* Posts by DavCrav

3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007

Maxthon web browser blabs about your PC all the way back to Beijing

DavCrav

"They also keep people in 95% dark about their own doing which are many times worse."

I just checked, and China and Turkey's human rights violations against their own citizens are in fact worse than the US's, not the other way round. I know the US isn't a squeaky clean bastion of truth and justice, but saying it's "many times worse" than China and Turkey is insane.

DavCrav

Re: Is this worse

"Why are we automatically meant to be more suspicious of China than America?"

Let's have a quick browse of today's paper. Top story in China that I could see: Chinese magazine closes as newsroom taken over in dissent crackdown.

Oh yeah, that's the reason. The US spies on people around the world, and has a serious problem with gun violence. China spies of people around the world, and engages in systematic and brutal oppression of its citizens, eliminating dissent in all forms, and attempting to export such concepts the world over.

MPs tell BT: Lay more fibre or face split with Openreach

DavCrav

Re: So a bit over £1Bn/pa is generating c£2.5Bn/pa

BT Group, 2015 total revenue: £17,851bn. 2015 operating profit: £2.135bn. That's a profit margin of about 12%. You are dividing profit by investment, rather than profit by all costs. These people don't pay themselves, you know.

DavCrav

Re: Nationalization not needed.

"Once it is the law that it is obliged to provide a broadband service of defined minimum performance within defined maximum time of a request, to anywhere in the UK (or to some subset of anywhere including all residences and businesses), at a cost that's not out of reach of a household if modest means, then it will happen. Otherwise the fines that will be levied if it does not will simply get bigger and bigger, with the ultimate threat of break-up."

Technically, one of two things happens: 1) it happens because the cost is still low enough the the company is profitable, or 2) the company goes bankrupt, because it cannot be done at the price you want. This is why the cost of posting letters is skyrocketing: the USO, combined with fewer letters being posted, means that the cost has to keep going up exponentially. When broadband is £50-60 a month, as it is in the States, will you be happy about the USO then?

"It ignores rural communities where there is no competition and where the cost of providing a service for a small number of customers will exceed the amount of money it can bill them for."

All the USO is is a transfer of money from city dwellers to rural citizens. Since almost everyone lives in the city, it's more-or-less equivalent to funding it out of general taxation, except this is more like the poll tax than income tax.

"Can you imagine a country where 5% of the population are told that they cannot have a mains water supply because it is not cost-effective to provide it? "You have a pond. What are you complaining about?" "

If we now had to resupply the whole country with water it would be horrifically expensive and wouldn't be done for many rural places, which would use water butts. The reason it's possible is that it is laid while the houses are being built, and not retro-fitted. New rural developments could have fibre very cheaply.

Dying! Yahoo! writes! off! half! of! the! $1bn! it! paid! for! Tumblr!

DavCrav

"Perhaps in the same way that the hair still grows for a while on recent corpses."

More apt a metaphor than you know, because it isn't true, it just appears that way...

FTC lets Nest off the hook over Revolv IoT hub bricking shame

DavCrav

"If an ISP or the like offers uncapped data then they should be able to sustain every customer using their full bandwidth all day every day."

So a phone company should be required to have enough redundancy so that every person in the country can use their phone at the same time? The postal service should have enough redundancy so that everyone can post 100 letters every day? Petrol companies should have enough stock for everyone in the country to fill their tanks on the same day?

"Continuing to run an essential central server shouldn't depend for finance on continuing sales of new product - that's effectively a Ponzi scheme."

This is a difficult one. It sounds reasonable until you think "how else can a company do this?" The only way I can imagine it otherwise working is that customers would have to pay for the lifetime maintenance of the server as part of their upfront cost. You might as well just ban sales of such devices.

"And unlimited storage is a complete non-starter."

It obviously isn't unlimited: it's limited by the total data storage in the world, for example. Any reasonable person knows that it cannot be truly unlimited. What it means is "don't worry about caps". If you go silly then you can be told off from the company, and eventually disconnected. Is this a better or worse way of going about business than explicitly stating caps? The idea is mostly to reassure people who have no real idea what a gigabyte is and would worry about what happens when their internet uses too many gigabytes.

Facebook deleted my post and made me confirm pics of my kids weren't sexually explicit

DavCrav

Re: It's not your platform and you are not a customer

"Really? Don't own shares in companies that make money hand over fist and are regarded as essential by a not insignificant chunk of the population?"

You're right! I should snap me up some shares in essential search engines like Lycos, Yahoo or AltaVista, and essential social media websites like MySpace.

DavCrav

Re: Enough

"who fit the description of a local armed robber to a tee"

I suspect here that your version of a description of this armed robber is 'black man'. Just guessing.

Florida U boffins think they've defeated all ransomware

DavCrav

Re: Next gen ransomware

Maybe you said it somewhere and I didn't understand it, but how exactly do they encrypt files without either bulk modification of files or bulk deletion of files, both of which are looked for?

Bomb-disposal robot violently disposes of Dallas cop-killer gunman

DavCrav

Re: @YetAnotherLocksmith ... It makes sense, but...

"Absolutely. Let's respect the rights of a mass murderer who has just erased the rights of so many other people. Let's commit God knows how many officers to an effective siege. Let's cordon off a substantial chunk of the downtown area and disrupt countless businesses and the lives of all who work in 'em. Let's make an even bigger dent in the public purse for the additional cost of the law enforcement resources required to respect the aforesaid mass murderer's rights."

Yes, because it's the law. If you are up for extrajudicial killings of bad people, why bother having a criminal justice system at all? Just point and shoot at everyone who commits a crime, saving a lot of money.

The reason we have the rule of law is precisely to prevent such things from happening. The same law that Micah Johnson broke in killing police officers is the one that should prevent criminals being summarily executed by police without trial. You know, murder.

DavCrav

Re: Of course...

"Robotic killing machine will be running evil Windows 10"

If that's true, make sure you do your criminal acts on Patch Tuesday?

DavCrav

Re: Shooter Did Not Use "Assault" Rifle

"The term, "assault rifle" is biased inflammatory rhetoric unworthy of rational debate, especially when the term is blatantly provably wrong."

I think if we are talking about a man being blown up by a killer robot, having killed five police officers during a demonstration about the fact that Police seem to kill with impunity innocent black, and occasionally white, men for doing nothing at all wrong, and you think the worst thing about this is that a particular gun is called an 'assault rifle' rather than an 'assault weapon', I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.

DavCrav

Re: Tear Gas

"...but in reality how was killing the shooter with a robot that different to shooting him in a fire fight where it would be called self defence?"

Because sending in the robot is not self defence, you said it yourself. The idea is supposed to be that killing a person is a last resort, not a convenient way to end a troublesome situation.

And for anyone who says that he threatened to blow stuff up, you don't generally solve this by blowing him up yourself, without a detailed analysis of the explosives and location; you could end up doing a lot more damage.

DavCrav

Re: Gunman murdered by the police?

"if the cops use DEADLY FORCE on a POTENTIAL THREAT to civilian lives, safety, and also the lives and safety of police officers, it's not "murder".

It's a PUBLIC SERVICE."

Oh good: so if someone witnesses a police officer gunning down an innocent person, like happens frequently, they should kill the cop as a public service? Or for some reason does that not fit your ideas?

DavCrav

Re: Fink-Nottle

"WTF? So, the cops have him cornered, they have the chance to finish the confrontation with lethal force (which, after the suspect has used lethal force against the public, let alone officers, and still is a lethal threat, by law they are justified to do), and you want them to sit around on their hands, possibly giving the killer the chance to escape, and also ignoring that the officers were needed in the search for any accomplices, all on the off-chance someone would just happen along with a remotely-triggered canister of some super knockout gas?!?!? Seriously, get a clue. The cops used what they had at hand to safely end the threat to not just them but the public as well."

Part of the reason we are in this situation in the United States is that the police have a shoot-first-don't-ever-ask-questions policy with respect to policing. The best way to escalate that, when blow-back starts, is to double down and move on to a blow-people-up-with-killer-robots policy.

DavCrav

"so want the cops to have no guns when other side has them? Kinda sad how people think public should have better weapons then the people that are suposed [sic] to keep the peace."

Ideally neither side would have guns, but your stupid population and government won't make that happen, so how about we settle for the police not having killer robots? You know, like the OP said?

DavCrav

Re: AC @YetAnotherLocksmith ... It makes sense, but...

"If you want to try looking at it from another angle, between 2003 and 2013, FBI figures showed that black criminals killed cops in the US in equal numbers with white criminals, despite being only 12% of the US population compared to about 44% whites. That means that during that period, every time an officer of any colour encountered a black suspect during the course of their duties, there was potentially three times more likelihood that they would be shot by that black suspect than any other ethnic group."

Erm, no it doesn't. It means that any given black person chosen at random is three times more likely. But police officers in general interact more with blacks than whites (because, ooh, racism maybe?) so you cannot use this statistic, but multiply it by the number of interactions with each race.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

DavCrav

Re: Well there is a point to this

"// don't change this part

And wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?""

I have written in the past, to myself

/* Don't change this. You think it isn't right, but it is.

I've thought about it a lot recently, and it is right.

I know what you are thinking: you're thinking it should

be n+1 rather than n, but it shouldn't be, it should be n.

I mean it. If you do, you will get the wrong answer. */

(Note the use of Linus-approved commenting.)

Bad blood: US govt bans bio-test biz Theranos' CEO for two years

DavCrav

Re: Easy to predict...

"The minute you have a back-up plan, you've admitted you're not going to succeed."

I don't even know what kind of mind would produce such a statement. I think she should remove her airbag from her car, since that's an obvious Plan B. And no need for these pesky rails and barriers everywhere: Plan A is not to crash, so stick with Plan A.

Muppet.

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

DavCrav

"Bear in mind when ever somebody loses money, it doesn't disappear, just ends up somewhere else."

Sorry, this is drivel. If you really believe this, start thinking carefully. If money cannot be lost, then it cannot be gained either, because doing the opposite of the thing that gains money would mean you lose it. Thus our living standards are the same as in the 13th century, or any century you choose.

FBI won't jail future US president over private email server

DavCrav

Re: Whitewashing

"That's not how things work. Intent matters, but one can break a law even then, if they had not intended to do so - and will still get prosecuted. For ex. most traffic accidents do not occur, because the drivers want to harm or kill the victims - yet, they will be prosecuted for it, even criminally."

Depends on which laws. You cannot be guilty of murder one or fraud without intent, you can be found guilty of DUI without intent. Armchair lawyer versus head of FBI: I wonder who I'm going to trust on matters of law.

"Clinton should be tried, for what she did. If she will not, then this will just prove again, that the so called American democracy is just a facade, where that law and justice is only enforced against poor people. Which most of us knew anyway."

Here it is public interest: minor, unintentional breaches of classified information are very rarely prosecuted. If they were, you would have difficulty finding anyone to be a low-level official in such organizations, and have difficulty finding room to put all the new prisoners.

DavCrav

Re: What a shocking and totally unexpected result...

"Since the other guy is not running for president, his infractions are also somewhat less significant."

What happened to all being equal in front of the law? A crime is a crime, and either both are prosecutable or neither is. Doesn't matter which job anybody is applying for.

Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right

DavCrav

Give me a 'V'! Give me a 'P'! Give me an 'N'! What does it spell? 'Go fuck yourself, government'.

Wealthy youngsters more likely to be freetards than anyone else – study

DavCrav

Re: Someone forgot a Golden Rule

"The government’s annual study of online content consumption, conducted by Kantar for the Intellectual Property Office, shows a spooky overlapp between between illegal downloaders and voters keenest on the European Union.

Someone forgot "correlation is not causation", so I'm far from certain that anything has been proved.

And overlap has only one "p", and that's a second rule..."

I'd go farther than that. I'd say it's complete arse-gravy. If there's a correlation between group A and group B, and between group B and group C, unless those correlations are very high (hint: they aren't in this case) you cannot say anything meaningful about the correlation between A and C.

This article's subhead is complete rubbish, and I am sending a correction to El Reg now.

fMRI bugs could upend years of research

DavCrav

"So the question is does this affect the raw data? If not, they can just reprocess with the fixed software..."

The raw data in fMRI is massive though, I think a friend of mine in chronic pain study told me it was about a terabyte or two per scan. Nowadays that's possible to store, although remember you have lots of these per study, but ten years ago that was a serious amount of data.

DavCrav

"Oh I dunno. Having something called "Tukey's honestly significant difference test" implies that there are dishonestly significant difference tests out there somewhere..."

Oh, I didn't say you couldn't lie through your teeth with statistics. But if you are doing post-hoc analysis of data, it's so much easier to be honest about it. So much easier to pretend you were looking for that all along.

DavCrav

"statistics is inherently hand wavy"

You are wrong. Statistics is not inherently hand wavy. People who don't understand statistics think it's hand wavy.

"involving approximations and estimates. add a lot of prerequisites for the theorems you're using but don't understand and any statistical argument is prima facie dodgy."

I can tell you are not a mathematician or statistician by that argument, which boils down to: "I don't understand stats. Therefore nobody does".

DavCrav

Re: Any decent scientist checks the tools for accuracy

How? This isn't a slide rule. This is a piece of software that interprets a couple of terabytes of information into pictures. What do you test it with, and against?

DavCrav

Re: Cargo Cult Science

"The whole point of science is to be able to question EVERYTHING."

Except you don't. You assume that the scales and thermometers are accurate. You are heading towards Descartes's evil demon with your thinking. It's 'standing on the shoulders of giants', not 'standing behind them constantly checking their shoes'.

Science works by construction and destruction. You have to assume that most people are doing their jobs properly, because you cannot question absolutely everything. If I had to check every piece of research before using it I wouldn't be able to do any research. Sometimes errors are discovered, generally because new research contradicts old research or experiments don't match theory, and we have a big bonfire and throw a load of research on it. But I claim that this is by far the most effective method, rather than everyone being paralyzed through the requirement to replicate every single experiment.

DavCrav

Re: "Cargo cult science is a bit harsh for most."

"Is it really too harsh? A whole research field went astray for 15 years, huge amounts of money were burned, scientific careers were made and unmade -- and nobody validated the experimental approach? Those scientists had 15 years of praise, now they deserve their five minutes of shame."

Yes, it is. A similar example: I was laying a laminate floor the other day and the edges of the pieces I was cutting never seemed to line up with the wall completely, it was fine because of the gap, so I ignored it, putting it down to either the wall not being straight (which it isn't) or the floor itself being laid slightly off straight (which it obviously will be). I then at one point made another line with two different pieces of equipment and they were different.

Turns out that my right angle I was using for marking the boards was, in fact, not a right angle.

Could I have checked that when I bought it? Yes, of course, but you assume that the company selling right angles sells right angles, and not sort-of right angles. Do I "deserve [my] five minutes of shame"? I am not sure.

Their experimental approach was validated, but it depended on a machine giving correct readings.

Celebrated eye hospital Moorfields lets Google eyeball 1 million scans

DavCrav

Re: Retinal identification as a consequence?

"It was written by a bloke on the shrooms. That it might in any way have some form of real-world application is entirely coincidental."

It could so easily have gone the other way. Just look at Yellow Submarine.

Pollster who called the EU referendum right: No late Leave swing after all

DavCrav

Re: Luck, not skill?

"There was a report on the Beeb saying much the same thing. However we're told that the Leave vote majority was due to all those old folk who wouldn't recognise the internet if it bit them in the leg, etc. etc. That doesn't quite fit."

It does, because the samples are weighted. Some old people do use the net, and those people are chosen in YouGov's online panel. If they cannot find enough oldies, they just double the significance of their response. (Roughly. In reality, YouGov use what's known as Mr P: Mulitlevel regression and poststratification.)

DavCrav

Re: Luck, not skill?

"The fact that most polls got the result wrong, rather than a roughly even split between right and wrong, suggests that there were common errors or biasing factors affecting most of those results, so it's certainly possible that the few who did get it right did so because they avoided those errors, rather than simply getting lucky."

If you look into it in more detail, you find that Isos/ComRes's telephone polls were much less accurate than online polls like YouGov's, which more or less said it was within the margin of error. The telephone polls were included into poll of polls, and so this skewed things towards Remain. Excluding phone polling and it was 50/50 with Leave in the lead on several occasions. If you look at the two graphs on this page:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/trust-opinion-polls-eu-referendum-2015-general-election-pollsters

you'll see that the online polls were pretty accurate.

DavCrav

Re: Luck, not skill?

"Seems to me they also used a fair amount of knowledge to produce unbiased results. Recognising that their polling skewed the results due to education and social status seems to be the key factor here, whereas other polling companies have assumed that sentiment would be the same regardless."

Unfortunately, what seems to you is false. Education and social status are definitely parameters in every pollster's model. I've written a short article about this last week, so looked into how these things are computed at a slightly greater depth than available in this article. Every polling company uses age, sex, education, social class, political party affiliation/support and newspaper readership (if applicable). There are other parameters used as well, but these are all standard.

UN council: Seriously, nations, stop switching off the damn internet

DavCrav

Re: India, Indonesia and, South Africa don't surprise me in the least

You stay classy, person who downvoted man nearly imprisoned for life for being gay.

My plan to heal this BROKEN, BREXITED BRITAIN

DavCrav

Re: Ha ha

"Britain exit looks a lot like when it was in, gets a free trade deal (EU needs stability too), is out of the social side, the free movement side"

No. Not on the table. In order for it to get on the table, the EU would have to basically rewrite everything. So expect this not to happen unless it looks really, really bad for the EU. Which it won't, not bad enough for them to give up on a central plank of the idea of the single market to begin with.

DavCrav

Re: Parliamentary Sovereignty

"No, it wasn't politicians that said we would leave the EU. It was the people, and we spoke clearly."

Did we now? That's 26 votes leave for every 24 votes stay. Let me just show you what that looks like:

LEAVE STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY LEAVE STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY LEAVE STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY LEAVE STAY STAY STAY STAY LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE STAY STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY LEAVE LEAVE STAY LEAVE.

(Actually, that's 23 votes stay for 26 votes leave, just to prove a point at how difficult it is to get a clear sense of which is which.) It's not clear, it's marginal. Held the week before or the week after, the result would be different, either much more for leave or a remain win. This is no way to decide a fundamental part of the UK's governance.

Osborne on Leave limbo: Travel and trade stay unchanged

DavCrav

Re: Growing Sense of bereavement..

"No, what we have is market jitters driven by uncertainty and uninformed scaremongering.

If we have those figures in 6 months time, after Brexit plans have been published and refined, then we'll have a problem."

Aha. OK, so we've nailed you down now. If it's still all shit in six months' time, when magical Brexit plans will have appeared (hint: nobody knows how to do that), then you are wrong, and conveniently it'll be too late at that point to do anything about it.

Oh, and S&P knocked Britain's credit rating down two notches already, which will affect people. That's just the latest one since the last set of repercussions from a few hours before that have been mentioned above.

DavCrav

Re: Growing Sense of bereavement..

"I do find some amusement that the leave campaign was about democracy, and the remain campaign occasionally tried to claim democracy and yet on a democratic vote we have the remain again demanding the end of democracy and leave still pushing it. Interesting."

The vote was not democratic. A referendum is only meaningful if it is a clear question with clear outcomes. Remain is clear: carry on as before. Leave is what exactly? EEA, EFTA, bilateral trade deal, WTO rules? Free movement, EU budget contributions, co-operation on science and policing? What? The Leave option is not well defined, and therefore this isn't a democratic referendum. The Leave side constantly conflated all of those options, promising Common market access without Free Movement, something which is not, has never been, and never will be, allowed. Since the Leave campaign and ideas are built upon lies and misinformation, anyone who had any vision of a non-EU future, mutually incompatible visions, could claim it for themselves, and this was actively encouraged by the Leave campaign. It was even mentioned today by de Pfeffel Johnson.

"Of course ignoring democracy does wonderful things doesnt it? The rise of some of the most notable figures in history. Stalin, Hitler, Kim, etc. And of course the EU looks even more fuzzy and nice if the populace is completely ignored and rode over."

Right, the undemocratic genocidal side are Remain, not the side engaging in hate crime against the foreigners. I think in a Hitler analogy, those jackboots fit better on the Leave side.

"Surely the idea of growing up would be accepting the rules in place at the beginning of a democratic vote no matter how poorly both official campaigns pushed their ridiculous propaganda. Or to move to a country that doesnt have problems like voting."

So, what were the Leave rules in place at the beginning? There were none? Right you are then.

And anyway, I am guessing I know a lot more about constitutional law than you do, since you seem to think that this non-binding, advisory plebiscite is a mandate for change. It can, and should be, ignored, as a 52/48 split is not a sufficient margin to justify years of pain. 70/30 probably, 80/20 definitely, but 52/48? That is a year of old person deaths/young people turning 18 away from 50/50. It's not a clear mandate to do something so fundamental, so economically catastrophic as Brexit.

DavCrav

Re: Growing Sense of bereavement..

"The pound has dropped. A little. Three months ago it was $1.43, now it's $1.37. "

$1.32 actually. Do try to keep up, you can't use data from a few days ago, this is an economic crash. It's at a 35-year low, and still falling.

If you think this is a little spot of bother, what type of economic catastrophe would you need to see to change your mind? Think about that, and if you say something absurd, like 12m unemployed and everyone eating turnips, your decisions are based on ideology rather than reasoning. If you come up with something reasonable, like pound down 20-30 cents, FTSE loses 10%, growth down by 2% on what it was supposed to be, then that's exactly what we have. And here's the point: this is initial reaction, and we haven't actually left yet. This is just reaction to the thought of leaving, not the real damage, which is that Article 50 is designed to massively fuck us over. There will be no informal negotiations, and invoking it leads us down a path where we have no negotiation power at all. We will take the rogering and like it time.

The reason that nobody planned for this is that there is no good way out. It's like someone deciding to chop off your leg, and then giving you some time to come up with a plan to deal with it. There is no way to make it work, that's why lots of people told you not to vote for it. You know, every single former PM, every University VC, 90-95% of scientists, 90-95% of economists, a dozen Nobel prize winners, all major political parties, and so on. Who told you that it'll be all OK? Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Eton, Oxford to study classics, fired from the Times for lying about Europe, main reason for Leave: become PM), Michael Gove (Oxford to study English, ex-Times correspondent, main reason for Leave: who knows, ego maybe?) and Nigel Farage (no higher qualifications, ex trader, possessor of stupid facial expressions, main reason for Leave: vanity).

DavCrav

Re: Growing Sense of bereavement..

"We have a once in a generation opportunity that we didn't have a week ago."

Fabulous new opportunities await! There's hanging, electrocution or stabbing! Take your pick.

Or we could grow up, look at the realities, decide that economic suicide isn't a good plan and ignore the referendum result. You know, like the Greek referendum on the bailout. Or the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty. And the Lisbon Treaty. And the French referendum on the EU constitution. And the Dutch referendum on it.

Parliament takes axe to 2nd EU referendum petition

DavCrav

""Only UK or British citizens and residents can create or sign a petition"

Just to check, does that mean you have to be both a UK citizen *and* a resident, or can it be an either or thing? A lot of ex-pats are still citizens and will be worried about the idea of splitting away from the EU"

When you read "Men and women can [do something]" do you think this only applies to hermaphrodites?

DavCrav

Re: On the day of the referendum, there were 24 signatures on the petition.

"If the country does suffer, it wont be you that suffers, it will be the poorest in society. "

You mean, the ones who voted Leave? Based on a pack of lies? That sounds terrible, why on earth would they vote for that, unless they were influenced by liars and their lies? Something should be done, maybe ignore the result or a 2nd referendum?

And I think you can drop the 'if' from your assertions. I think it's pretty clear at this point that the Remain campaign's 'scaremongering' was anything but.

Gartner: Brexit to wipe $4.6bn off tech spending in Blighty

DavCrav

"And the stock value of British banks has just lost 30% or more ... If I were in the UK and/or paid in British pounds, I would be queuing before my bank branch getting my savings out converted to euro ... but that is just me ... you sure will be by the end of the week ... think 2008 again ... the longer you wait, the fewer euro you will get ..."

Replace Euros with dollars and sure. They are also in for a big hit as it all looks a bit uncertain about the whole EU for as long as this debacle continues.

DavCrav

"Nothing has actually happened yet though, other than the vote?"

Well, Sterling fell to a 35-year low, $2.1tn was wiped off the global stock markets in one day, Scotland heads towards a second independence referendum, and there are quite a few reports of racist acts in the streets of a type we haven't seen since 'no blacks, no dogs, no Irish' days. The Prime Minister has resigned and nearly half the shadow cabinet has resigned.

Other than that, nothing much has happened.

Time to re-file your patents and trademarks, Britain

DavCrav

"You have to accept the hand you were dealt. I voted "remain" but am fully resolved now to make the best of "leave"."

People have been saying this, but why exactly? Campaigns change things all the time, without recourse to the populous. Many EU referendums have been either repeated (France, Ireland) or ignored completely (Greece) so why is this one special? Especially since it is clearly causing catastrophic damage. Why should there not be a snap election and a political party runs on annulling the vote? If they are elected, they can do that democratically. Beyond a vague notion of Brexit, what is the mandate for the referendum? Leaving the common market, freedom of movement, EEA, EFTA, all trade at all, and many other partial options? Since the Leave option isn't a solid thing there is no mandate for any one of those things, and so the question is anything but resolved. Would the knuckle-draggers who want no Muslims (they do exist, and have been on the telly) be happy with EEA membership with freedom of movement? Or is that not an option because Leave promised them no people with funny accents living next door?

Dr Craig Wright lodges 51 blockchain patents with Blighty IP office

DavCrav

"Eh? I thought software and mathematical patents were still not allowed in the UK (& EU)? Even t though they are also not allowed in the US there is the transformational argument which opened the door to them, but the UK doesn't have that, does it?"

You're allowed to file for any patent you want.

Kremlin wants to shoot the Messenger, and WhatsApp to boot

DavCrav

"I bet Edward Snowden has read this and thought "Shit""

You mean Russia wasn't on the side of Truth and Justice, and was really just doing it to piss the US off?

How's your driving, Elon? Musk tweets that Tesla Model S 'floats'

DavCrav

Re: Missing the most important question

"I think I'd want the complete kit;" OK, let's see what I can do for you.

"rotating number plates" Seems easy enough, just don't tell the DVLA.

"ejector seat" I can make one that goes up, but I'm not sure what would happen when it came back down. It would eject, that's all I can guarantee. You also might not appreciate being next to it when it does eject.

"caltrops" Easy. Just put a bag full of them on the passenger seat and chuck them out of the window as needed. Be careful not to hit your own rear tyres.

"and of course machine guns behind the side lights." Hmm. That space is usually occupied by engine-y bits. Maybe an Uzi 9mm would fit? Might make a mess of your lights though.

Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me?

DavCrav

Re: Doing naughty things 101

"With half decent IT external device being used / copied to should be logged (assuming external device use actually allowed in first place on the machine)"

Everyone walks round with a camera in their pocket now. Just take photographs of the information on the screen with your personal phone.