* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4532 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

You wait ages for a sun, then two come along at once: All stars have twins, say astroboffins

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How much can you get wrong in one post?

The idea of a companion star for sol named Nemesis dates back to 1984. Star Trek: Nemesis came out in 2002. I think the hypothetical star was named after the Greek goddess especially as ST:TNG only started in 1987 (Planet Vulcan predated ST:TOS by over a century).

Astronomers have already found about 50 stars within 1,000,000 AU (15.8ly). Stars move relative to each other. Scholz's star (currently 20ly away) came within 52,000 AU (0.8ly) of Sol only 70,000 years ago. The problem of identifying Nemesis is more likely to be that astronomers have already found many stars the right age and composition, but they have little idea where they were 4.7 billion years ago.

EU regulators gearing up to slap Google with €1bn fine – reports

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When I see a Google / Samsung headline ...

... I take a look at the recent offerings from one particular author. Perhaps I am not the only one because some AO headlines made it past my filter, and the articles did not call for Samsung to be found guilty of puppy drowning, Google to be tied down to a railway line or Julia Reda to be burned at the stake.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

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Re: My code won't run but the spaces are great

i+++j is obvious, but a fun way to catch people out is some variation of:

int divide(int n, int *d) { return n/*d; }

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Re: My code won't run but the spaces are great

When some heinous cretin uses a clueless indentation style, fix it. If they use a consistently stupid style you can reverse the changes and avoid a time wasting flame war. The correct character to use depends on the language.

Germany puts halt on European unitary patent

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They tried that ...

... in East Texas.

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Re: That is one of the EU's greatest strengths!

@Pat Att

Yes.

Patent litigation is still ridiculously expensive with unpredictable results.

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That is one of the EU's greatest strengths!

Whenever the UK government want to do something mind bogglingly stupid, they wait for some vaguely relevant event to hit the news then rush through emergency legislation. If there were a ten year delay before legislation could take effect then there would be some hope that the worst clauses could be weakened before too much damage gets done.

The best feature of the European patent office is their internal conflict and strikes. The idea of patents was to reward inventors for publishing instructions to build their inventions with a twenty year monopoly. Nobody reads patents any more until litigation is threatened. There are several reasons: the signal to noise ratio is tiny, the 'inventions' are either obvious or broken, the instructions are vague well past the point of uselessness and reading a patent causes triple damages for wilful infringement. As nobody reads patents to discover how to manufacture inventions, publishing is pointless and a 20 year monopoly is an excessive reward even for the dozen or so quality patents mixed in with the tens of thousands granted every year.

The current system of adjudication is poor. A judge with minimal to non-existent understanding of tech attempts to be impartial and the result is random. The new plan is to have patent professionals (with a minimal understanding of the tech) make judgements to enrich their peers. About the only consolation prize from Brexit is some hope that we will escape the European patent court. Avoiding the EPO is a mixed blessing: the UK patent office has equally low standards for granting patents but without the strikes.

From landslide to buried alive: Why 2017 election forecasts weren't wrong

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"Except the bit where Corbyn has constantly stuck to his principles for 40 years."

I thought Corbin couldn't find a seat.

Ex-NSA bod sues US govt for 'illegally spying' on Americans: We drill into 'explosive' 'lawsuit'

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Credible evidence

Perhaps, but I would bet that they haven't read it, wouldn't recognise it if they did, and it refers to naughtiness not mentioned in their complaint.

Tech can do a lot, Prime Minister, but it can't save the NHS

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Re: First of all

My local hospital recognised the danger of getting locked in with a monopoly software supplier. Their solution: pick two incompatible solutions and let each member of staff pick one. The result is that they are locked in with two different suppliers. It is almost as if people outside the software industry do not understand that the most effective tool to break lock in is the GPL.

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Re: Real world underfunding

May's £8 billion over five years is almost £31 million per week. What happened to the other £319 million?

So despite all the cash ploughed into big data, no one knows how to make it profitable

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Re: Data speculation - Done successfully

Successful big data is rare, but the results can be huge. The obvious example is Robert Mercer, who had the data for a very successful "Get out the vote" campaign for Donald Trump. In the UK, the name you are looking for is Cambridge Analytica.

NSA leaker bust gets weirder: Senator claims hacking is wider than leak revealed

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It could be worse ...

The proposed reason for turning Winner's life into shit is because she undermined confidence in the US election system. Imagine how little confidence people would have if all the results of investigations into election tampering were top secret and any attempt to publish them resulted in a decade in prison.

The open source community is nasty and that's just the docs

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Have they surveyed other groups?

The many of the negative attributes quoted for the open source community apply to just about every other community too. Claiming the open source community is nasty is an empty statement. Claiming it is nastier than other communities - with research to back it up - would be interesting.

UK PM May's response to London terror attack: Time to 'regulate' internet companies

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Why we must ban the internet

Some kook posts a mad conspiracy theory and it will be debunked and forgotten. We cannot allow that. Censor the internet! Delete everything! Put up a great wall! Make empty threats about hunting the kook down! Show how utterly terrified we are of a few words and people will be convinced there must be some truth behind them.

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

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PCMCIA

People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms

Boffins play with the world's most powerful X‑ray gun to shoot molecules

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Re: I have become the destroyer of worlds

Killer scientist: Look I have a new weapon of mass destruction!

Arms dealer: Cool, whats the range and area of the death zone?

Killer scientist: A few cm and 8x10⁻¹⁵m².

Arms dealer: What?

Killer scientist: You get someone in there and they are going to die!

Arms dealer: Of course, they wouldn't fit.

Killer scientist: That's just the detector to find out what happened when we shoot something. You don't need that.

Arms dealer: That's a relief. It looked a bit expensive and impossible to transport. Where is the actual weapon?

Killer scientist points.

Arms dealer: That tunnel goes on forever!

Killer scientist: The tunnel is 3.2km long, but we only use the last km.

Arms dealer walks away.

Killer scientist: That's just the first prototype. The next version will only be half a km long.

Arms dealer (calls back over his shoulder): Still wouldn't fit on an aircraft carrier.

Killer scientist: Aircraft carrier - good choice. You would need the nuclear reactor as a power source... Why are you leaving?

Intel gives the world a Core i9 desktop CPU to play with

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Re: At 140 Watts...

The bad news is that you need Tcase for you Intel tea maker, not Tjunction. A reasonable guess is about 70°C, which is sufficient for green tea. Heating time for a well insulated kettle is 4200*(Thot-Tcold)*mass/Power. Cold water from the tap is about 10°C, so a 140W processor make 1kg of hot water every half hour, or one cup every 7.5 minutes. Green tea is usually served in smaller cups, so you can have a fresh cup every 4.5 minutes.

It looks like Intel have found a killer app that totally trashes the raspberry pi, which would take over two hours to make a cup of green tea.

Lexmark patent racket busted by Supremes

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Re: Recycled cartridges

My Epson Stylus P50 has been running fine for years on recycled cartridges. I chose that printer based on reviews of third party ink and the Linux driver.

Don't rely on fitness trackers to track number of calories burned

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Only off by a factor of 1000

2500 kilocalories per day is a sensible guess at the required intake for an unknown human. You can add extra confusion with 1 Calorie = 1000 calories even though Mr Calorie did not invent the kcal. I see food manufacturers getting this wrong all the time. It is almost as if they want me to believe my usual 2km row is worth 700 doughnuts, not 0.7.

Fat-thumbed dev slashes Samba security

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Correction in the comments:

No regexes. The problem was that the path separator character ('/' in unix) should not have been allowed in pipe names. The '\' is a part of '\n' (new line) in debugging output. The new code is:

if (strchr(pipename, '/')) {

DEBUG(1, ("Refusing open on pipe %s\n", pipename));

return false;

}

Google wants to track your phone and credit card through meatspace

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Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

Using cash? Facial recognition to the rescue. [advert]Take a look at these special offers on facepaint and masks[/advert].

My e-mail address really is 'root@localhost'. I can prove it: look over my shoulder while I send myself an email.

If they get this working for me, they will get a list of things I bought, but I did not see the advert because I have javascript turned off. If they invent ads that work without javascript, they will know exactly which products to advertise so they can prove their marketing is effective.

Got to go - I need to buy a pair of lightspeed briefs.

How good are selfies these days? Good enough to fool Samsung Galaxy S8 biometrics

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Best feature of the sensor

Thieves do not have to steal your eyes to authenticate.

SSD price premium over disk faaaalling

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@Jeffrey Nonken

Take a look at how much your swap file is actually used. My remaining Pi version 1 has 1GB of swap space, 252K of which is currently in use. It still uses its original 8GB SDHC card. The 7th field of /sys/class/block/mmcblk0p3/stat divided by uptime gives 52 sectors/day. SSD's are guarantied for years with the assumption of one complete drive write per day. 3½" disks are guarantied for years with the assumption of one spin up / spin down cycle per day. (If you want more cycles, pick a 2½" drive.)

That Pi started with one spinning disk, and currently has three. The oldest disk got replaced a few months ago when it started to make unusual noises. Pi V1 has only ½GB of ram. Just about everything under five years old has much more, and even less use for swap. If I had something writing huge amounts of data I would still prefer SSD for reliability, and if you are going over 6 drive writes per day, a spinning disk is probably too slow to read the data back even once per day.

ISPs must ensure half of punters get advertised max speeds

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Re: Wednesday Morning 3AM

One of the reasons I picked my ISP is because they defined contention ratio and said what it would be with their service. Maximum theoretical speed was not on my list at all because if were genuinely available the only possible benefit would be the ability to watch multiple video adverts simultaneously.

[For some reason ISP's do not put "opt-out porn filter" in large letters across their adverts. It is almost as if our PM wants to mandate features that ISPs know most customers do not value.]

Having a monopoly on x86 chips and charging eyewatering prices really does pay off – Intel CEO

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Re: Another Thing

Protected by their effective monopoly, Intel has developed the most expensive manufacturing process in the world. That is fine for their CPUs, but a barrier to entry into any competitive market. If it ever got out that a Pi3 is fast enough for a call centre terminal, Intel would find their monopoly being restricted to data centres. The big data centre operators have been looking at licensing ARM and getting their own design manufactured. I think an ARM data centre would be big enough news that we'd know. I think Intel giving big discounts to Googazonple Book because they have a viable data centre ARM would be so secret that we would not find out for years.

[ARM are already in data centres - spinning disks and SSDs are often ARM or a heavily mutated descendent of the 8051. Switch builders who selected ARM of MIPS are busily celebrating that they didn't pick Intel.]

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@Nate Amsden

You are a strange customer. You have the patience to trawl through Intel documentation for the CPU that meets your personal requirements, and the determination to track one down and buy it. Intel's marketing team hate you. You are supposed to look at the reviews of Intel's finest and assume when you buy the chip that is actually in stock that you are getting the same thing.

Perhaps if you order 1000 CPUs per month Intel will treat you a little better. Can someone who buys on that scale please tell us: does Intel make high performance low power chips in quantity, or do they hunt for a few exceptional parts to send out to reviewers?

Republicans want IT bloke to take fall for Clinton email brouhaha

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If you can spell the name right ...

You can find links to epic failures. As a bonus it avoids people responding to your spelling error and avoiding any valid point you may have. [At the time, bio-weapons professionals were saying Colin Powell's mobile bio-weapons factories were ridiculous. To be fair to the man, he did apologise for being utterly wrong - a move that is almost unheard of in politics.]

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Can anyone tell me

Who went to prison for maintaining gwb43.com where 5-22 million emails got lost?

Shock horror: US military sticks jump leads on human brains to teach them a lesson

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Is your project about to be cancelled?

Having difficulty getting funding for your project? Do lack any evidence that it could ever work? Call DARPA now! (Bonus points for projects that are creepy or impractical or unpopular.)

Intel redesigns flawed Atom CPUs to stave off premature chip death

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Re: Intel Pi

Not going to happen any time soon.

Intel got to the top the same way every CPU maker before them: build something cheap, sell huge numbers to divide the design costs of version N+1 down to insignificant. Their challenge for the past decade has been to stop cheap ARM CPUs doing the same thing to them. Intel have the most expensive manufacturing process in the world. ARMs get built with a manufacturing process that is one or two generations old and still give excellent performance per watt. When Intel make small CPUs it reduces their output of high margin big CPUs. If Intel design too small, people will buy cheaper ARMs instead. If they design too big, people will buy Atoms instead of Core. The Intel solution is a compromise with extra hurdles to buy and use Atoms.

The only reason Intel would make something like a Pi is if they lost effective monopoly pricing on Core and Xeons. That will happen when you can slot your phone into the shell of a laptop (keyboard+trackpad+display but no CPU). The desktop equivalent would to to plug your phone into the USB C video/charge port on you TV which presents a bluetooth keyboard and mouse as USB devices to your phone. Add an ARM alternative to Xeon and Intel's high end margins would be cut to the point where making cheap CPUs does no additional damage to their revenue.

Swamp-draining Trump pushes ex-AT&T lobbyist to oversee AT&T mega-merger

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Re: Orange-faced, tiny-handed, self-serving...

Having an orange face does not mean someone will make a bad president. Having small hands does not mean someone will make a bad president. Unfortunately, being self-serving is a requirement for being elected, with bonus points for acting like a fuckwitted moron.

I must admit that when I see 'Big John' on the left, I lower my expectations, switch from reading to skimming and hover the pointer over the down vote button. This time, his comments were short, to the point and I agreed with them 100%. Please try to read what is actually written, not just who writes it, otherwise there will be violent liberal mobs handing out summary beatings. Please try to listen. Consider the possibility that someone you dislike might actually get something right once per decade and that politely explaining why you believe they are mistaken stands a better chance of changing minds than a verbal clue bat.

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Re: Moving goalposts

IIRC, Donald never threatened a tax on exports to Mexico - that would simply cause Mexicans to import from elsewhere and cause unemployment in the US. The plan was an import tax, sometimes just on goods from Mexico, and sometimes a generic import tax. Prices in the US would have gone up to cover the tax, so Americans would be paying for the wall even if Donald got is tax through congress.

A 30% import tax on some item can cause a few local manufacturing jobs. It causes local manufacture of that item to be 29% less cost effective than the rest of the world, so no export market, reduced economies of scale and every other business that uses that item gets extra costs compared to foreign competitors. As a bonus, the boarder patrol get a pile free stuff from smugglers in return for not spotting the holes in the wall big enough to drive trucks through.

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Re: Colour me surprised!

Donald 'caved' before he was elected. He named several of his appointees as a part of his manifesto, They were all people with the most to gain from regulatory capture. I assumed that was how he got Robert Mercer's support. The only surprise was exactly what Donald wanted to keep out of the news with his recent vague comment about sending people to Mars in his first term. Now we know.

Amazon may be using disk drives with hot-swappable components

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Every possible tiny variation is patentable

Jaz: disk in cartridge, motor, heads and controller in drive. REV: disk and motor in cartridge, heads and controller in drive. Pre-USB floppies: No intelligence in drive at all, just transistors to amplify control signals enough to drive stepper motors. The disk controller chip (on an add-in card, on the mother board or integrated into the chipset) had just enough brains to match the sector/track fields in the sector header. Everything else was handled by the CPU. Early hard disks connected in a similar way to floppies, with the controller (which could handle multiple drives) separate from the mechanism.

Drives gained intelligence because intelligence became cheaper, the market size increased giving economies of scale, and the reduced latency (between mechanism and controller) made a big difference to performance. For a while, it was often practical to swap the controller cards on a pair of similar drives. This became more difficult because the modern interconnect is more difficult to swap and drives are cheaper than the time required to fix them.

Where to place the divisions between media, mechanics, electronics and intelligence have always been selected by the market forces, not because only a single person on the entire planet had enough brains to spot that a component had become cheap enough to bundle with the medium. The market is going through another big shift: consumers are switching from mechanical to solid state and data centres are becoming the major/only customer that needs the huge capacity of modern drives.

It is about the right time to change which bit goes where again. Patent offices all over the world are calling this an invention worthy of protection - without any details of a standard interconnect or how to implement the standard. Patents were supposed to be about rewarding publishing research so that everyone else did not have to repeat the research. In real life, patents are a way to punish people who do research because a patent holder who contributed nothing can demand royalties from the people who do the actual work.

Microsoft and Rambus will get schwifty in quantum-cum-cryogenic computation collab

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Re: Why WHY WHYYYY..

Before RDRAM, memory manufacturers had come up with several different replacements for SDRAM. Intel decided to make their CPUs compatible with none of them. The message was clear: you spend money on R&D and Intel will ensure it is money down the drain. The unique selling point of RDRAM was the patents. In return for creating a market for RDRAM, Intel could use the patented interface to connect their CPU to the north bridge chip. Everyone else making north bridge chips could be bled dry with patent royalties by Intel while Rambus trolled the memory manufacturers.

For some reason, memory manufacturers did not immediately leap under the bus. RDRAM did not arrive in quantity until months after Intel paid $1B to Micron. Even then the speed was terrible because RDRAM was difficult to manufacture and the latency was appalling because RDRAM was defective by design. For an added bonus Intel CPUs could only operate RDRAM at a few different speeds which did not match the speeds that could be manufactured in quantity, so the CPU had to select the next speed down - which turned out to be a big step down to the lowest available setting.

All this was abundantly clear in advance to the techies that lived through it. Some PHBs got burned by the memory translation hub fiasco, but I am not convinced that many of them understood exactly what was defective or why Intel had been so determined to create a spectacularly bigger cock-up than the FDIV bug.

The obvious answer to 'why WHY WHYYYY..' is that Rambus have tremendous expertise in selling bullshit to PHBs, and the PHBs at Microsoft do not understand just how badly Intel got crippled and burned (although - to be fair - AMD were able to let that huge opportunity painfully drag itself past them).

Get your popcorn, sit back and get ready for a giggle. A mosquito has got into bed with a leach. I would like to think that Rambus can deliver an even bigger train wreck than RDRAM, but I doubt Microsoft will commit themselves to filling a black hole with cash quite as enthusiastically as Intel did.

US military makes first drop of Mother-of-All-Bombs on Daesh-bags

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Unique selling point

You drop this on someone, it is going to be headline news for days. It will distract the electorate from what ever cock up you made no matter how huge. If your cock up is so great that a few days will not cover it, just drop another one! In your next press release you can say "America makes the best bombs in the world!"

Isn't that worth a few measly hundred million?

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

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Re: dummies

Do it yourself crash testing for dummies.

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Re: But the real issue is

Ok Google, what's in an Easter egg?

Windows 10 Creators Update general rollout begins with a privacy dialogue

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"When do we get a non USA operating system bumping off windows ?"

You get a non-USA operating system when you install Linux. As for bumping off Windows, Microsoft are trying really hard. Despite their best efforts users are putting up with slurpware. The exact death date for Windows will be a matter of opinion as governments will keep it on life support long after it is brain dead.

Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti-social' and 'love to hate'

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Re: Marco van de Voort

I did not say everyone should create their own distribution. I made a toy distribution years ago. I learned a great deal from doing so, but it was a huge time sink. I am sure there are dozens of people on the planet who would benefit from taking the time to create a distribution, but it is not a course of action I would inflict on any but the most hopelessly clueless commentard. There really are hundreds of distributions, and unless you have a really strange requirement, half a dozen of them will almost certainly be a far better choice than spending the time required to create your own.

"Making demands from upstream". I had to wait a while before I was calm enough to respond to this without a foul mouthed screaming rant whilst brandishing an iron plated clue bat. You are not entitled to demand anything ever. You can politely offer you opinion on which way you think a project should go. You can politely tell others why you think one distro is a better choice than another. You can offer money to people capable of creating a change in your preferred direction. You can download the source code, fork it and prove to the world that your way is better (or - as I have discovered - there is often a damn good reason not to try to do it that way).

All the people screaming and swearing and demanding the removal of systemd achieved bugger all. The Devuan maintainers sat down in their comfy chairs and got on with something constructive (They are close to getting into the top 100 on distro watch). By all means follow their example and create Vortux, or use one of the Ubuntu derivatives that does not use MIR.

"Ubuntu is too big for any package or application maintainer to not support." Round objects. Canonical is quite capable of creating packages for any application they want. Application maintainers have enough on their plate without doing anything non-trivial to handle specific needs of any individual distribution.

A very brief search showed that distribution makers were not particularly bothered by Canonical creating MIR. They were peeved by Canonical making statements about competitors to MIR that were not particularly true.

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Does the other way round fit?

How about a thicko with an big inferiority complex saying "I know, but I won't tell you" when he hasn't got a clue and is trying to hide it. Just tell the emperor he has no clothes and enjoy the spectacular tantrum as he screams "of course I have clothes, but you are too stupid to see them".

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Re: summary: People resist when somebody else set the agenda without consulting them

There are places where that would be antisocial, but this is free software. If you do not like the direction Mr Shuttleworth is taking his project built with his time any money, use something else. In the free software world, there are always at least dozen elses. For distros, it is far to easy to find 100 elses.

Ex-IBMer sues Google for $10bn – after his web ad for 'divine honey cancer cure' was pulled

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"I read it in a book"

Has anyone tried asking if all books are infallible sources of wisdom?

I prefer "the test of truth is an experiment". Shajar Abid is welcome to eat radium until he gets cancer then cure himself with his magic honey.

Democrats draft laws in futile attempt to protect US internet privacy

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Re: Americans preparing to repeat history

This time people are making sure the repetition happens ASAP.

Put down your coffee and admire the sheer amount of data Windows 10 Creators Update will slurp from your PC

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I am certain Microsoft have a reasonable understanding of how you feel

The obvious way for Microsoft to deal with your dissatisfaction with their newer operating systems is to back port full telemetry to their earlier offerings.

As Trump signs away Americans' digital privacy, it's time to bring out the BS detector

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Re: We'll follow as usual

If only there were a presidential candidate who promised to 'drain the swamp' ...

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@joed

My ISP used to provide a web server accessible via ssh, but then cancelled it without warning and outsourced it to a company that only provided sftp. What they did not say was free for one year only, so a year later the site became unmodifiable and still causes trouble when people find it instead of the replacement.

My ISP used to provide email with the option to run my own email server. Then they <sarcasm>upgraded</sarcastm> to Microsoft exchange, so I lost push email, and adding an account required spending ten minutes interacting with a web interface instead of just typing two words of CLI. Later, email disappeared without warning, with the option of paying per account. (I name accounts after the company I am corresponding with and delete the account if I get spam from it.)

So far I have stayed with this ISP because they have demonstrated competence as a bit pusher. I fully expect that in future they will use deep packet inspection to find out how I access my web server and how I send and receive email so they can block it and make their defective overpriced spying services compulsory. That will be the day I dump them and hope there is still a bit pushing service available.

D'oh! Amber Rudd meant 'understand hashing', not 'hashtags'

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Last time this came up

Joe Biden proposed a law mandating back doors in all encrypted communication. He also plagiarised Neil Kinnock's speeches. The result was steganography software which created output that resembled a Neil Kinnock speech.

Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly

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Re: Will any Minister be sacked for this?

QE? Do you really mean quantitive easing, or the second big 'bail out the banks by printing loads of money' known as QE2?