Martin Rodgers

Recent Actions

• Commented on Announcement time!
  Excellent tip, thanks for that and the link....
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Yes, that's readable. Many thanks....
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Thanks, but it's paywalled. Do you have a link the rest of us can use?...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  It's also useful for sorting by time. (Sorting with more general text can get complicated, however. Unicode makes a total mess of it.) So I use ISO8601 dates whenever I'm given a choice....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  There are multiple "falsehoods programmers believe about..." collections on Github. I found a collection there years ago with over 200 of these documents. A quick search just now produced this "curated list" (first in the results): https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood Here's a thread...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  James Dallas Egbert III? I read the book in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_Master...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  One way or another, the next step seems to reading more history....
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Again, I'm talking about search results. I've made that point well enough already. I see no point in repeating myself....
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Oops, yes. Wrong Smith [*]. Thanks. [*] I could so easily have checked, but I'd want to do it by looking at something other than Wikipedia. Fortunately, 'founder of mormonism' was a useful search term. (This time.) Shame I didn't...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  There's revised version of that for programmers: "If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!" Of course, that's been revised too. The current version is simply, "Move fast and break things."...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Yes, I often need to add or modify a search term, sometimes several times, before I get useful results. Giving up and trying another search engine also happens. E.g. I've found many computer science papers via CiteSeerX, but sometimes there's...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  I don't need to confirm anything other than what was reported. I can confirm that many people repeated the chef description, but I also recall people debunking that part. Given the wild and creative nature of conspiracy theories, I read...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  I'm talking about results for a search term you provided. I still don't see anything that supports your conclusion(s). You could explain or not. I'm just saying that, following your guidance, these results don't appear to be what you may...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  "Your search results may vary" applies here. I searched for 'Skripal Bellingcat' and got these top three results: https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/skripal/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/23/skripal-salisbury-poisoning-decline-of-russia-spy-agencies-gru https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/10/09/full-report-skripal-poisoning-suspect-dr-alexander-mishkin-hero-russia/ I'll come back to these stories later. It's hard to see how these stories could lead to your conclusions,...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Malware writers have been exploiting timestamps for a while now. They're great for adding to the attribution problems. Just pretend your malware development computer is in the timezone of $STATE, release your malware, then watch the infosec community go wild...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Yesterday's XKCD 2867 was well-timed. See also: Falsehoods programmers believe about time...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/05/uk_government_denies_sellafield_hack_claim/ MRDA ("Mandy Rice-Davies Applies") So I'm not sure how reassured I should feel. I still have the Stuxnet dossier in my computer science papers archive, filed under "security". Looking at it again, one line immediately leaps out. Victims attempting...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  334 by Thomas Disch may be another book to add to "regular Joes" list....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I remember watching and enjoying Keystone Kops when I was a preteen. I may have preferred Buster Keaton. Anyway, thanks for the reminder. Very apt....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  The Register has the best coverage of that story. The very best! The IT angle. https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/15/georgia_trump_indictment_data_theft/...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  All this talk of fonts, screens etc is fascinating (or amusing, depending on my mood), so here's my own small contribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Source I've been wrestling with this problem since the paper was published. I may someday need to decide on...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Dude, you're the one arguing that violence can never be justified, I said I can't support it. I also acknowledge that other people make strong arguments to for justifying some violence. I've even suggested how they make those arguments. However,...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Well, I've been struggling with this kind of question for most of my life. The root seems to be zero-sum thinking. I even find it in discussions like these. (This discussion isn't a zero-sum game either.) I may have mentioned...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I assume Martin is not thinking of those as the sort of cause that can't be supported if it relies on violence. But it's hard to know where they draw the line (less charitably they may not draw it at...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Turns out I was confused and used the wrong Haitian revolutionary/leader Don't worry, I think I understand your point well enough. ;)...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I refer the honourable gentleman to the reply I gave earlier. ;)...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  If your cause demands violence, you've lost my support. I'm sure the ghost of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is devastated, but understands. Slavery is a form of violence, sometimes leading to death. Could resisting violence be just a basic act of...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  This all reminds me of a short story, “Roadside Rescue” by Pat Cadigan I read in Omni magazine back in 1985. And just so happens to be collected in an anthology called Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  They later changed into terrorists (killing innocent civilians being easier and getting more headlines), and later expanded into organised crime. A small quibble: They were more extreme than that. Their car bomb campaign eventually targeted children. A bomb would go...
• Commented on Minor updates
  Narnia never interested me. The only CS Lewis I ever read was The Screwtape Letters. Not nearly as entertaining as Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth You and me both, on both counts. I don't recall reading the Narnia books....