Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Given this further evidence, "Senate Intelligence Committee" seems like a contradiction in terms.

Ah, Netscape Navigator

Still remember that, and Mosaic (which still supported gopher)

There were of course so few websites in the days of Mosaic that you could conceivably test your browser on all of them

Now I tend to use Firefox under Linux and Windows, and Chrome on Android. Works for me.

Re: Murdered?

The media language of propaganda these days is utterly ridiculous.

"Expedited removal" - People killed faster.

You could add:

"Revoked", you know, k-i-l-l-e-d: revoked

Alternatively "inhume" is popular with the guild, or "inhume with extreme prejudice" if you want to make a clear statement

Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett

Re: RAW?

There is also UFRAW:

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used it yet, but will probably do so shortly.

Re: Nerdium, Geekium, and uhhh...

Boffinium, perhaps?

Re: These detection methods don't scale.

Not only do these methods not necessarily scale, they need an ever increasing ground truth of identified code for training. This is not trivial to obtain. Besides, as more and more coders are added, you have to worry about the number of degrees of freedom in coding anything, i.e. are there enough different coding styles to distinguish the millions of coders on this planet. Besides, you have to deal with code developed by teams (which is the normal situation), which will either show a mixture of styles, or predominantly show the style of the loudest mouth in the team, with a small admixture of the other members. Similarly, what happens when a new coder refactors old stuff? I know I have seriously refactored a program written by some students to adapt it to new use cases. It is still not really like my

You could of course show that a certain style is consistent with a known sample of some hacker's work, but even then people might slowly change their coding style. Having had a look at some of my earlier efforts, I know I have changed style a great deal (thank goodness ;-)), if only by incorporating OO techniques

I do not for a moment doubt the ability of politicians of ALL parties to get things wrong, often deliberately because it suits their purposes. As stated in the Hitchhikers' Guide:

"It is a well-known and much-lamented fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it"

Re: not a handsome beast

Actually bigger than many if not most WW-II cruisers. The RN County class heavy cruisers weighed in at 10,000 tonnes, rather less than the 15,000 tonnes quoted here, which is heavier than many pre-dreadnought battleships. A very far cry from the 260 tonnes of the earliest torpedo-boat destroyers. Churchill apparently once said that by forever increasing the size of destroyers, we move them from the class of the hunters to that of the hunted. He may have had a point.

Re: Grand Chamber panel included the Russian Judge

Very enlightening. I do note however that this Russian judge carefully notes past experiences from the Soviet and Imperial eras as contributing to the suspicion that "political and economic figures, including human-rights activists, opposition activists and leaders, journalists, ...." are targeted. The current regime isn't mentioned. Very diplomatic