Posts by P. Lee

Re: Imagine that...

>a key role of the jury is to determine what is fact from the evidence that's presented.

The jury, yes, but what about the judge? Ruling out testimony from one of the investigators of Silk Road seems to me a bit heavy handed, even if he is just presenting his theories. This isn't testimony from his mother's uncle's step-father's cat.

I've no idea if Ulbricht is guilty or not, but I get the feeling guilt isn't going to be relevant to the outcome. The US has been embarrassed by recent internet happenings and they require a win. Justice needs to be seen to be done and that means allowing leeway for dubious evidence to be presented and confirmed or exposed, especially if it comes from the investigators.

Re: I do not see the value in putting it in a mouse

While I agree technically, there may be some benefit to having a single device. It's probably better though to have a mouse with a USB plug into which you can put all the other gubbins. HDMI is also good because its likely that port on the monitor will be available and people won't be too worried about leaving an HDMI cable around, whereas they probably don't want to leave a USB stick plugged into the back of the screen.

Marketing-wise, better to sell a mouse which gives you android than a stick, a mouse, a keyboard, an SD card which people hope might work together, though admittedly, perhaps a mouse with an "HDMI receiver" with all the electronics in it might be better.

How about thunderbolt, though, giving you displayport rather than HDMI?

> it probably was leaving those for later after filling up on the dogs.

Or the cats are just dog-bait.

Re: I'm reminded of zero-tolerance policies

But this is quite the opposite. MS said it didn't matter at all.

Re: Business model?

>Adobe and Microsoft are moving towards software rental by monthly subscription for applications.

I think here is where they will come unstuck. A lot of people & small businesses install windows and Office and sweat the assets for years and years, with the system mostly used with some invoicing and customer management application. They don't want or need an ultra-reliable internet connection (that's chromebook out) and they don't want to keep paying for things they don't use that much (Office software rental or upgrading windows every two or three years).

Write some accounting/invoicing/customer management software for Linux and put it on Steam. Write it to QT if you want to go cross-platform or use VMs. You can then provide an option for off-site data backup. Then the user pays for what they really need.

Re: warmists or sceptics

>Last I checked the scientists were still trying to figure out how the complicated system of climate works.

Yes they are. The problem is that a model which shows that AGW either is not happening or is not a problem would be politically completely unacceptable to governments all around the world - and therefore funding around the world. In other words, the funding favours a particular result. It may be the correct result, but its still a biased result.

There could be many reasons for the hiatus, the one that springs to my mind is the shift of manufacturing from the West, where most of the records exist, to China. The expansion of cities is a problem. From where I stand, it looks as though that invalidates the data from those areas. You can't really hope to adjust it and get a reliable data, especially if you're talking about 0.1C changes, which means we just don't know what's going on. That may be unacceptable for those who worship at the shrine of Science, but most people can accept that "we don't know" is the truth. They can also accept, "it looks as though it temperatures might have gone up very slightly, but our margin of error is more than the change, so we can't say for sure." Don't let the fact that a sentence is too long for a newspaper headline to change your message.

Despite all the governmental "woe is me" conferences, no government appears to be doing anything. We all know telling people not to buy the next iphone is not going to work. Using fewer plastic bags won't work, neither will taxing things with inelastic demand, like petrol.

If the science is settled and you want to put your money where your mouth is - start spending on setting up northern Canada for farming. Before you do that, I'm not sure you *really* believe the data or you're just generating bad news because it suits you politically. Tell the population why you need to tax them more, ring-fence the revenue so the public can see you aren't just fixing your irresponsible military spending deficit. No, we don't want drought-resistant GM crops, that just means people keep farming where they shouldn't, you eventually get a dust-bowl and it looks as though you're just giving hand-outs to your corporate sponsors to allow them to get a lock on their industry. Surely we don't need more studies if the science is settled, that just looks like scare-propaganda, especially if *all* you do is fund studies.

Do something. Do something which doesn't equate to a hand-out to big business. If the action plan is painful for government it is more convincing and if it is just revenue raising or helping its corporate friends. Then I might believe that the government believes the data and is working for the benefit of the people.

Re: Really?

>The main issue is that most organisations have also been ignoring ITIL and TOGAF (among others) and so don't even have a CMDB

+1

If you're still on 2003, the chances are the rest of what you should have (information about your systems) is out of date too.

Re: Akamai - bloody evil Net Accelators!!

>(Mockery actually aimed at the ill-informed Net Neutrality crowd that can't even draw a line between the good and the "bad".)

Are there any net-neutrality supporters who think caching is bad?

Personally, I'm sad at the drop in proxy availability. They're up-to-date, use less disk and are less maintenance than mirrors. Ya hearing me iinet? Give me a proper Suse/Packman proxy, not a mirror which stops a version or two behind.

Re: Firefox stability problems?

>The half and half trick, fondly remembered from days spent fixing peoples' Quark XPress.

Binary searches pre-date Quark.

I remember doing them in Applesoft BASIC and I'm sure they go back way before that.

Re: Actually that's rather a non-issue here...

>"Car simulator"?! I smell a marketing opportunity.

A little box which messes with GPS signals?

Sounds good to me. Feed it data from google maps and off it (virtually) goes.

Re: Presumably the subsidiary will "go bust"

The offence is "state aid." The company complied with the requisite laws.

What would the EU do to Luxembourg? Well a fine could work. Luxembourg's position is valuable due to its position in the EU. If it got chucked out, a lot of that corporate money would stop flowing.

Re: Probably going through a looped routine right now

That's why it failed. It didn't have a donkey and there was a stack overflow.

Re: No need a car for that

>ou already carrying mobile phone which happily provides all this information and much much more.

>And it's already being sold to whoever wants buy it.

Plus, your car has a radio in it, one of the few places radios are still listened to.

How about targeting adverts for the local "food" outlets with extra information - "just 300 yards ahead on your left."

I don't want a connected car thank-you. Any data collected should be useful to the person in car, or the person with the engine diagnostic computer. It doesn't need to go further.

Re: Meanwhile in Iceland

And on the last day of the month, its time to use up the remaining internet bandwidth by spamming UDP to random addresses.

Re: it operates “much like a mother's soothing touch ...

>Or you could just use, say, a mother's soothing touch...

Don't be silly, mummy is far too busy sharing both their personal data on facebook, including the fact that they have a $500 stuffed toy.

I've never understood the monitor thing. If the baby's heart has stopped, what realistically, are you likely to do and are you likely to be able to do it in a reasonable timeframe? Once you've woken up, stumbled through the house, etc.

Re: Jeffrey Nonken

If the city is providing it as a service, "reasonable" normally would be some capital costs+running costs+ investment costs calculation, rather than pricing as high as you think the market will bear.

The cableco's have nothing to fear if city hall can only produce a bloated bureaucracy and rubbish service.

Using the city as a coordination point seems like a good idea for an infrastructure service. They have good links with infrastructure planners and contractors and have an overview of what is required for the city as a whole.

Re: Fuck Uber.

Perhaps if the taxi industry wasn't such a good source of political donations, the public might be a little more sympathetic.

Perhaps if there was a little more discussion around the reasoning for the maze of regulations, the public might be a little more sympathetic and wary of non-conforming drivers.

I think we've all seen stupid laws passed at the behest of vested interests.

Criminal it may be, and to an extent, that makes it wrong, but is it really ethically wrong or wrong on a technicality? It says much when the complaint is that the criminal refuses to break the law for an officer so that the officer can arrest him.

I'm not saying Uber is in the right here, I just feel as though we aren't being given the full arguments, and I'd like to hear the taxi industry and the government present a good justification for the regulations.

I've had a proper registered cab take me home and then ask for an extra $20 on top of the fare. Huh? What? Why? "Now I know where you live, give me more money," sounds like the unpleasantness of an unregulated industry.

Re: After carefully considering all the evidence...

Since no-one is ever going to believe or use NSA stuff ever again, I doubt it matters.

Presumably, even the NSA doesn't use its proposed standards.

Re: Fracking

>I'm not sure light and transport count as 'survival' criteria for people.

We have much larger cities than in the past. If you can't get massive amounts of food in, people will starve.

We've made our infrastructure extremely fragile in the pursuit of profit.

Re: Ring-a-ding-ding

> Now, if it could give us the giant holographic screens that magically interpret the motions of users based on intent that we see in so many Hollywood-style works, then we would be cooking with gas.

That's far too energetic! My mouse only moves an inch and a half across the whole screen.

>How long will it take before someone de-anonymises large chunks of that data?

No names provided, but the ride was from 999 Letsbee Avenue to 1 Smistress Place

All that data in council computers? What could go wrong?

Re: Needs domain admin and can allow you to impersonate any user.

>But if you have Domain Admin rights, you could just edit the schema and create some random account buried deep in the System container and give yourself every right you want.

And the audit logs would record you doing it.

Re: There is no sensible way to encrypt those on a budget

I'm pretty sure we knew this from when wireless keyboards first came out - someone was using XOR for encrypting keystrokes IIRC.

You need a computer to get a peripheral to talk to a computer.

Welcome to the internet of things... what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Forget the ABS and International Capacity

>Surely their stats will be based on speeds from their on-shore presence to Australian end users,

I would imagine there's a hierarchy and an incomplete caching system, so they can test akamai (au) to end-user (au), but also akamai(non-au) to akamai(au) and also akamai(non-au) to end-user(au).

A very high proportion of my traffic isn't within Australia, so slow(er?) links into Australia links are very much part of my internet experience.

I'm with an earlier poster though, I'd prefer a more reliable connection to higher speed.

Re: Sorry, but Google were uttely wrong.

So MS were holding off until the very last possible moment before releasing the patch and hoping Google would relent? They were happy with 92 days but not 90? Doesn't Patch Tuesday roll around every week?

My guess is that MS are playing games, with customers' security being the sacrificial pawn. They were looking to either get Google to change their policy on disclosure as a concession to MS, or to score PR points saying they were irresponsible for releasing a zero-day.

Sorry MS, if you can't release a patch in 2.95 months (or even 1.95 months), you don't get my sympathy vote. You know Google's policy, if you asked them to hold off until 92 days, did you actually to get a reply from them to say they would? I'm guessing you didn't. If you don't get an exception to the policy, the policy stands, that's how things work in business. You don't just fling an email into the void saying you won't make a deadline and hope the third-party changes its policy to suit you. That isn't how enterprises work.

Nice try, no cigar. Stop messing around. When you display an attitude like that, I'm glad I'm not your customer.

Re: think of the children....

Ah, John Lennon. Famed member of the Beatles.

What great lyrics they wrote, "Mother Mary came to me, whispering words of wisdom..."

Then there is George Harrison's worship song, "My sweet Lord... Hare Krishna."

This is the group that went and composed a lot of their songs for the White Album and Abbey Road at a Hindu retreat? Yes it is.

I guess they would be for The Chop in your Great Society where no dissension or deviation from the State sanctioned secularist belief system is allowed.

Thinking of the children... Whose children are they? Logic and the natural order of things suggests that they are the parents' responsibility, being genetically formed from them. Perhaps you'd like the State to take them away and send them to a camp to be re-educated? I hear that Nicolae Ceaușescu did that a lot in Romania in his time. What a nice atheist man he was, moving all the children around and creating large numbers of orphanages where they could run free, free from the religious shackles of their parents. Then there were other places in Eastern Europe where the little corner of the house devoted in the past to religious icons were abolished and converted to be a "red corner" in honour of new atheistic state leaders. No religion to see here folks, honest, move along. As Lennon suggested in the link you provided, these great leaders did away with possessions and religion and brought in a brotherhood of man, by force of law.

Seeing as you think the law shouldn't be broken just because you don't believe its morally right, I'm sure you'd have been a staunch supporter of all these regimes, along with the Khmer Rouge, Mao and Enver Hoxha. These would be your heros, pushing back the bounds of religion, bringing secularism to the people. Don't take my word for it. Google it yourself. The House of Saud might also agree with you there and suggest that your points (a) and (b) are in essence what is going on with this flogging. (c) is also a bit of a nonsense, since children don't grow up in a vacuum. Whether you consider what they learn a "delusion" or not is depends your point of view. I'm sure the Saudis take exactly the same view of things.

Do you sound intolerant? Yes, yes you do. With regard to your strawman, I'm not sure if I can think of any "traditional" religions which reject people based on where they are from, what someone looks like or even what their parents thought. I say "traditional" religions because... well, let's take a look at the morality proposed by "God is Dead" Nietzsche and those strongly influenced by him (who cannot be named on an internet forum but are still relevant to the discussion because of their zeal to eradicate religion). Sadly deformed at birth? Oh dear, it doesn't look good for you. Are you a Gypsy, black-skinned or Slavic - not "from the right place"? Eugenics is definitely in. Did even just one of your grandparents believe in the Torah? There's a train ride and an unpleasant shower waiting for you. It's a tragedy that Lennon was murdered by a criminal nut-job, but zealous atheist leaders seem to do things on a much grander scale. Stalin's atheistic religion led him to kill around seven million kulaks in an engineered famine. People weren't directly hurt (that wouldn't be ciivilised and there aren't bullets to spare) they were merely stripped of all possessions (including pots and pans) and everyone else was forbidden to give them aid.

The BBC's article (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30714702) is interesting, but Tom Holland appears to end with simply two different viewpoints struggling for political supremacy. When two viewpoints struggle and the end result of either is the obliteration of all others, I don't see how they are that different from each other. I prefer permissiveness to restriction, but that is not the way things are going. The government is legislating more and more morality as special interest groups push their social-engineering agendas. They seem desperate to have their behaviour preferences pronounced "good" and all who disagree must be silenced. All disagreement is labelled "bigotry" or "hate-speech". Why not go all the way and label it "blasphemy?"

We don't flog those with religious beliefs different from our own, but if they dare to mention those beliefs they can lose their job, have their cafe or B&B shut down by the police and courts, be rejected as foster-parents, be dismissed from working for the local council's ethics committee, and the list goes on, but no flogging, because we are civilised and we live in the "free" West. Perish the thought that someone with religious beliefs should work on an ethics committee. We don't need any of your steeekin' ethics thank-you, we only want our own.

How far from Saudi Arabia are we?

Re: Bah!

>So Gates and Jobs wasted all that money in their secret joint effort "Project Global Spin-Down?"

I think they picked the wrong strategy if, "Linux has a problem, the internet is going down!" is the headline.