d0ugie's comments

Does it have to be so sinister? Were you a trooper doing speed enforcement, what would you care whether someone give fifty bucks three years ago to your agency's own union, or the FOP? If you are like other union members I've known, you might resent your union for not sticking their neck out for you enough, or for negotiating a weaker contract whatever you had before you unionize, overpromising and underdelivering and so on, the first thing secured during a contract negotiation being automatic dues deductions from your paycheck. Or maybe you like the union, but the "optics" of these stickers is not doing rank and file police any favors, mainly just the often AFL-CIO-affiliated unions themselves.

So Billy BMW clocks in at a brisk but almost reasonable 120mph as he was at least using his turn signals, you chase him down, you "light him up," then you see a union supporter sticker, would that sticker more likely than not work to his advantage with your discretion, because he may have kicked in a few bucks, or by the time you began interacting with this person, wouldn't other things, like his pulling far enough over to minimize your exposure to traffic and so on, matter more? These stickers offer utility not limited to bids for latitude, including political statements, that yes I think the police union, the most vilified institution in the US, is worth defending, and at the risk of getting my car keyed I will stick it on and hope others give money too. Another utility perhaps, maybe it's a signal to cops that, when they pull you over, run your plate and see that you have a CCW permit, that if you concern yourself in any way with police unions, you might be a little more likely not to try to shoot your way out of a ticket as you decide with how much caution you need to approach.

Besides, I routinely see people with these stickers and emblems and thin blue line things driving way too slow. Perhaps they like I do feel that there has been a war on police and it is a thing to push back on, on a flag mast on one's house, in Thanksgiving dinner table arguments, and yes, the bumper of one's car.

Yandex images preserves filters, and lets you specify dimensions.

Reminds me of the reluctance in 2008 of the healthier banks to accept capital injections they didn't need to serve as cover for the banks that did, sort of. On top of concern for appearances of not needing it, one reason that may have been argued was that they would presumably be pressured by the feds along populist lines, like bonuses. Not the best comparison.

Case closed then, F policing as a profession and everyone who sees it as a vital component to a civilized society? NYPD are well aware that they are vulnerable to this virus and in turn to spreading it not just to you but to other cops, but in order to keep a lid on rioting, while growing increasingly shorthanded in number, in tools, maneuvers, plainclothes units, or effecting arrests (regardless of the disinterest in those being prosecuted), they need all the oxygen they can get. I'm not saying that $42,500 is not enough money in NYC, just that this is an exigent need for oxygen, not biological warfare.

https://talksub.com/covid19 is the best I've found for the US, breaking figures down I think to the county level, with sources. For the world, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (if you just want the numbers, not a map), fairly detailed. Though following sites like these gets scary fast...

Is there a detour here or is using letsencrypt reliant on these apis?

https://medium.com/enigma-shards/lets-encrypt-uptime-and-ope...

This is a rather imperfect comparison, but to try to answer whether the tech is mature enough yet, the Sikorsky 61N in its Pan Am configuration could ferry 25 passengers plus some luggage (though capable of 39 passengers), with a max range of up to 450NM, requiring about 2 megawatts give or take, fuel weighing up to 4000 lbs.

The Sikorsky Firefly is a one-passenger electric helicopter, one of not that many electric helicopters, with a max takeoff weight of about 2K lbs, a little more than one pilot's worth of weight between MTW and its empty weight (no passengers). Over half its weight, 1150 out of 2050 lbs, is comprised of its two batteries, burning up to 140kW for 15 minutes max (IE, not flying like Airwolf).

So the technology is there to make the electric flight about one way before a long recharge with one very wealthy passenger and no cargo provided the passenger is the pilot, presuming the batteries are replaced regularly and it's not too cold.

Maybe they should use solar paneling for the rotor blades? ;)

https://evtol.news/aircraft/sikorsky-firefly/ http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/acdata_s61n_en.php

It's all gravy, the javascript WebP decoders, until you convert your 20K high res photo site to WebP, then not realizing for a week, scratching your head about the bounce rate spiking, that you're crashing browsers left and right...

But it's not just postfix or sendmail you need to configure correctly and then put apt-get update/upgrade -y in cron to avoid the damage caused by making a mistake or falling asleep at the wheel. Casual self-hosters have other vectors of attack to mitigate, for example making sure sasl or whatever they may be using for imaps auth is solid, that passwords are strong and routinely changed, that php is also tight and so on. The stakes are relatively high, the efforts to compromise systems for this and other purposes are voluminous and incessant. So I'd say "it takes a village" to do this safely enough, not individual enthusiasts who cannot commit to administering a server diligently.

Whenever the government Al Capones someone, which ought to be a verb, it's a reminder to me that due to a legislative and prosecutorial discretion excesses combined with politics that those of us who aren't 100% squeaky clean are unjustly vulnerable to judicial creativity run amuck. If you've got a Snowden or an Assange you want to lock up with all keys thrown away, stick to charges along the lines of espionage etc; and if you cannot prove those charges, too bad - don't attempt to railroad them for paying a nanny under the table. Not that there's anything forgiveable about nanny tax evasion, but I'm bothered by byproducts of affording too much discretion in the judicial system.

You are baffled that they reacted this way, that you became the villain? It's hard sometimes, but I've found it helpful to try to perceive both myself and the digital obstacles from the shoes of users I'm trying to help (calibrating more as I proceed), and adjust myself accordingly.

Affording someone the ability to save face is among the reasons to consider making a private approach. And when irritated, slighted or indignant, when amped up somehow, not disengaging to cool down is the sort of thing I tend to regret.

It's a tall order to expect people to interpret an offer to steal passwords in a coffee shop to assert their need of your acumen as a beneficent act.

I feed ADSB data I collect with an antenna sticking out the attic window to FlightAware and a handful of others. Not sure why I do that, maybe the attic is an escape from my ol' lady, but I'm glad to learn it's going toward a good cause!

Speaking of grounding the 737 MAX, I should probably ground that antenna...

Perhaps the less discretion and selective enforcement we afford police, prosecutors and judges, the more productive we will be in improving the array of laws they are tasked to enforce.

On the other hand, homegrown weed is one of those things the Supreme Court, such as it is, needs to use words like "aggregate" to square federal regulation of it with the Commerce Clause, which is poppycock.

> .. trust Microsoft more

ducks in advance - I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP, mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85% of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded.

All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic win-win for everybody.

I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to that.

Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and "keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield.

I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests.

That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers everybody!

edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong and it could help me wake up.

I just discovered the joys of sshfs which lets you mount whatever you can ssh/sftp into. What'll they think of next.. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

According to this Q&A from the IRS, yes, miners are on the hook: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf:

A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. (...)

A-9: If a taxpayer’s “mining” of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the “mining” activity is not undertaken by the taxpayer as an employee, the net earnings from self-employment (generally, gross income derived from carrying on a trade or business less allowable deductions) resulting from those activities constitute self-employment income and are subject to the self-employment tax.

Perhaps fairly inevitable eventual breaches of client data are more forgivable when a given firm can point to efforts such as this as evidence of having tried to keep a lid on leaks, and to elevate confidence that it is less likely to happen.

From what I've seen some firms' internal security practices in general seem more to be about appearances whereas other firms tighten and scrutinize everything as if the company's reputation and survival depended on it.

You mean in retrospect? Or was that the prevailing opinion of citizens at the time that had anything to do with trade or total war?

I like open source self-hosted alternatives to everything, though some headhunters, for those looking for work, may either ask for your github link or figure it out themselves in order to further size you up, one possible utility specific to github.

Goldman is experimenting, not smelling big bucks. Other firms, namely JPMorgan, won't touch bitcoin for the same reasons they train every employee over and over how to stay away from money laundering red flags. Banks have populist targets on their backs, getting involved with Bitcoin elevates the bright redness of those targets. But Goldman is uniquely smart and I'm intrigued. Guess I'll add them as a custom Google News section...