If I had infinite time, I’d learn ASL. This is so badass that it hurts my brain.

I think I’m a little bit in love with that woman just from a 1+ minute video.

When Secure Boot was new, people like me who argued that it would be used to take away control and lock us out of our own computers were roundly laughed at, told we were alarmists and that it “wasn’t a big deal.”

Well just what I and others predicted would happen is happening.

I’m astounded by just how much people blindly trust corporations. What is that about?

By the way, Apple-branded computers are now more “open” than most machines that come with Windows. The infringing of SecureBoot on my rights to my own equipment will only increase this difference.

In other words, it’s easy to install Linux on my MacBook Pro. Not so much modern OEM boxes and that will only get worse.

We had the internet and computers that worked for us rather than for corporations, but as I’ve said before we were too fucking dumb to keep it.

I like these photos but it annoys me when someone goes to all the trouble to do such a shoot and mucks about with the weapons like some five-year-old.

That’s not a cavalry sword. And where’s the sheath? An unsheathed sword on a horse actually riding into battle is going to lead for a very bad time for you, the horse or most likely both.

The reason I mention that is of course the horse and the uniform though not of any particular army most closely resembles a Union Civil War cavalry officer’s as far as I can tell.

Most commonly soldiers would have their sword clasped between their left leg and the horse or immediately behind their left leg. Most people are right-handed so that’s the best place for it.

Still, even then it was mostly for show. Swords were used minimally if at all in the Civil War.

Ah, this is a good question.

The first adult song I can remember being into is “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. I must have been five or six and I’d put it on the old record player at my grandparent’s house over and over again.

This was well before Johnny Cash’s hipster renaissance, so I guess I’m a triple double hipster, eh? Must’ve been about 1980 or 1981.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Cash was at his best when someone else did the songwriting. It’s true for Ring of Fire and just as true when he later covered other works, too.

Background checks for jobs have gotten increasingly onerous in the last twenty years to the point of complete absurd ridiculousness. The comment below made me think how they are going to only get worse in the future.

That’s a world with a lot less practical freedom for most people, especially younger people who don’t know if they’ll be able to get a job with some vaguely disturbing Twitter scandal showing up in their Google search, or embarrassingly naive political writings from when they were 22 showing up online when they’re applying for job.

When I first applied for a civilian job more than fifteen years ago now the background check was basically:

1) Is this person breathing.

2) And they might have called my old commander to make sure I hadn’t shanked anyone at work.

That was about all.

I’ve looked for a variety of jobs lately and received offers for 4 of the 5 positions for which I interviewed (what was wrong with the fifth company we’ll never know 😉 ), so I’ve gone through a number of background checks lately.

First, some more history. Years ago I worked for a casino. The background check process I thought for that position was excessive. It involved contacting former colleagues, friends and all manner of other various character assessments and credit checks.

Now that process — which was considered at the time by everyone to be a really intensive background check — is the norm for any job at all whether or not it deals with any sensitive data or large amounts of cash.

In fact the background checks for regular old jobs are now only a little less strenuous than was done in the army 20 years ago for my secret clearance.

This is modern phrenology. It doesn’t lead to better employees. The evidence demonstrates this pretty clearly. In the future I plan to ask during interviews how strenuous the background checking is and unless it’s a job I really really want, I’ll opt out early.

Not because there’s anything negative in my official background. There’s not. I pass those fuckers with flying colors. But because I don’t need my time wasted and background checking consumes too much of my time for a job I don’t need to survive.

Also it’s good to note that these oppressive background checks are far worse than even six years ago when I got my last full-time job. That background check involved contacting a few references and a really cursory examination of work history.

Partially companies do this because they can, because the technology allows it and it’s now cheap. But there are a few other factors at work. One is that it’s to hire the “right kind of people,” i.e. people just like them, no deviation allowed.

Another is that the background checking companies are really powerful and most executives being MBAs etc. are very dumb so it’s sold heavily and seen by those executives as some sort of voodoo powder you can sprinkle around to make good employees magically happen.

When in reality you are probably eliminating your worst employees (sometimes) from getting a job, but also almost assuredly eliminating your best hires like me who will no longer work for you in the future.

Also I think it’s a way of dehumanizing and devaluing people as the sort of treatment once reserved — undeservedly — for janitors and such has now climbed up to affect white collar and front office employees.

All of these are factors.

But if you haven’t looked for a job in a while, I think you will be extremely surprised by how intrusive and outright abusive and inconsiderate of your time and experience background checking has become.

There’s no real scientifically demonstrable reason for it, but nevertheless it’s only going to get worse.

Saying that people can’t help but gain weight due to their genetics is about as dumb as saying that people can’t help but smoking for the same reason.

My genetics may (and does, actually) predispose me to be heavy.

But I still make the choice. Every day.

And so I’m not heavy.

The next book I’m reading.

Thinking about reading only female authors for the next year. Sounds like a good idea to me. My reading has tilted 80% women lately anyway and I naturally feel greater affinity/commonality with women, so not much of a stretch for me.

All ya’ll offer any suggestions if you got ’em.

This is a pretty good list of some devastatingly beautiful horror movies.

Horror I think has the potential for compelling beauty as nowhere else can assemble tableaux of such contrasts of human experience.

But they missed a few (says the movie buff) though I’ll only concentrate on one.

Trick ‘r Treat by Michael Dougherty– perhaps the most underrated horror film of all time – is simply stunningly beautiful. Take a look. Some of the best shots I can’t find and don’t feel like capping them, but these will do:

What a gem of a movie in so many ways. And it heavily features female characters (and not just getting killed, though they do that too – but so do the men). And in one set of scenes, well,  getting killed is quite the opposite of what happens.

(Nearly everyone in the movie including “Little Red Riding Hood” above is in their Halloween costumes as the movie occurs on that day. Makes for some great light allegory and expectation-switching.)

I agree with Harper on the opposition to niqabs.

Any religious symbology in public, most especially such an oppressive one as that, should be banned in a secular society.

Yep, I include Christian crosses in this. I’m most close to the view of this person, I think.

The face-concealing niqab, unlike the hair-covering hijab, hides an individual’s prime interface with the world, while denying her individuality. Of course, one could argue that a “choice” is involved here when a woman wears one, but it is also a symbol of cultural and religious diktat that goes against every tenet of an open and equal society. Let’s not forget about that.

I don’t know what prompts people to defend something that is so objectively and icredibly oppressive to women? Can’t wrap my head around that one.

I’m all for free expression but I can’t defend the indefensible and can’t jump on the liberal bandwagon of allowing a secular society to promote the silencing and oppression of so many people. Tolerating intolerance is not a liberal value, but rather one rooted in the desire not to offend anyone.

But I’m all about offending motherfuckers who make millions of people’s lives worse.

All about it.

Remember when ISPs want to put bandwidth caps (actually transfer caps, but everyone calls them bandwidth caps so I will too) on your connection that games, movies and other media are only getting larger. All the idiots and the clown car full of idiots at Wired who support these restrictions never seem to understand that.

An upcoming game that is sure to be very popular — Star Citizen — will weigh in as a 100GB download.

Some common bandwidth caps now are 150GB, 250GB and 300GB. One game then could use nearly all or a significant portion of your entire allotment for the month.

This is the plan, by the way — to ease people into paying more over time. Games will only get larger. So will movies. 4K is not the end. I expect movies to top at around 8K in 2025 or so, and then there will be VR which will require 20-100x the bandwidth of 8K.

The average connection in 2040 will probably use 100TB or so a month. Quite a lot more than even the most generous cap now. Think the ISPs are likely to expand caps at the same rate as usage?

If so, what are you smoking?

Working From Home Doesn’t Have to Cut You Off From Humanity.

What? That’s the whole reason I’d want to work from home!

I don’t understand people who get their social needs met in the office. But add it to the list, I guess.

Because there are more fat people in America now than normal-weight people (and I use the word “normal” very deliberately and I hope very offensively to my targets), it is becoming more common to shame skinny and healthy people than the opposite.

I was friends with a woman during the 90s who was very fit. She had a baby and gained 19 pounds during the entire pregnancy (I know because she told me). The baby was healthy and weighed 8+ pounds. She was back at her pre-baby weight (about 120 pounds at 5’8″) in less than six weeks.

She was a bit anomalous and I know that every person is different, but it is doubtful that during humanity’s history that women gained 60+ pounds for pregnancy as is the standard now.

Working out during pregnancy only helps you, if you can. Not gaining massive amounts of weight helps, not hurts. The evidence shows this.

Fat people aren’t disgusting, but the whole fat acceptance/fat celebration culture certainly is.

Only in America would you attempt to force people on a wide scale to something that is obviously harmful, deleterious to a good life and objectively terrible rather than making the damn effort to change and improve.

What a country!

I do not like articles that are so dumbed down that they do not use the scientifically-accurate words for phenomena.

What this article should have had — somewhere — is that butterflies are so colorful mostly due to aposematism and Batesian mimicry.

One of the reasons I completely stopped reading books aimed at kids at five or six is that I figured out they were completely stripped of real content that might help me be smarter. Though many of the books I tackled at that age were “over my head,” my head quickly grew larger and soon — within a year or so — no book was over my head.

I think most kids are probably capable of this, though in my near-complete disdain of what any adult said or thought was probably highly unusual.

Anyway, science articles should contain the correct terminology otherwise it makes it very hard for people to learn more if they choose to do so. This is particularly harmful to young people who are often more receptive and open to new knowledge and fun words than adults.

There’s this push lately in the IT world for DevOps. It goes by other names too but that’s the most common.

It’s not inherently a bad idea, but what most companies are attempting to force DevOps to be and what it will actually be is two very different things.  Companies are looking for a great developer who is also a great sysadmin. What they will get is either an ok to good developer who is a poor, dangerous systems administrator, or a ok to good systems administrator who is a poor, dangerous developer.

I’ve been in the IT world a while, and the number of people I’ve met — out of the hundreds to thousands I’ve known and also hired — who would make both good programmers and good systems administrators is — maybe — one. This guy was very probably an actual genius, though. IQ in the 160-180 range. The number who’d be great in both areas is none, not even that one dude.

Like I said, I have never met a single one. They may exist, but there aren’t many.

My partner is a great programmer. Don’t just take it from me — all her bosses have said so. But when I talk about the things I do at work she has no clue what I’m doing or what the terms mean or how to zone fiber channel (something I did today, and if you type even one character wrong in a few areas, the entire customer production environment will go down) or how to set up HSRB or automate a VMWare ESXi deployment.

Developers — who tend to be pretty arrogant — think what they know about systems administration is all that there is. What they generally know is the person who comes to fix their PC (not a systems admin) or that it involves like clicking a button in Active Directory or something. Hell, anyone could do that!

(There was some utter tool on Hacker News who insisted that installing and managing Microsoft SQL server could be done by anyone, and was easy. Yep, anyone can click through the wizard and install it. And it’ll be full of security holes, configured incorrectly, and completely not scale. But he clicked through the wizard on his single-user dev box, so that’s all there is to it!)

But here’s what being a systems administrator really involves.

It means understanding deeply the systems an environment uses, and how they interact. It means being able to hold the entire picture of the network in your head and knowing almost by magic (really experience) where a fault is located, and then find it in minutes where your DevOps might find it in hours or days (if ever). (Been there, done that by the way!)

It means being able to design scalable, reliable solutions that are cost-effective and comprehensible.

For instance, I just designed and built a solution for a company I’m consulting for. Right now it can only support about 20 users. More than they actually need, by the way.

But with a few clicks, a few PowerShell scripts and some more money, it could support 10,000+ users. I figure we’d have to move to another solution at about 15,000 users. But if this company gets 15,000 users I’ll be so rich I won’t fucking care.

And right now it only costs $500 a month (absolute peanuts in this space). And I did it just like that, in hours.

I’d like to see the fucking joke of a system a developer would put in place compared to what I built. It’d be more explosion-prone than a Pinto and more likely to fall over than a giraffe mainlining Absolut.

Think your DevOps can do that? Do not. Fucking. Make me laugh.

A lot of this — most of this — is an attempt by companies to save money. But much of it is the belief that everyone should be a programmer and everything else should be a side concern.

While I do find myself writing more scripts than ever before these days, being a programmer is not and never will be what a systems administrator is all about.

Developers and systems administrators are very different fields with very different concerns, and it will always be thus.