Posts by Number6 2296 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I can see them holding onto the information for 14 days, because that's the time limit for sending a NIP to the driver. After that it's too late.
Even so, as others have mentioned, it doesn't really do anything but note the existence on the roads of a vehicle with a particular plate, and with the prevalence of cloning of plates, they don't necessarily have proof it was the real one anyway.
The way to address the scaling of servers, assuming each phone has a fixed IPV6 address, is for the phone to register once with a server and exchange keys. Then if the server has traffic it can fire off a ping with its ID and something encrypted with the key to a defined common port on the phone. The phone then looks at the packet, checks its validity and notifies whichever application(s) on the phone have registered to receive notifications from the server, at which point they can connect and you've achieved the same as polling. The overhead of authentication each time is probably less than the overhead of all those polling packets flying back and forth. There is nothing to stop multiple registrations to multiple servers which can all send their packets to the common port. Telcos can continue blocking inbound stuff to mobiles provided they let through packets (in a standard format) to that one port.
There we are, unless someone has patented it already, it's in the public domain so go use it.
is "Bollocks". I've already started using Facebook with a different browser so that it is isolated from everything else I browse. No sending of cookies to Facebook because I'm reading some other site, they can live in a walled garden.
Meanwhile, we're all jumping up and down over here about the crazy idea, what are the government up to over in the shadow in the corner?
All he needs to do is release it with a licence that prohibits use where it's illegal, such as the US, if MS object.
They'll probably turn a blind eye to it because as far as I know, to use Skype to call out, you have to give them money, and I doubt if that can be bypassed. If they've just relieved themselves of the need to maintain the Linux version they'll be happy, and can continue with the Windows development with a few crumbs to the Mac crowd.
So you share an email account with your friend and use it to register with the on-line service. You set it up, choose a password and enjoy your subscription. Meanwhile, if your friend wants to watch something, he goes to the site, runs through the 'forgot my password' routine, picks up the reset password from the common email account and downloads his fix. When you're next on, you find that your old password didn't work and you in turn go through the 'forgot my password' routine. At no time have either of you shared a password.
Of course, they probably monitor for customers who reset their passwords a lot so perhaps it already won't work for very long. Or the wording of the Bill is good enough already to catch it.
Perhaps it's exactly the sort of thing that is needed, because the level of complaints from those with substandard broadband will get louder and louder and may encourage a decent upgrade. I wish BT would do FTTC in my village. While our existing ADSL wet string isn't as long as some, it's still a bit too long for comfort.
Have you ever driven a Lada? I have, and while it's nothing special, it was a fairly solid performer. It was cheap too, only £300. I towed a trailer with it and it was very smooth and comfortable. It was eventually left in a rusting heap in the car park of the local garage, having been part-exchanged for something newer (and more expensive).
It doesn't help that for many years, UK innovators have had to look abroad for VC funding because there isn't much of it available in the UK. This inevitably pushes the technology overseas, to the point where American VCs are happy for development to take place in the UK but consider that Silicon Valley is the place for product design so there's inevitable transfer of knowledge, and in some cases people, and the perception that it was produced in the Bay Area.
Pipers, tunes and all that.
Yes, being taken over by an American Corporate. At the time we reckoned no more than five years and sure enough, they closed us down just under five years after the takeover. The last couple of years were pretty dire, too.
A friend is currently about two years into a similar cycle and his decription matches my experience.
A long time ago, when I was young and naive, I used to think that a single joined-up system would be really good and useful. Over the years I've grown less naive, and the previous government demonstrated really well just how such a joined-up system can, and will be, abused.
So now I'm quite happy to have multiple sign-ons and accept that slight increase in cost and complexity and the need to duplicate data entry is a small price to pay for freedom.
If they want to make it simpler, provide an option to all the forms where users can upload a plain text file in standard format that auto-completes the form fields. If government departments can standardise on a minimum subset of data then it should be quite easy to generate the text file once.
Provided the little guys all talk and share information, filing a million individual cases is going to take up a lot of Big Corporation time, especially if the "you're the only one with the problem" brush-off doesn't work.
Just refuse to sign any sort of non-disclosure agreement unless you get adequate payment for it.
The other fun thing to try is to cross out the bits of their standard contract you don't like, but be prepared to either not get service or back down when they refuse to accept your version.
If these are software patents then surely the answer is for the rest of the world that doesn't recognise software patents to fork from whatever is in the US and carry on developing, just make sure you don't authorise any code release back to the US.
Think of what happened with PGP - the rest of the world carried on, unencumbered by US restrictions, to the point where the US was suffering.
Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, not stifle it. If they're holding things back then they've outlived their usefulness in their current form.
You're obviously missing some fundamental points here.
1. Powerline stuff uses a broadband signal and so covers a very wide range of frequencies from very low to VHF.
2. A signal that has travelled across half the world may well have little residual energy at its destination and will be easily swamped by a local signal. Think nanowatts and picowatts.
3. If I set up some equipment and knocked out your TV and radio reception then presumably that wouldn't matter either because there's only one of you.
4. Standards are there for a reason, in order that a multitude of different systems can coexist.
5. Ofcom appears to be volunteering to be abolished, seeing as it's useless at one of its primary functions.
Try Air France 358 back in 2005. Off the end of the runway at Toronto in a storm, fire broke out and all 309 people got out.
Or the Hudson River Cruise, where they all got out.
Or BA038 gliding over the fence at Heathrow.
Obviously if you pile in at 500mph then the escape drill is not much use, but there's a whole range of other reasons for an aircraft to come to rest in an abnormal fashion where knowing what to do may save your life.
Perhaps all registrars should contribute to an independent agency who have the job of sending letters to domain holders, requesting them to enter an auth code on a website by a certain date. If you respond then you're in the clear, the address has been verified as getting to a real person, if not, they can try again using a more robust delivery method (in case the first one got lost). eventually send email to the contact addresses listed (often they're fake too) with a final demand for a valid postal address and if that bounces or is ignored, suspend the domain.
It would need fine tuning to make it robust, especially in some parts of the world, but it shouldn't be too hard. Having a formal check of contact emai addresses would be good as well, I bet a lot will bounce, and the only way to get a valid one is to suspend the domain and wait for someone to complain. A great shame the Ts and Cs didn't forsee this one and allow it.
I'm not sure that many common home routers will cope with 100Mb/s throughput, so the value is limited to those prepared to spend even more on something decent, or stick to a single PC.
So far 10Mb/s has been adequate here, although it would be nice to have uploads at the same rate (they did increase that recently, to give them some credit).
The properly-equipped van, or at least the technology to go in it does exist. I'm less sure about the TV detector vans, but electronic eavesdropping on spurious signals is a well-established field. No doubt it has gotten more difficult with improvements in electronics and emissions standards for all electronics on the market, but I don't doubt it can still be done to a degree.
The advantage of corporate marketing on Twitter is that it is the ultimate opt-in. If I happen to be interested in something I can either follow the feed or occasionally go read the stream. If I don't do either of those then I'm generally untroubled by it all. No pop-up ads, annoying flashy banners on websites (although I filter those anyway) or any of the other intrusive and objectionable methods in current use.
The original purpose of patents was to advance things by giving inventors an incentive to invent and publish. All too often now, the purpose of a patent is to prevent innovation, by threatening all sorts of legal action by large companies with armies of lawyers against small inventors. The large companies keep in trim by having occasional patent spats with other large companies that benefit no one but the lawyers involved.
The net result is that the large companies attempt to patent as many trivial things as possible so that they've got a whole load of patents they can use in a counter-suit.
Perhaps Obama could arrange that the USPTO is liable to pay costs to challengers if a granted patent is subsequently overturned, which might give them some incentive to make sure they're worthy of being patents in the first place.
The travel may be true within the Schengen area, but the UK is outside that so you'd need your passport to get to France but once there, you should be able to travel more freely. However, I know someone who went from Germany to Holland and got stranded because the Germans wouldn't let her back in without her passport.
Simple IR night vision is trivial, just dismantle a webcam, pick apart the lens assembly and swap out the filter that blocks IR for one that blocks everything but IR. Then you can play games using your TV remote as a torch.
Proper thermal images are much more fun and much more expensive. A previous employer bought one (they're useful for finding hotspots in electronics) and had to sign all sorts of bits of paper because it was classified as a weapon under US export regs.
Pretty much any organisation that receives significant government money. They should be required to account for how they spend it if asked, and if the sole purpose of an organisation is to do government work then it should be fully covered.
If you don't want the details of your contracts with the government (who are our representatives even if they act more like our masters) to be made public then don't bid for them.
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