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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • People with private jets often charter them out when they’re not using them. The best place for an airplane is in the air. Only bad things happen when you let it sit around on the ground all the time. It’s not much different than commercial planes that spend most of their time in the air.

    Sure, a private jet will have more emissions than an Airbus, but it’s a marginal increase. It’s not like rich people with their planes are producing a million times more pollution that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have a private jet. They’re still going to fly, at least for longer trips.

    It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this line of reasoning. Who else is using less efficient aircraft or taking unnecessary flights? Are all those police helicopter flights necessary? What about people flying to go party on an island somewhere versus some more noble purpose? Or airlines with a half empty flight? Meanwhile, it’s the oil companies producing the vast majority of carbon emissions while we squabble over travel itineraries and choice of aircraft.



  • I have been very happy with my X1 Extreme. I did have an issue with the keyboard and later the touchpad, but I paid for onsite support so it wasn’t a big deal. They came out a day later and fixed it right there at my dining table.

    I would say buying a ThinkPad is worth it for their paid support options alone. When I had a keyboard problem on my old MacBook, AppleCare took like 10 days to fix it. Lenovo’s premium support is reasonably priced and they don’t mess around. A person picks up the phone when you call and they treat you like you are important. If it’s a hardware problem, they are not fucking around. They don’t care how it happened or ask a bunch of questions. It’s covered and they are fixing it. Fast.

    The X1 is also super easy to work on. It’s easily disassembled with normal tools and upgradable parts like SSD and RAM are right there when you open it up. They don’t do dumb things like solder in the RAM or leave you without an open slot. This thing is designed to be repairable.

    Linux support is flawless.







  • They’re not losing. They are kicking the absolute shit out of the Palestinians. This is not even a remotely fair fight. The problem is most of these people didn’t have anything to do with 10/7, which means Israel is destroying any respect or goodwill anyone had for them when this started.

    Nobody would have batted an eye if they just wanted to get in there and kill some terrorists. It was 100% justified for Israel to respond. But you expect a tough, appropriate response and not some maniac shit. They have wrecked half of Gaza and have everyone crammed in the other half. This shit is nuts. It’s as bad as Russia with Ukraine and Russia is the absolute sleaze of the planet. Israel really went low here.





  • In all fairness, 13 days is a fairly quick turnaround for patching in the enterprise. The breach was only 6 days after disclosure. They were almost certainly in the planning stages already when this happened.

    I used to be the head of IT in a large organization that worked with clients in highly regulated sectors. They all performed regular audits of our security posture. Across the board, they expected a 30 day patch policy. For high profile vulnerabilities like this one, they would often send an alert and expected imminent action within a commercially reasonable time frame. We would get it done anywhere from 24 hours to days later depending on the situation and whether there were complications. It was usually easy for us because we were patching every device and application on the network every couple weeks anyway. A hotfix is much easier to deploy when everything is up to date already and there are no prerequisite service packs. We knew we were much faster than most and it took a lot of work to get there. Thirteen days is a little slow for a 0-day by our standards but nowhere near unreasonable.

    The reality is many enterprises don’t patch at all or don’t do it completely. They may patch servers but not workstations. They may patch the OS but not the applications. It’s common to find EOL software in critical areas. A friend of mine did some work for a railroad company that had XP machines controlling the track switches. There are typically glaring holes throughout the company when it comes to security. Most breaches go unreported.

    Look, I hate Comcast as much as anyone. They suck. But taking 13 days to patch isn’t unreasonable. Instead, people should be asking why there weren’t other security layers in place to mitigate the vulnerability.