Posts by Tom 13

Alar? Saccharin?

Answer: not very. Just need an enviro-weenie to lie about it and make an emotional film. Like say, Gasland.

And actually, now that I think about it, it may count as even better than perfect.

Because there were three different messages using the key. Only the first and second have been decoded. They indicated what they had and that the exact location for where they were hiding the stash was. The third one has never been decoded, hence an article in a C64 programming mag for something that would help you work with the document.

That would be the one guy affected by all this

who isn't phishing someone else - the guy who now has his credentials in the hands of 3 to 5 phishers. Although there is the distinct possibility he was trying to scam someone too.

Well, in my case

having once been said typesetter for just such a publication. We weren't attached to a university, but our stuff is used extensively The States as acceptable testing methods to meet certain government testing requirements.

No, the judge willfully misapplied the law.

The plaintiff filed not only for themselves, but applied for class action. In this instance the class was suitably well defined, and there was cause to believe that many or all of them would have been potentially harmed by the company's actions, particularly as they have KEYSTROKE loggers installed. While the original plaintiff's equipment was in the hands of the police, most if not all of the rest of the class certainly was not.

I expect if the hoodlums managed to run

up the copier bill by making a copy of every book in the library, they'd get a good bit more than 35 years, especially if they then sold the copies to other people.

Prices won't come down because most of what you've written is bollux.

I worked in the printing industry for a while. The lowest cost part of the publication is the printing of the book itself, assuming you don't have an idiot for a printer. The costs are in the distribution marketing, and payments to all the middlemen involved in producing the book. Granted it's been a while since I was at dear old State, but our textbooks were black and white, and just as outrageously priced. Started in Astro, so I spent as much if not more on books than the Lit types who had more numerous volumes. The reason given of course was the expense of the type fonts to set all those damned equations. Believable before the advent of computer typesetting, but not anymore. At the time I was spending about $450/semester for books, and that was more than 20 years ago.

If anything, the used book market would drive prices down, if profs weren't in cahoots with the publishers. War and Peace hasn't changed any since Tolstoy wrote it. Newtonian physics has changed less since he published his work, and all the translation for that has been done long since. Which means small changes don't necessitate changing the text for the course. So if the publisher puts out volume XIII, volumes X, XI, and XII should still be good. Oh, and if the publishers wrote good usable reference books, there wouldn't BE a secondary market because students would keep them for future reference. I still have my physics books and kept a fair number of the math ones as well.

As to the last, yes the authors are a major cost, but good books don't necessarily take a long time to write. They may take a long time to edit because most profs can't speak let alone write a simple sentence, but that can be worked around. Another problem might be illegible long-hand notes that some poor schmuck at the printing house has to decrypt into some semblance of English. (My astrophysics prof had a sheaf of hand-written notes that were run off at the local copy shop every year, completely indecipherable.) No the problem is most printing houses aren't interested in signing contracts with new authors because despite the economies of scale, academic books lose money.

I'll also note that I did a back of the envelop calculation when they quoted the 30 day rental figure and went, 'Ah, so that'll be at best 10% less than if they bought the book to get them through the 90 day semester, which is easily compensated by selling your books back.'

While I generally agree,

the fact remains that Adobe is obstinant about not using MS management tools even when they are provided.

And,

while particle physics may be arcane and a true lair of the boffin, the underlying equations are converging equations, not the divergent ones of chaos theory.

I've never had a problem with it corrupting the tables,

but the damn thing kept running all the time even when I was trying to use the PC and bolluxing up my ability to access files. After I yanked it things ran better.

Yes, it is an underpowered Lenovo and at the time it had Vista on it. But given those are the circumstances under which Diskeeper claim to improve performance....

Yes, when running a geographically diverse non-profit.

It worked well until we got a bunch of under 30s people who implemented a blog and irrevocably split apart the communications methodology. They didn't see the point of having something that actually downloaded things so you can read them offline. I couldn't arrange to be constantly online to read their messages. Also, their messages got dispersed in so many places I could never manage to check them all.

No, they don't.

Because only lawyers could come up with the absurdity that you can be compelled to provide a key, but not a combination. Common folk everywhere see that for the point of accessibility providing either is functionally equivalent. So if you can be compelled to provide one, you should be compelled to provide the other. And that the same thing applies to encryption as well. Now it might well be that the original decision to compel turning over the key was wrong, but if it is assumed to be right, then the others are just verbal jujitsu to make the law say what your prejudices want it to say, not what it actually says.

Correction:

The HYPOTHESIS of the way fossils occurs is...

because no one has experimentally created a fossil.

Probably because contrary to some posts here at El Reg,

unlike the US, the Chinese WILL engage in extreme rendition or targeted assassination if you hack their military.

No, XP is still faster.

I run a dual boot XP/Win7 system. XP is faster. Quad core 660, 8G of RAM. And it isn't that convoluted.

I expect their lawyers are calling the shots

and they've advised them that they would have unacceptable levels of liability if they continue to handle accounts for WikiLeaks.

That should have

been summarily rejected too. I keep wondering whether I should be asking how much the clerk was paid, or how someone that stupid slipped through the hiring process. And the $25 million payment to Lindows to change their name shows M$ [b] KNOWS [/b] they don't have a leg to stand on, because they buy lawyers the way newspapers buy ink.

While that is their claim,

when you start looking at the real variations in climate change data, they are well matched to the sorts of changes you see in solar radiative output. The claim is that a 1 or 2 degree C change is catastrophic for the earth. By referencing C instead of K, they subtly shift the emphasis to water freezing instead of absolute 0. Plus or minus 1 degree at 32 C sounds a hell of a lot worse than plus or minus 2 degrees at 305.

Even if not peer-reviewed,

the referenced article is better science than anything coming out of CRU. It meets the actual requirements of science: it is falsifiable (as opposed to an article of faith like the warminsts), the data are fully published, and anyone can review and replicate the experiment to confirm the results.

No need to worry about the police going lax.

Other hackers are already on the case. THEY won't quit so the police can't either. It's an embarrassing when the amateurs do better than the pros.

If Mozilla is giving Enterprise the big FU

it's not like there are a lot of other options. Business need:

1) Widespread adoption of a consistent platform

2) Stable predictable release cycles so planning and testing can be performed for updated software.

3) Transparent standards for coding the systems.

Mozilla provide 1 and 3, and until recently had 2. Granted there wasn't much business adoption, but now there will be none. MS have 1 and 2 down cold, and like it or not, as far as most businesses are concerned, they meet requirement 3 as well.

I think they should award $1 to Google,

and then make them pay each other's lawyers fees. With court oversight on payment of the lawyers fees of course.

Pre 2008 that would have been true,

this is post 2008. Although since it's Korea instead of China it's a 50-50 thing for Samsung.