Posts by Intractable Potsherd

Re: Adam 52 - Linux not easily fit for purpose

I moved to Linux Mint around eight months ago, but will soon be changing back to Win 7 because there are so many problems that take so much time to find answers to (or not, in some situations):

1) I have been unable to connect my laptop to my employer's wifi (Eduroam), because Mint will not accept the security certificate, claiming that I do not own the appropriate folder, even when logged in as an administrator. The University's Linux guru has been unable to sort out the problem, and so have several, usually reliable, online sources. I have now given up

2) WINE works when it feels like it - not particularly helpful when ...

3) ... Libre Office reformats everything that was previously made in MS Office, and then MS Office reformats everything again - not useful when trying to do a presentation to a lecture theatre full of students. I do not care whether the problem is with Libre Office or MS Office - it is completely unacceptable, and, since my employer uses MS, it *has* to be compatible with that.

4) Oh, and don't suggest VM - VirtualBox is as bad as WINE for deciding not to work.

5) Oh, and installing software is a bigger job than it needs to be - okay, perhaps Windows is too easy, but the Linux route is a pisser. I really don't have the time to mess about finding the nearest thing to do something easy in Windows (let's say, rotating a video 180 degrees), find out there is nothing that actually does the job, try the four possible solutions, find out none of those actually work, then try some command-line technique that may (or not) work, but which takes an entire evening.

I have sympathy with Munich - if you are trying to accomplish something that makes you look professional within a reasonable time, Windows is the way to go.

Re: on that (lack of) accuracy claim:

"It turns out the imperials where just having fun hunting desert rats ..."

Shouldn't that be Womp rat?

Re: Errrm @Charles 9

"Nice guys finish last." That is the most depressing, and the most wrong statement ever made, and it is only ever used by psychopaths excusing their world-view. It is time the nice guys got together and made sure that the bad guys never, ever, get a chance to screw the world up again with their selfishness and hatred of standards of behaviour that most people accept as decent. There is much more to success than money and screwing everyone else over.

Re: Lots of people...

Why would it stop? There is no mandatory requirement for a police officer to arrest in any situation you describe.

'Paul Ehrlich was correct when he said in a speech in 1969: “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”'

It is unfair to criticise Ehrlich for being a few years out. Brexit will achieve his forecast by 2050 at the latest.

Re: Parliamentary sovereignty

According to classic Diceyan constitutional theory, in the UK, Parliament (the legislature) is sovereign, and is bound by no one, not even itself. The government (the executive) puts the will of Parliament into effect. This includes the Crown, except for certain areas of prerogative held over from when the term meant what it said. There has been a withdrawal from the classical theory that has been accelerating since Thatcher's clusterfuck of a government, which May seems to be using as an early prototype for her regime, in which Parliament is a hindrance to the will of the executive. (Note:I'm not absolving Blair, who simply followed the Thatcher playroom to the letter. ) Who would have thought I'd miss Cameron?

Re: But..

Why in the name of $deity do manufacturers thing that we need beeps to tell us that a wash is finished? Recent changes to our life-style meant that we wanted to do more washing at night, but the ridiculous racket the washing machine made at the end of a cycle meant that was not really feasible. Fortunately, there is a way to switch the beeps off (Bosch Classixx), but it is far from easy (pressing odd buttons in exactly the right way within a very short time limit - several attempts were needed). It is as if the manufacturer doesn't want anyone to switch off the noises - again, why??

Re: Still no pity

You are wrong in so many ways.

Re: I suppose...

No - they don't *have* to. Making the same profit as last year isn't a right or a duty.

Re: Alternatives

I think there *is* something about the risk of being blown up that is attractive to some /many young people. Life in the UK (and possibly other countries) is very safe and ordered, with few ways to prove oneself against extremes (let us say "show courage" as a shorthand term). There are no rites of passage, nothing that shows progression from childhood to adulthood - and the concept of "adult" is fairly dull too - the best many can hope for is meaningless work, little chance of their own home with the consequent effect on family choices etc. Even the military is increasingly safe in terms of Health amdand Safety, yet less safe as a career, and heroism is undervalued.

Running off to war has been a way young people have tried to find meaning for centuries (I see the current crop of ISIS candidates as being no different from the British who went to the Spanish Civil War, or the Americans that joined the Second World War before their government did). It is this underlying lack of meaning in modern Western culturethat needs to be addressed if any significant change is to be achieved.

Re: Propaganda by CEO's

"... do you want to be press-ganged into field work to save Britain's food supply?"

I am fairly certain that none of the Brexiters thought this through, especially the unemployed ones who thought that getting out of the EU would provide jobs for them. None of them thought that, in order to meet significant shortfalls, the requirements for what would count as reasonable requirements for getting a job might have to be relaxed almost to press-gang levels ("What do you mean, vegetable picking in Fife is too far away? - you only live in Newcastle! Take it or lose your benefits.") Those shitty jobs are not going to go away, and people are still going to have to do them. The pool of unemployed seem to be an obvious place to go, politically (lower benefits bills), though practically, who would want them? (People who don't want to do a job are going to be difficult to motivate - one of the advantages of any sane immigration system is that people willing to move to countries and cultures other than the one they were brought up in are likely to be motivated to do the job - that's why Poles, Czechs etc are such popular employees.)

TL:DR - people might not have thought this through.

Re: This Yank says

No, but it is long past time we did.

Re: Brexit means Brexit

"On the other hand, the UK is the second largest economy in the EU" - but how much of this is because it *is* in the EU? As the AC below your comment pointed out, the UK is already down to third place.

Re: Thankfully...

"The BBC do not produce anything worth watching anyway," - yes, they do: University Challenge. I can't think of anything else, though.

Re: Idiot rant

"500,000 and 0.03% have fuck all to do with it."

Statistically insignificant figures really *do* have a lot to do with it. yes, the figure for ISIS members is higher than the figure for ADF members, but neither figure means anything because they are both outliers. Trying to base any sort of practical argument on them is only just short of lunacy.

Re: Look to elsewhere (e.g. China and India) PLEASE! @codejunky

I really don't recognise the world you live in. Are you from an alternative dimension?

Re: Nothing new here

Do you have evidence for that statement? Are you just another AC troll?

Re: From the 27

I know very few who admit to voting leave. The only one I do know of - my mother - did it exactly because she doesn't like the "groups of foreigners" who are on the street when she goes shopping. Apparently, the groups of Pakistani and Bangladeshi people immediately before this, or the groups of English people before that, were no problem ... At no point have the finer points of democracy been mentioned - just the foreigners (I also suspect she hopes that my Czech wife will be escorted to the nearest airport).

This just goes to show that your simple "I know a lot of leavers and ... none of them are racists" is, just the same as mine, an anecdote with no value.

Re: Bored plod and freedom of speech @Olius

" ... where crimes have a victim, the victim must press charges"

Not in the UK. Once a crime is reported, what happens after that point is entirely out of the hands of the person who reported it . Even if the person reporting it later decides that they do not want to proceed, the police and CPS can carry on anyway. Only in situations where the person reporting the crime is the main witness, and therefore refuse to give evidence, do they have any ability to stop the proceedings.

Re: January 1st?

Or, another variation - has anyone ever worked out what HR does?

Re: So he

"Else his insurance company would have scanned copies of his DVLA entitlements"

Why would they? I have never sent my insurance company any of my driving licence details.

Re: bored, nothing else to do but troll ...

@ Trevor - I thought something along the same lines, only more in terms of autonomous cars being likely to actually stop following the accident. rather than to keep driving ...

Re: Some kids will find a work-around.

Thanks for the reminder, jake - I had completely forgotten about those! Great tools once you'd learned to work them (which I only sort-of did).

Re: Police Body Cameras Seemingly Cause More Assaults on Officers

From the article itself:

"The final possibility that Ariel offers is, however, the one I’d put my money on. He says that the increased frequency of on-officer assaults might be a natural corollary of the decrease in the use of force by officers. With no camera recording the goings-on, officers may be more inclined to use force when they themselves are assaulted. When the cameras are watching them, however, they suppress their normal tendency to provide a “tit-for-tat” response and simply report the incident. Turn the other cheek, but write it up, you might say."

Re: Ahh @David Webb

"... women working in IT are given a much harder time by their male counterparts, who believe if they have got ahead of them then they have done it because they have tits ..."

Actually, there is some evidence to show that this attitude on the part of men is justified, depending on where in the world you live. There is a great deal of pressure to meet quotas for non-white, non-male, disabled employees, and so there is positive discrimination going on. Women are getting jobs/promotions in these environments, but not just because of their skills. This means that any woman* who gets a good job ends up being tarred with the same positive discrimination brush, and this leads to them having to work harder to justify their positions. In short, the problem is the stupid laws and guidelines which mean that there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in that job for reasons other than ability (trust me, I've seen it happen in universities, where being a male was positively bad when it came to getting a professor's post - from virtually no women profs to nearly 30% in two years, with many of the appointees having nowhere near enough experience to justify it).

On the other hand, look at the professions - law and medicine will soon be approaching parity in women:men entering the work-place. I teach both, and in most years there are more women students than men. There has been no positive discrimination - it happened organically, and (with the exception of nutters who want 50% women judges overnight) there has been little fuss about it.

* or member of any minority group thus blessed with the equality stick

Re: Be safe online AND on the phone

"I have to tell my aging parents this all the time. No caller ID? No answer."

My ageing mum won't pay for caller ID. I regularly get her telling me how often she has answered the phone to some marketer - grrrrrr!

Re: downwind

@ Uffish. The difference is that no-one is trying to legislate against farting. The point that Stephen Raith was making is that there is a very public campaign against vaping - which you think is an annoyance - that is using legislation to further its aims. This is wrong - using law to curb an annoyance to some people is dangerous ground.

Re: "into a personal relationship with the third party/group member."

True. The correct policy, which would have satisfied the law, would have been "It is not acceptable for any member of the council to create a false social media profiles for the purpose of their employment. Anyone found to have done so will be dismissed, and appropriate legal investigations begun. Anyone who knew about it and failed to report it will also be dismissed, and legal options considered." It could also put in a statement about use of information found through social contacts of any type outside of work, too.

The fact that the council didn't do this undermines their argument that they would never do it.

Re: Simple solution @ Hollerithevo

... and all achieved with no need for prohibition! The same would work for drugs.

Re: Vengeful Bureaucrat? @Wzrd1

The problem with your approach is that it requires someone who a) may not care, or b) put the vulnerabilities in for their own purposes to give permission for you to look. In some cases - and electronic voting systems is one - it is in the public interest to see i) if they are insecure and ii) what sort of damage could be done by a black hat. Indeed, it would also be in the public interest to do this without informing the people responsible for the site, in case they covered up holes that might already have been exploited. We are living in a world where computer breaches are all too common, and the people responsible (the data custodians) are none too willing to inform people about them. What this guy did seems reasonable to me - get in, scope what damage could be done, then get out and contact the site owner before going public. No need for law-enforcement, just a "thank you for being responsible".

Re: The good times are over

I do sort of agree with A Ghost. There is nothing new coming out of the Western nations because they are decadent and dying. Short of a war, or some other catastrophe, or a great upswelling of hope (fat chance) there isn't the will to produce anything new. New music will come from other cultures - ones that are suffering, or ones that are optimistic about the world. I'm increasingly looking back to albums and artist I missed from the 60s and 70s, where all sorts of new things were happening, and you can hear the joy of creating sounds that hadn't been heard before.

Re: Surgeons *will* fight this tooth and nail to the bitter end.

This is just a small part of what surgical robots can do. Eventually, they will be put together (and I don't see that being all that far away - say 50 years for a fully-functioning tin surgeon). I teach medical students in one of my roles at the moment, and I tell them that is is the "soft" skills (those involving human interaction) that are going to be marketable by the end of their careers, not their physical skills. Many of them are already aware of it - the ones wanting to be orthopaedic surgeons look worried though :-)

Re: Annapolis police never found the thief

I'm not particularly surprised they didn't catch him: this isn't a crime that the thief would get on the phone to say "Hey, guess what I've just scored - wanna party?"

Re: I worked with your old man at Leeds

That's sad to hear, Alistair. My commiserations. Dementia is a terrible thing that leaves the body and takes the soul.* The sooner a cure is found, the better.

*I don't mean this in a religious sense - just that everything that made the person who they were is erased. No memories of the past mean that the personality changes. Foul disease.

Re: Dynamics

"There are critical roles where privacy has to be peremptorily renounced."

Let's accept that premise for now; the conditions for those "roles" (I think you meant "situations") should be clearly laid down for all to see, with a list of who can do the renouncing, under what conditions, for how long, and detailing what penalties will be applied by whom for misuse. We are a looooong way from that being the case.

I do not agree that there are situations where the privacy of *everyone* is peremptorily renounced just in case it will be useful in the future - yet that is where we are.

Re: As Robin Williams said @ Dropbear

I like that idea! Which of El Reg's finest will be te first to market?

Re: "Jeffress is not allowed to appeal the decision" @ Graham

... yet.

Re: Stable Doors @Edward Phillips

It is not in the public interest fro law enforcement to act outside the law.

Interestingly*, in the UK there might be a way for this to happen, because we do not have the doctrine of "fruit of the poisoned tree" - it is up to the individual judge to decide whether illegally gathered evidence can be submitted at trial. Also, the last bunch of tossers in government got rid of the rule against double jeopardy, so people accused of things like this but found not guilty can never be sure that they won't get a knock on the door in the future to be arrested for the same crime - though the evidence so far is that juries don't like this and tend to acquit again if it comes to court.

*This should be pronounced as "wrongly".

Re: Give it...

Well, England, maybe.

Re: Here's the test case.

This is a genuinely interesting point! I think I'll set some of my students loose on it and see what they come up with ...

Re: Therein lies ruin @simmondp

So, to paraphrase your comment - the most agile companies are those that don't give a toss about the security of their own, or their customers', data because everyone working there wants the latest shiny.

Nice one, Sir! Have a downvote.

@ Silly name

Way to miss the point! Let me guess - you work for Congress, don't you?

You are putting forward a variation on the multiply discredited "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument, which if nothing else, shows you really don't have a clue. The issue here is that the "forces of law and order" are indistinguishable from the criminals at the moment, and that, short of trusting those fine people in government, the Bill is mathematically impossible.

Now, why don't you crawl back under your rock and keep working on your proof that Jesus could have ridden a dinosaur ...