Posts by Adam

Bow Wow Wow

If the IWF (the principal of which I think is a good idea, but they have too much power for what they are) applied their rules consistently, they would have more credibility.

They have got it wrong in this case in so many ways:

1. Nudity IS NOT pornography, and this picture is obviously not meant to be sexually provocative.

2. A quick image search on Google for 'Virgin Killer' shows that plenty of other sites are hosting this image. Are they going to block them all?

3. Bow Wow Wow's page has not been blocked (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_wow_wow#Controversy) (the girl in the picture is 15 years old)

4. Nirvana's Nevermind album has not been blocked, including the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevermind)

5. An image search for Nevermind returns far more hits than 'Virgin Killer', many of which are quite high resolution (much higher than the Virgin Killer images). They quite clearly show the baby's genitals and he would appear to have already been circumcised. Genital mutilation is a far more serious example of child abuse than the Virgin Killer album cover.

C'mon IWF - get a grip on what you are doing, pick on real examples of child porn or you risk losing any sense of credibility you may have.

@Non-human Boss

You may have Mekon, but I had Mordac, Preventer of IT from Dilbert as a boss.

Thankfully, I've changed bosses, and Mordac now 'Works from home' but he still hinders all IT work with his demonic ITIL Chnage Management process (designed to prevent as much change as possible)

@Dom & @Spanner

I think he's referring to this line in the article:

Cambridge's aspiring rival, the perfectly acceptable minor university at Oxford

@Duncan Watts

Traffic Lights - it's been thought of already. A company we used for penetrations tests had a job to try and crack the IP interface of some traffic lights and see what they could do with them. I don't know what they found though.

@Rabbi

"If, for example, you consider ONLY files of 4MB in size. There are 2^25 possible such files. A 128-bit hash has 2^7 possible values. Therefore, on average, each hash value can be derived from 2^18 different files."

Really? I don't think so. 2^7 possible values - that's only 128 values. A 128 bit hash has 2^128 possible values. That's over 3.4 X 10^38. As the sun has a mass of approx 1.9 X 10^30. That's 17 million times the mass of the sun in kilos. Or, in file sizes, a single file of 3.4 X 10^14 terrabytes. One file of this size would be needed to generate all the possible combinations.

That's (for current computers) not a space that can brute-forced.

Adam

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are 10 types of people in this world:

Those who understand binary,

Those who don't and

Those who start counting at 0

Nice idea, unlikely to happen

While Edward Pearson above has a point, if we don't aim high, we are never going to achieve universal human rights.

However, asking for this is effectively asking all governments to allow complete political freedom. You can't have it just on the internet and not in real politics, the press etc. The Internet is just one method of delivering those freedoms - it doesn't exist in isolation.

Consequently, this initiative is bound to fail. Amnesty should just campaign for general political freedoms (along with everything else it campaigns for) - Internet freedoms will (if it succeeds) just follow on naturally.

Big ISP's maybe able to do a little, but as the China Google charade shows, big 'free' web sites just get blocked in countries where they threaten the status quo. ISP's in the countries trying to oppress people just get closed down. There is only so much they can do.

I got the blue pill ....

and it tasted Goooood!

Oh dear

I'd better keep that old BBC Model B I have at home well hidden!

What's the problem?

Pedophile - isn't that someone who has a thing about feet?

From:

Ped - Latin for 'foot'

Philos - Greek for Loving

Now, if we were talking about paedophiles, that would be another matter entirely!

Obviously works on planes too

It's the secret of invisiblity - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/invisible_stilt_dancing_dog/

If you look carefully, you'll also see a dog on stilts and a man with a squirrel in his pocket!

National Anthem

Perhaps it's just a way of softening the Scots up a bit, before this verse is reinstated into the National Anthem:

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,

May by thy mighty aid,

Victory bring.

May he sedition hush and like a torrent rush,

Rebellious Scots to crush,

God save the King.

;-)

Block religious schools, not religious teaching

Andrew Wood - I didn't actually say don't teach religion at all - it has (and still does) affected most peoples lives all around the world, in one way or another whether or not you follow a particular belief.

However, religion should be taught in a balanced way, with just the facts about a religion and its belief system being taught - without the beliefs of a particular religion being taught as fact. Furthermore, no religion should be promoted above another, as does happen in faith schools.

A balance, of course, has to be struck here. It is not possible to teach '*all* possibilities' as suggested somewhere above, which means some religions won't get taught at all. However, to start with the 3 monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism & Islam) and add in the more widely supported of the others - Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism (and perhaps something like Humanism for balance) etc would I think give kids a better understanding of what most people believe, and would hopefully improve tolerance between followers of different beliefs - something sadly missing in today's world.

RE: Can't you just lie?

Can you lie all the time when you are searching? Wouldn't that mean searching for stuff you are not interested in? If you are ill, searching for information on a different disease?

Not all data is asked for explicitly through a nice form where you can choose what you put. After a while, if you use Gmail, use a personalised Google search page and so on, they will collect lots of valid information about you and, depending on how clever they are, work out who you really are, whatever you put when you sign up.

American Idol and American President

"Trust me, the "winner" is determined long before the series goes on the air."

"Conclusion: Yanks are useless at sticking up for themselves."

We know this already - twice they've allowed George Dubbya to be appointed President, and have just sat back and accepted it.

Seems like the "American Idol" and "American President" voting systems have much more in common than just the poor quality of the candidates!

What are they complaining about?

English has, over the years, absorbed thousands and thousands of loan words from other languages - especially French.

In England, French was the language of government and royalty for 300 years following William the Conqueror's invasion in 1066 until Henry IV had himself crowned in English and his son Henry V decided that all his royal correspondence should be in English.

Since then English has absorbed Latin (especially after the bible was officially translated into English by King James) and loan words from a host of other languages including Indian, native American, US English, native Australian and Aussie English, Arabic and more.

Has English suffered from this onslaught? No - its ability to adapt is one of the prime reason for its success. Compare it to German - the language that started English when the Angles, Saxons & Jutes invaded after the Romans left. German is a very fixed language and, partly as a consequence, has very little use outside of Germany and its immediate neighbours.

If the French want their language to thrive and be taken seriously as an international language, they should let go a bit, and let the language develop naturally, instead of trying to control its direction.