There are things worth dying for, and there are things worth living for. There’s always a choice.
“Motherland: Fort Salem,” Season 2, Episode 5
Category Archives: Talk
Talk about politics, society, science, computers, internet, psychology, and philosophy.
Medical Drama
A: “Looking over your resume I’m impressed.”
B: “Thanks.”
A: “Stage experience, some TV and even a movie, that’s nice. However…”
B: “Yes?”
A: “I don’t see any surgery experience.”
B: “Huh? Surgery?!”
A: “Yes, this is a medical drama after all…”
B: “Yeah, but… surgery?”
A: “We can’t have people cut into each other willy-nilly…”
B: “Haha, yeah, good one.”
A: “Hm. We do have some spots for patients though…”
B: “Eh, yeah, I’m not sure…”
A: “We’re shooting a scene right now… you could make a quick buck…”
B: “Touch me and I scream!”
A: “It won’t be many people around hearing that anyway…”
B: “I’ll call 911! I’ve got mace!”
A: “Ok! Ok! Listen… I usually don’t say this… but you and me…”
B: “Yes?”
A: “I don’t really see the chemistry…”
B: “I know, right? Like… poof nothing! Why is that? You know, like, some people… like… void…”
A: “Hm, yes. You know what… leave your contact information when you leave and we’ll see if we’ll get back to you…”
B: “Thank God! Yes! Bye!”
The Devil You Don’t KNOW
Choosing the devil you know over the devil you don’t know can be very risky, because the devil you don’t know may not be a devil at all…
Shoot Your Gun laws
“I’m a bit reluctant to visit American states with these… um… what are they called? Shoot your gun laws?”
“Stand your ground laws?”
“Yeah… those…”
The more absurd the idea…
The more absurd the idea, the more complex the defense…
Thank God We’re not Pod-people
A: (ANY STATEMENT)
B: I disagree!
A: Thank God we’re not all pod-people.
Miserable excuse for a User Interface
Simple test:
If you double click something in the user interface, the interface redraws and rearranges controls at the exact same moment causing your double click to end up on something else, then you know you’re dealing with a miserable excuse for a user interface… (Apple? Microsoft? If you’re interested… No? Why am I not surprised?)
Voting
If you have to explain why every adult citizen in a democracy must be allowed to vote, you’re having serious problems with your democracy!
Photo credit: SUXSIEQ on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC
Time estimate conundrum
When developers say a piece of work will take 2-4 hours what really happens is one of three things:
- It takes 2-4 hours to finish the job
- It takes 2-4 radians of hours (a.k.a hours times pi) to finish the job
- It takes 2-4 bitcoins to finish the job
Header image from Visualhunt
My first (and last?) attempt at security programming
My first, and probably last, attempt at security programming was back in the 80ies, on a Spectravideo. I remember spending some hours on the program, and I had an if-clause to check for a password, and if the password was wrong, obviously the program needed to be protected… so I deleted it from memory…
Some BASIC along the line of:
1820 IF password <> "******" THEN NEW…of course, after some hours of programming I’d forgotten the password… and forgotten that I didn’t knew it so I typed in the wrong one and off my program went…
…did I save it to cassette before I tested it. Nope. Did I learn the cassette equivalent of the “ctrl-s”-reflex. Yup!
Does this in any way resemble modern security programming? In my experience? It is as if nothing has happened since the 80ies. In fact, I’m fairly certain there are systems out there that will format c: if you fail to type in the right password too many times.
Or like moron Azure DevOps. What happens if you try to view a page you don’t have access to? Yup, you get a 404 error (as in page does not exist, not a 403=you don’t have access). They’re even helpful enough to tell you so. You know, so no one will know that the page do in fact exist. If they don’t have access. How many people spend how many hours bug hunting that one? Do we bill Microsoft? Ah, no, they’re billing us, right…
format azuredevops:It seems that if it’s about security and doing the wrong thing makes something explode and burn, some security manager somewhere will have mental, or not so mental, orgasms… But I guess usable security systems will be hacked because the users will be too comfortable using them… right…?
Talkwards 