Posts by Number6 2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Imagine a world where lots of popular video was put up on the web using any of the supported codecs except H.264 before IE9 was released. That would sort of discourage people from using IE9 if suddenly the boot was on the other foot and the IE users were the only ones who couldn't access the content.
It took the US a long time to realise that the rest of the world was happily ignoring US rules and developing their own encryption technologies, and US companies were trading at a disadvantage because they weren't allowed to compete due to their rules. If there's a thriving video codec industry outside the US that ignores the US software patents (some of which might not even be valid) then the only companies to suffer will be the US ones, unable to develop and compete, and the people who suffer will be the residents of the US, who won't have access to it all.
It's been many years since I had a postal vote (in the days when you needed a good reason to have one) but surely the procedure should be to have two envelopes. Mark your ballot paper and put inside envelope #1 which has a serial number on it (which may or may not match the one on the ballot itself). Place envelope #1 inside envelope #2, seal it and fill in your identifying details on the back. Put in the post.
At the receiving end, the up-front work consists of checking the details on each envelope #2 and if OK, remove envelope #1, make sure its serial number is correct and the envelope is sealed and place it unopened in a secure ballot box. On the night, open the box in the counting hall and remove the ballots from the envelopes, having first noticed that they are still sealed and include them in the count.
Perfectly secure, no chance of a leak provided the procedures are followed. No easy way of identifying individual votes either, apart from the mechanism built in with the ballot serial numbers that is common to all of them.
If you've got an ARM licence then I'm sure there's something in there that restricts ARM's right to revoke that licence without plenty of warning, and probably ties up the cost fairly well. An Apple takeover wouldn't immediately have effect because existing chips being produced by all the licensees should continue. What might change is the availability of new stuff, or its cost, so there would be a gradual migration away from the platform.
Admittedly I did it from inside a corporate firewall, but I accidentally printed something to my default UK printer when in the US office. However, I didn't need to contact the helpdesk to work out why it didn't print, I just quietly kicked myself and sent another copy to a better-sited printer.
You can't fly over it, and the dense lower atmosphere would make it difficult and slow to fly under it, assuming you know its lower bound. More birds lower down as well, increasing other types of hazard. You can't see it on radar, so you wouldn't know for certain where it is.
The cloud is drifting down towards Europe, so the safe zone is shifting all the time.
On the bright side, if we can get enough volcanic dust into the atmosphere, it'll cool the Earth a bit and make all the global warming fanatics re-fudge their calculations.
If they don't resist the call then at some point, every website will be required to have a panic button on it, just in case.
It's not the government's responsibility, nor a private agency, but the parents'. Teach your children about the dangers of the internet, how to use it responsibly and encourage them to talk to you about how they use it.
And putting a panic button on webpages is Something. The fact that it's generally useless is beside the point, along with a lot of stuff, some of which has made its way into legislation.
Proper education of children by their parents would go a long way to catching this sort of thing - make the children aware of the dangers and listen sympathetically and helpfully without being over-prescriptive if they come back with questions or problems. It's about time we ditched the assumption that the state will come to our rescue every time, because such reliance just makes things worse over time and erodes freedom. Take responsibility for your own life and for raising your children properly.
If you want another example, try the Badman Review of Elective Home Education. The statistics in that are somewhat dodgy, were pulled apart by angry home educators and even the Commons Select Committee considered them unreliable. Then the government produced the legislation before the report on the consultation that was supposed to guide the process (report turned up just before second reading so no one had a chance to look at it properly), managed to confuse a figure of 95% of responses against the proposals with a majority in favour and only the impending election has saved us from it becoming law.
Definitely policy-based evidence-making.
I always did used to run my washing machine overnight when I was single - I deliberately bought a clockwork machine (that is still working 15 years later) and a timeswitch so that it came on at about 3am. However, with a family, the degree of organisation required to achieve that is too great and often would require being up in the wee hours to put in a second load.
It'll cost you for a bit of kit, but it can be done. Set up a small PBX running Asterisk (which will run on all manner of small, cheap NAS boxes with a USB stick for storage) and connect it to something like an SPA3102 or other ATA with a line and phone port. Then you can receive the CLI from an incoming call and if you don't like it, you can get the PBX to drop the call, play it a message, put it through to your asnwerphone, etc.
He was presumably chosen because he was the best tissue match to the donor. That's usually how such things are decided, give it to the person who stands the least chance of rejecting it. There might have been some element of "if you can get here quick enough", which would apply more in a country the size of the US compared the the UK.
Having such a button on every single page is pretty typical of this government's attitude. The nanny state knows everything and is always right. Overkill, lack of common sense, etc.
It's a bit like walking around almost anywhere in California where there are wonderful signs on pretty much every public building warning that the building contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer. After a while you just tune them out as irrelevant, and the same goes for most of the goverment's initiatives. We all laugh or are horrified at some the stupid health and safety regs, which means that the ones we really should take seriously get lost in the noise.
So, to Facebook I say: Just Say NO.
It was a games console that finally encouraged my son to learn to read. He kept asking me to read the text on the screen and after I got bored of it, I'd tell him I'd come and do it when I finished what I was doing at the time, thus putting delays into his games. At some point he decided to learn to read it for himself and has easily caught up with his age group, having not really bothered until he was almost seven.
I'd like Facebook to add an option that allows me by default to see no third-party applications. At the moment I have to individually hide/block each one that appears in my feed, so a global tick-box to opt out of seeing any of them would be useful. I'm sure I'm not alone in that wish, either.
There ought to be a clause added to the sale conditions of these domains that requires onward sale to be at a price no greater than that paid by the purchaser, with automatic reversion back to Nominet if they try. That would stop the inevitable speculators who will be bidding to acquire as many as they can and then offer them on at inflated prices.
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