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Sunday Not-So-Funnies

by Vanderleun on November 24, 2019

Manufacturing In Elbonia – Dilbert Comic Strip on 2019-11-24 | Dilbert by Scott Adams

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Rob November 25, 2019, 5:23 AM

And that is why the company I worked for never ever would have circuit cards fabricated or assembled in China. It’s a horrible regime, true, and they just end up stealing your IP. Don’t make it easier for them by sending them your design files.

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John the River November 25, 2019, 2:05 PM

My former position was as a telecom engineer, my primary product line was Nortel Networks. This is what China did to them.
Whenever us mere users or customers wanted to log in to get updates or new software; we had to use a user/password combination that had to be changed every thirty days. The new password had to be 12 digits and could not contain any sequence from the old password. Last, it took an hour or two for the new password to be active on the system. That was us ground pounders.

The executives of Nortel (we came to find out) didn’t put up with that. This was discovered many years after that company went belly up. Thanks to China! The Nortel exec’s traveled often to the Middle Kingdom and were wined and dined, leaving their laptop computers in their rooms. Chinese government agents entered those rooms, found them embarrassingly easy to hack having either only four digit passwords or being left open and unlocked on the desk. With the information on the laptops their got entry into the home office mainframes and then loaded spyware and worms that would spread throughout the entire companies computer network.
This is how China got access to all of Nortel Networks crown jewels and subsequently the market in China for Nortels products dried up. The Chinese could make their own Nortel tech and in fact took over much of Nortels worldwide business.

After bankruptcy the mainframes and other computers were sold off and many of the new owners (on the whole a lot smarter than the equipments former owners) discovered all the systems were hopelessly compromised by spyware and worms. They junked a lot of it.

Give them hell, Donald!

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Vanderleun November 25, 2019, 5:35 PM

That’s a chilling tale, John. Not just for the rapaciousness of the Chinese but for the cluelessness of the execs. Heads for pikes.

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

Lament for the Rohirrim

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

— Tolkein

from Preludes

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

— Eliot

from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND

The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.

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