I just realized today that my side has it all backwards. Liberals think that if they triumph at identity politics (which is not possible), then justice follows.

When in reality, triumph mostly follows economic and legal victories wrought in collective action.

Identity politics is the exact wrong approach to achieving real justice for the people most liberals and social justice types are attempting to help. In many cases, it’s actively harmful. In the majority of cases, it allows them to celebrate victory having actually achieved nothing.

The implicit denigration of fundamental research is bizarre considering that’s where nearly all of the modern world came form.

This week, Rice University said that Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad science division, has invested $11 million in this autocomplete programming project, dubbed PLINY, after the ancient Roman author of the first encyclopedia.

DARPA created the internet. Was that mad science? To the clueless at the time, I guess so. The thing is all really creative things will seem absolutely harebrained and useless at their inception.

Humans are very limited in their cognitive scope mostly (I’d guess) due to evolutionary history.

Even Wired is very, very conservative in many areas.

If “mad science” gave us the internet, self-driving cars (also kicked off by DARPA) and so many other cool and useful things, I’ll take “mad science” for $2,000, Alex.

I would personally like to punch every Firefox developer in the face.

No, seriously.

What this means is that Firefox now prevents you from logging into any older device such as routers, switches, RAID systems, load balancers, and so, so many more devices that lack certain newer security measures (don’t feel like explaining it all here).

Most of these devices are not capable of being updated to something new. Either the vendor does not have an update or is out of business.

These sort of devices are not rare. At the last place I worked, there were probably 20-30 of them on the network.

This is not at all unusual.

So it means that these devices – which all have web interfaces (only) – can not be managed by Firefox. At all. With no way to override this idiotic behavior.

What are these annoying fucklet developers even thinking? Are they even thinking?

When you are so convinced you are right, not even the dumbest thing possible can convince you of anything else.

Hell fucking yes.

As for whether humans “need” or “get used to” a Retina resolution, that way of thinking is backwards. The default state for humans is real world resolution (no pixels), or for text, the resolution of ink on paper (600dpi to 2400+ dpi). What we had to “get used to” was the unnaturally chunky, low resolution of displays from the first computers until now. Those Dark Ages are over and now we can enjoy computer displays that have the resolution they always should have. A 96 dpi monitor is not “normal,” it is as archaic as a dot matrix printer.

People arguing that hi-dpi is not needed just boggle my mind. The world is hi-dpi, all the way down to the Planck Length, the “pixels” of the universe. Why would you not want readable text? Why would you not want excellent graphics?

Status quo bias in action, I guess?

I try to avoid writing about politics on this site because in the US it is mostly irrelevant. The moneyed class will get what they want the hard way (Republicans) or the easy way (Democrats), and there is only difference on the margins between those two.

But this guy, though I disagree with a lot of what he says, is on the right track: Hilary Clinton would be a continuation of the Obama presidency, which was a continuation and in many ways an intensification of the Bush presidency.

Politically Obama and Bush didn’t govern that differently, all the heart-rending cries from dumbass self-deluded liberals aside.

I don’t support Hillary Clinton for president because I don’t support any war-mongering, high-finance-coddling, poverty-inducing colonialist assbag for president, regardless of gender or experience.

By the way, yeah, the Republicans took the Senate. So what. Know how much difference that’s going to make despite all the howling you’ve heard?

Absolutely none. American politics and outcomes – especially on the national level – is largely not influenced by voting, despite what you’ve read.

That’s a lie you’ve been sold.

But don’t believe me. Believe instead the evidence.

It took some doing, but I just installed a hypervisor on top of another hypervisor.

More specifically, I installed ESXi 5.5U2 on top of Microsoft’s HyperV in Server 2012 R2.

So now I can test and run features of ESXi without having separate hardware, as well as of course HyperV itself.

Going to need a server with more memory and a better processor real soon now.

It wasn’t easy, but now it’s running like a cheetah.

If you don’t have any clue what I am talking about like most things on this blog, it’s not really important.

I’ve always seen David Foster Wallace accused of being sexist and misogynistic. Yet I’ve never seen any evidence of this in his works or anywhere else.

Yep, he has characters who are sexist, but check this out: we live in a world that is sexist and misogynistic, so having characters who putatively live in that world and who never, ever exhibit those characteristics would be rather inauthentic, wouldn’t it?

A lot of people it seems have trouble discerning fiction from reality.

Here’s is DFW’s reading list from his former course.

Notice anything?

Yeah, six of the nine authors are women.

Outside of a specific course in the women’s studies department, that is highly unusual. I’d bet in 99 out of 100 English departments you walk into, 90% of the assigned authors would be male.

The specific accusations that DFW is a misogynist seem to spring from envy than anything else, and misreading of his works by those who should know better.

But when you have an ideology to push, “knowing better” is no obstacle.

I was on the phone with a recruiter today about a contractor position that I might be interested in.

He was looking at my resume and said something like, “It’s unusual for someone to have this level and number of certifications in such disparate fields.”

And my reply was basically, “Welcome to awesome!”

I didn’t say that phrase exactly, but that was pretty much the gist of it.

Both the people who hate Lena Dunham and Lena Dunham are idiots, just different kinds of idiots.

That is all.

It’s funny that Northern US people can’t hear that I am a Southerner (as my Southern accent is well hidden), but Southerners can almost always tell even when I don’t let my original accent out of its box.

Of course, I  can usually do the same so it makes sense.

I was reading these tales of IT horror and woe and was recalling some of my own.

There have alas been many such tales that I’ve been part of – some of which I’ve caused and even more that were thrust on me like some foul gift.

One that immediately springs to mind is starting a new job – a huge promotion compared to my previous position– and walking into an organization using some off-brand mail server that had been compromised quite long ago by Chinese hackers and which was being used to send more than 120,000 pieces of spam mail a day (all it could handle as it was old and slow).

Being as it was off-brand, and virtually unknown, there was no documentation and even less support from the vendor.

Eventually I discovered and hacked enough to stop the deluge of spam emanating from the office.

The company was still on every blackhole and spammer list in the entire fucking world, and I spent the next month getting the company removed from all of them. But of course since I was the new IT guy I was blamed for why “the email isn’t getting through.” This despite the fact that the problem had started long, long before I’d arrived.

In fact the prior IT person was fired for incompetence. Given the situation and other lapses I’d found, this termination was 100% justified.

This was the same IT person who had pirated nearly every bit of software installed in the office and then called the BSA, triggering an audit, after he was let go.

Another thing I had to deal with about six months from the email server incident.

Nothing like walking into an office on your first day that is in utter chaos, with people mostly not able to send email, that has also been utterly pwned by Chinese hackers, all combined with nearly-unmaintained systems.

It took me a year to get that company straight. But I did it, then got bored and left.

And here’s one of those bad articles about internet infrastructure that could’ve avoided being bad – if they’d read the article they linked to — but is still just idiotically terrible.

This was important new research that highlighted how strained the infrastructure underpinning our internet is.

No. Just no. The internet infrastructure is not “strained.” There is an absolute glut of bandwidth. There is hundreds of thousands of miles of dark fiber all around the country.

This article is so full of pure dumbassery that I am pretty convinced that the author experienced some acute brain trauma while actually composing this tripe.

There is no “both sides” to this debate. Users have already paid the ISPs to bring the traffic to them. Netflix has already paid Level 3 or Cogent to carry their traffic.

It is fully and 100% the ISPs here are shirking their duties in an attempt to extort money.

In short, the ISPs are not turning up a port or two on a switch on their side and connecting them with Level 3 or Cogent with a $20 fiber cable. (It wouldn’t actually be $300 as mentioned in the Susan Crawford article as these switches in the meet-me room are usually quite close together, within 10-20 feet.)

This writer – Ben Popper — was most likely paid in part by ISP money to write this, I am guessing.

Such a fucking idiot.

Oh, this is going to piss a lot of people off.

But it’s right. Wanting us (correctly, in my view) to celebrate cultural differences but then denying that cultural differences exist is daft liberalism at its worst.

It’s not that white men never catcall; they do, just not nearly as often (which I’ve seen in person when walking behind and from talking to female friends) and usually more subtly.

But, yep.

White men, on the other hand, have no use for that sort of catcalling. They marked their territory centuries ago. So, instead, their sexual harassment is less invasive (“in passing,” as Bliss puts it) and harder to recognize—even when it’s staring you in the face. They do it in bars, at parties, on the frat row at your local college campus, in boardrooms, and other places men of color are never privy to, at least not in positions of power.

It’s funny how nominally current (idiotic) liberalism unknowingly pushes their own version of atomistic neoliberal individualism except when it becomes inconvenient and then the screams are deafening.

This is the same as the Maher Islam debate. Just because some group is oppressed or perceived to be oppressed does not absolve them from all criticism or make them angelic beings.

Such is the case here as well.