over spent billions of person-hours mitigating any potential problems that there was no widespread chaos on Y2K.

Here were likely results without any Y2K mitigation:

• Banks would have likely had many problems due to most still at the time (and even today!) running on very old mainframes. Fancy logging in to see $0 or negative million dollars in your account on Jan 1, 2000? No? Then be glad Y2K mitigation efforts occurred.
• Many nuclear (and other) power plants required mitigation. While the likelihood of causing some sort of meltdown or major disaster was small, with nuclear you know, wayyy better safe than sorry.
• Much of the power grid in general relied on computer systems susceptible to the Y2K bug. Like having power in the middle of winter? Thank a Y2K mitigation programmer.
• Many airlines relied on scheduling systems and software once again on very old computer systems. While widespread crashes were unlikely, having millions of flight schedules discombobulated by computer glitches might be a bit of a problem, don’t you think?

I could go on, but there’s no educating the uneducable.

As in IT, if you are doing your job successfully no one thinks you are doing anything. The systems just run and no one’s the wiser, or even cognizant of all the effort to make that happen.

Perhaps we should have just done nothing on Y2K to shut these fucknuggets up. I hate them so hard it hurts.

This was inevitable.

When Microsoft and Google start paying for my internet connection and my computer and the power to run it, I’ll watch their ads.

Until then, hell no – especially with as invasive and malware-ridden as ads are now.

Anyway, an ad blocker is just a text list with some simple logic around it. Trying to ban them is like trying to ban rain coats.

Hell, even I could write a rudimentary ad blocker in a few weeks and I’m an absolute shit programmer.

If programmers were 95% women, we wouldn’t value coding nearly at much.

We wouldn’t insist that “everyone needs to be a programmer.”

We wouldn’t declare start-up founders who program to be geniuses from the empyrean heights, who are not mortals at all but rather gods dispensing their infallible and timeless wisdom to the rest of us. (I’m looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg.)

We wouldn’t insist that design, support, marketing and HR are worthless while programming is where the rubber meets the road, baby.

If the vast majority of programmers were women, we’d see it as “silly playing with computers” while men do “the real work of recruiting and getting customers – what really matters.”

For some proof of this, watch what happens and has happened historically when other fields are “feminized.” Accounting and HR are good examples of this. I don’t feel like getting all expository on that here, though. Do your own research if you like.

But if you want to see this phenomenon in real time, watch as doctors become less societally valued over time as women come to dominate that field. It’s already happening. When MDs go over 65% or so, the field will lose prestige rapidly.

As Justin Wilson used to say, I guarantee.

About 10 years ago, I had a blog that garnered many more hits.

I posted there the obvious idea that it would not be long before physical products would soon by protected by DRM, and this would limit user ability to modify them and to use them as one wishes.

Even my political posts didn’t receive so much pushback, so much excoriation, and so much vehemence all advocating the idea that this would never and could never happen. There were several dozen comments telling me how much of an idiot I was.

I don’t know why. Perhaps people just didn’t want to believe it?

Not a new story, but of course it is happening. It will happen more. In fact, in the US I’d wager it’ll happen to nearly everything.

I don’t care about being right, really, as it was completely obvious that I would be, but I wonder why were people so reluctant to believe it?

Some sort of self-protection? Some variant of the just-world fallacy?

I have no idea.

I could really use three monitors, but I don’t have room for all three.

Three 5K monitors, of course.

I have a CCNP certification now. I got it a few weeks ago.

It was a very hard certification. The CCNP requires one prerequisite exam and then then three different CCNP-level exams consisting of a mixture of multiple-choice and practical tasks (configure and/or troubleshoot a router, switch, etc.) Comparatively, the Microsoft ones were a lot easier though harder than they once were.

Next week I am going after my Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. This one will be the most difficult of all as it’s all practical, all hands on. There are no multiple choice questions and only two hours to complete what I understand is many tasks.

I’ve been studying 8-10 hours a day for a few weeks now.

I feel pretty confident. I’ve learned more in a shorter time than any other time in my life, though I’ve used Linux for years so it’s not foreign to me.

But now I can set up in minutes – all without consulting anything online — services and capabilities that once took me hours to configure.

So I’m ready.

I think.

This is the most fun sentence I’ve read all day.

Warning: do not booby-trap your finger daemon, unless you are prepared for infinite finger loops.

Infinite finger loops. Just can’t put my finger on what makes that so funny. Hmm.

Shimer College: the worst school in America?

Sounds like what college actually should be like, or a variant thereof.

No wonder it’s utterly penalized for actually teaching people how to think.

Comcast Makes It More And More Difficult To Opt-Out Of Internet Sharing.

Here’s how to opt out: Buy your own cheap wi-fi router. Set it up as an access point and connect it to any of your Comcast router’s LAN ports with a patch cable.

Put a metal colander over the Comcast device and place the router itself on some aluminum foil. This is a Faraday cage,  so the signal will be attenuated to ~1m or less.

To avoid being double-NATted (which can cause problems with some services), place the IP address of your new wireless access point in the DMZ of the Comcast router.

I recommend this model as it’s cheap and very reliable.

It costs $50 to defeat that evil empire, but sometimes it’s Comcast or nothing so most people can’t just switch. And this will kill the empire’s wi-fi, but let you have your own still without strangers leeching it and doing who knows what.

Judge Richard Posner occasionally says some intelligent things. But mostly, he is still a staunch and addlepated conservative.

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”

I will be over to his place posthaste to install cameras in all his bathrooms, and in his master bedroom.

Night vision, too, because what does he have to hide after all?

His view of privacy has to be the dumbest one out of all possible views, and the least nuanced.

And burn. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Pretty much sums up how women in tech great treated every day.

BTW, Casey Johnston is the best writer at Ars Technica by a long shot. I go there specifically now to look for her articles.

If anyone wants  a large, good monitor for a ridiculous price, this is the best deal I’ve ever seen – by far – for a 30” IPS monitor.

It’s not 4K or 5K, but still – hard to go wrong with a 30” 16:10 2560×1600 monitor for $400.

The cheapest I’ve seen one of these before now went for more than $1,000.

There has been a lot of obsession over plagiarism lately. I don’t really understand it. Most of what people are claiming is “plagiarism” doesn’t seem even remotely close to me. Mostly it seems people are claiming that ideas can be plagiarized, which is just absurd.

I don’t plagiarize because it is faster for me to write my own material. And this blog isn’t some stellar example of writing, anyway.  Also, I think really differently from most people so plagiarism in my work would be glaringly obvious.

Discussions of plagiarism are generally overwrought, if you ask me. People treat it as some kind of unforgivable intellectual sin. What it usually indicates is laziness and sloppiness.

Many of the best authors in history have “plagiarized” by the modern definition, which seems at the moment to mean “have used two or three words that some other author once used” or “had the same idea that this author wrote about that a billion other people also had.”

And I think the concept of self-plagiarism is utterly ridiculous, too.

Plagiarism seems to be what you accuse someone of when you’re not as famous as they are, and want to be.