Posts by Brent Longborough

No, but here's an answer anyway

Leader / Follower

Please, now can we STFU and get back to debugging?

Who pays?

Why the F are they wasting my money on this, as well as the large haystack?

We need: (1) A decent framework of laws stringently restricting what they can and can't do (Including not building a bigger haystack) and (2) then they just quietly do their job as efficiently as possible, within those laws.

A couple of laws:

Brent's Law of New Ideas:

If it sounds like BS, people will ignore it.

Brent's Law of Cities:

Cities must never be more intelligent that their managers.

Minor edit

Just replace all mention of "cloud" with "clown" and you've got it about right.

(BTW, I don't claim originality for the idea; I think it was first proposed by BoingBoing)

His (her) Master's Voice

This is the movie and recording industry pulling the strings.

Treating torts as criminal cases is no better than having debtors' prisons.

Welcome to the Britain of Dickensian Dave

Is it even possible?

If, as we're led to believe, WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, how does the judge think anyone can decrypt it?

The judge better arrest every mathematician since Al-Quarismi.

(Note to the reader: the Brazilian Judiciary is probably best described as "not the cream of Harvard Law School".)

A better suggestion

Two alternative suggestions. The language has been self-censored:

1. Buy an island and lock Teresa May up there. (Elba?)

2. Spend £2G on the NHS

It took only two minutes to think these up. What are we paying our politicians for?

Just one question

I assume that "dark side of the Moon" means "the side that faces away from Earth", since no side of the Moon is permanently in the dark.

How are they going to communicate with it when it lands?

I asked my supplier how the data was encrypted...

and they said:

"We can't discuss that for security reasons"

Bodes well!

Well, that didn't take long

As any fool could have foreseen, the Chinese government have pinched a leaf out of the book of the fools who didn't foresee -- NSA, GCHQ, and Tragic Tess May -- and are happily quoting UK legislation.

Who pays for all this?

Leaving aside the merits (or, yes, otherwise, indeed) of Tragic Tess wanting to hoover up lots of IP addresses and other material to build her haystacks, who is going to pay for all the extra bits to collect and store it?

Three guesses.

"a right to privacy drowns out the right to life"

Where do they recruit these people?

Without privacy, who's got a life?

My doctor told me...

... not to worry too much about what I eat, as worrying could give me ulcers.

That's OK, then...

Nothing to see here, move on please...

Rant: Why so slow, and why such a rubbish UX?

I recently got myself a 65" SONY. The picture is lovely, and the sound is reasonable (I didn't buy all the add-ons for sound and stuff).

But why does it it have to be so slooow? Slow to turn on, slow to change function, slow do do almost anything.

Then there's the UI. ( warned you not to get me started...)

The "Return button" is too close to the Down arrow, so when you're picking photos to show your Gran, you're just as likely to back up to the parent folder.

The file navigator doesn't wrap round from right to left, nor left to right.

There's a nasty little "New Age" fingerpad as an alternative to the conventional remote control. Of course, as the display doesn't have a mouse pointer, it's completely useless.

So, maybe I chose the wrong brand. Or maybe they all give the UI design to the tea-lady.

Ahh, nostalgia for three-letter file extensions

Leaving aside the question of hypersensitivity to delusional sexism, why do they limit themselves to three-character file extensions?

FFS, it's 2015, not 1985! Who runs MSDOS any more? Why didn't they use ".brotli"?

Deeply disappointed

Yeah, deeply disappointed they were found out.

Who wrote the code?

I'm genuinely curious about the people who actually wrote the code

* Must be a small team, maybe one person and a reviewer.

* Must have known precisely what they were doing.

So, either:

* They didn't give a toss about ethics

* They were handsomely paid (off)

* They were too frightened to blow the whistle

Where are they?

It's easy ...

... just to fire the little guys.

All it needs

is to start enforcing the bit that says "under penalty of perjury".

At the risk of sounding frivolous ...

Don't let David Cameron (or his opposition equivalents, whoever they may be) know about this.

By analogy to cryptography: "cell division causes cancer, so we ought to prohibit it".

Seen it all before

Sourceforge is to Code as Geocities is to WebPresence.

Thank you for your attention.

What could possibly go wrong?

"When enabled/disabled by an administrator".

Isn't that (or something similar) what the UEFI lobby said? And now M$ is changing the emphasis there, so that you may not be able to turn of secure boot.

This thing is going to go the same way, as part of the War on General Purpose Computing and free software.

Abusing their market position in search?

Well, if and once they've managed to sort out Google, how about sorting out more important targets: NSA and GCHQ?

Every year, the same B*ll*x

Thank you so much for irritating me this Saturday.

Everyone with an IQ over 75 already knows this is the stupidest meme-that-doesn't-work ever invented; as to the remainder, can we try to convince our North American colleagues that 31st April would be a better date for this nonsense?

I'm very sorry, words fail me

It's about time we all told these peers where to place their charter.

As Cory Doctorow says, "Fuck Right Off", my Lord.

Another Illusion Shattered

Oh! I always thought that AOL was the Internets! You live and learn.

Minor point of law

It's "evading" taxes that makes you an "offender", not "avoiding".

What turns "tax evaders" into "tax avoiders" is inadequate legislation by incompetent, lazy, undecided, or corrupt legislators. Westminster etc please take note.

Yo, Prophet Mohammed...

... peace be upon you, you really ought to do something to improve the quality of these followers of yours. Shame on you for leaving your holy places in the hands of these loathsome people.

After all, we're only human

TL;DR:

"Well, we made a number of mistakes, but not making them couldn't have prevented anything. On the other hand, Facebook is a Terrist Communication Platform"

Yeah, sure.

I fear the Terrists...

A whole lot less than I fear gov.uk, the Servants who want to be Masters.

Internet bad in Cheltenham?

Must be because GCHQ is draining all the bandwidth.

Talking of 1-2-3

One of the funniest occasions of my whole IT career was when IBM launched a mainframe version of 1-2-3.

So you type something into a cell on your terminal, then you hit enter and *wait for the response* before you can type in the next cell.

What really astounded me was just how many (non-tech) IBMers just couldn't see that it was a non-starter.