Posts by Peter2 2945 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?
Yes. However, that assumes that every one of them is going to be standing upright, with zero movement and zero space to move.
It assumes that those ~7 billion people would need to eat or drink etc. So yes, theoretically it's possible. Practically, not so much.
But isn't it said that "offense is the best defense"?
Yes, but people misunderstand this as with many other sayings.
The reason for this saying is that when somebody is attacking, the other side tends to defend. It's basic psychology that you can see taking place in any strategy game. When defending, any plans for an offensive tend to go out of the window. Prolonged series of even token an ineffective harassment level attacks tends to put the other side in a siege mentality where they just respond to the actions of the attacker and fail to even consider attacking themselves despite having considerably more mobile firepower.
So by forcing them into a defensive posture you prevent them from attacking you. Hence, attack is the best form of defense. Unless it isn't, in which case defense is the best form of defense.
Spacenews says "The problem with the Space Launch System is that it is a fully expendable rocket that could cost between $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion to launch. NASA is struggling to make the SLS more affordable to operate"
https://spacenews.com/europa-or-enceladus-if-nasa-switches-from-sls-to-falcon-heavy-it-wont-have-to-choose/
Where did you get the half billion cost per launch from?
Meanwhile, SpaceX is quoting costs of $62 million for the Falcon 9 Full Thrust and $90 million for the Falcon Heavy, both of which have actually flown. The ESA has a target price of 90 million euros for the upcoming Ariane 6. Meanwhile, the SLS remains expensive vapourware and by the time they actually finish it, SpaceX may well be ready with their BFR.
Personally, I would be quite surprised if the SLS project ever actually gets used at the cost/performance it has.
If you like Pale Moon I have another web browser you might like, it is called Internet Explorer 6.
Look mate, most of us were moving people off of IE6 to Firefox in the second browser wars. In the early days, the biggest selling point of Firefox was that you could have it setup the way you wanted it.
All of the people who have fled Firefox will have done so because after 14+ years using the classic UI plus their modifications they know every nook and cranny of the UI and can do what they want to do quickly and efficiently, and frankly can't be assed to relearn how to use their own web browser because somebody thinks they should.
If Firefox wanted to retain or regain it's userbase then it's pretty easy to do. When you make massive changes to the UI just include another theme called "classic" that people can apply if they don't like your changes, and problem perpetually solved. Acting like a spoiled teenager and insulting the people leaving because they don't like the way the product changes tends to convince those people to remain in opposition rather than switch back. It's counterproductive as well as being childish.
I went for Waterfox. It can do all three kinds of Firefox extensions and it's based on Firefox 56 + a few minor UI changes which came later (sidebar, some preferences) + security updates. I figure it can't be worse than ESR 52.9.0 and if the project dies I'll look for another one.
Yeah, I did look at Waterfox. It's a good alternative if you liked that UI, however personally I was quite happy with the original Firefox user interface that i've been using since FF1 and went with Pale Moon on the basis that it's the default. Either work though, i'm just glad we have the option to do this these days!
I guess they're trying to hang on to users. Firefox Quantium seems to have made some monthly active users move somewhere else. There was a summer slump that never went back up. Odd that...
I'm one of those users. I was involuntarily upgraded to the new Quantum browser from the ESR release of Firefox. The new browser had loads of UI changes somebody probably thought would be a good idea to shove down my throat without a choice or method of reversion, while also deciding that I wouldn't actually want any of the extensions i'd got installed.
I had a quick look around and discovered that nobody had produced an extension to restore the UI of the browser back to how it looked previously. Having had my browser changed with the elimination of my preferences yet again with no way of actually restoring it this time, I decided that after ~14 years it was time to switch browsers since Mozilla has evidently been taking instruction from Microsoft as to how to forcefully cram increasingly broken bloatware down the throats of the users and ignore the feedback (ie. screams of protest)
Deciding that I probably wouldn't be the only person this unhappy with the status quo led me to check for forks of Firefox that keep up with security updates but don't leave me without a working web browser every 6 weeks. After trying a few alternatives I decided I quite like Pale Moon, and have been using it since without any regrets since.
The developers for it port the security updates to their codebase, but leave everything else alone. I'm quite happy with this as are family, friends and it has the benefit of not needing to do such major QA for updates as Firefox did at work. Better all round.
The maneuver is very little like the shuttles RTLS abort. In that, they stop boosting up to orbit at a random and unplanned point and jettison the rocket boosters and fuel tank, then turn the shuttle into a glider and then loop around and land on a runway.
The SpaceX rockets were designed to land afterwards, and even then you'll note that the first quite a few attempts didn't exactly go according to plan and required several design changes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9FzWPObsWA
So, um, you reckon they did all that firmware hijacking via a single flip-flop...? Because double or single digit nanometer scale is what individual features of a single transistor are at, not any fucking chip of any fucking level of complexity.
If we are being paranoid enough to check this stuff, wouldn't we be paranoid enough to check that what is in the chips matches what we expect to be in chips?
Given the report, there will be an army of BOFH's ripping out MB's and minutely inspecting them
As one of those BOFH's, i'm going to comment that there is no earthly point doing that for >99.9% of BOFH's. To make it worthwhile, you'd need:-
1) The original plans sent to the fab.
2) the ability to check the motherboard for objects that shouldn't be there that are on the nanometer scale.
In addition, after you've found something that you think might not be there then you'd need:-
3) the ability to figure out what the hell things are down to a scale of ~50nm. Xray scanners are not particularly common, and most of those aren't going to resolve down to the level where you can recognise components inside a chip, let alone allow you to identify them and spot things that have been added to the original design.
4) the ability to pull the embedded code off microchips to figure out what they are doing is as per the design.
Yeah, um. Next to nobody has #1, and I suspect the number of teams with the ability to pull off 2 is very, very limited. 3 & 4, um. I'm thinking "count them on your fingers".
For which punixhment at the first offence is normally a slap on the write and "don't do it again".
Yes, if somebody hasn't turned up, the court sends plod to collect them and drag them in, at which point they pull an apology such as saying they overslept, forgot the court date etc and beg the courts forgiveness at which point the court shrugs and says "don't do it again".
In this particular case, the person involved deliberately put himself beyond the reach of the law and put two fingers up at the court. He's likely to get everything the court can throw at him, which is a maximum sentence of 6 months imprisonment of which he might actually serve 3 months before getting released for good behavior and being deported.
Technically, having a jamming device is illegal in Britain. However by custom an embassy is considered to be the foreign soil of the country, which is why the twerp hasn't been arrested for skipping bail despite being present in the mainland UK.
You can't just jam "inside" the embassy easily as radio waves typically go through walls unless you've redecorated with a layer of tinfoil behind your new wallpaper. That'd make an "effective enough" faraday cage which would screw with a laptop or phone enough without actually inconveniencing people inside the embassy too much by stopping the use of wireless totally.
Mind you, if the pret is a fair distance away a low strength signal probably could jam that to the point of being unusable without causing too many problems for other people.
Which also makes me wonder how large an effect Buncefield, Pepcon or Enschede would have had, compared to the average bombing raid
A Lancaster could drop a total of 14,000 pounds, although in practice when bombing cities they tended to be mostly one big (4000lbs) bomb to blow the roofs off and then 10,000 pounds of incendiaries. There were quite a few thousand bomber raids, to a lazy calculation of every aircraft being a lancaster would give you 14000000 pounds, which is ~6.3 kilotons. Pepcon was about 1 kiloton.
But this is very large numbers of smallish explosions compared to one bigish one. I suspect the propagation on the blast waves of a bigger explosion has more of an effect.
It shouldn't have the same level of effect.
With an explosion, you set the entire lot off at once, and there is a huge bang and a shockwave. Individually, the largest weapons dropped apparently caused damage to the aircraft dropping these weapons, which would have been >25,000 feet above the point of detonation. Lest it be forgotten, that these were being dropped as part of air raids numbering in excess of a thousand bombers, so Christ only knows how many bombs were being dropped at a time.
With rockets, first there is only a single rocket being fired at a time, and not a thousand bombers dropping their payloads. Secondly, it's being lit one end and burned relatively slowly compared to the entire lot exploding in a millisecond so you don't get a shockwave.
Unfortunately for this guy and the way the American legal system works, I suspect Apple will just continue to drag out the lawsuit until he can't afford to fight it anymore.
That only works if the other side is paying a lawyer and will run out of cash to pay the lawyer with eventually. He's representing himself, so it shouldn't happen.
Now see, I don't understand this.
I simply couldn't tolerate an "unknown" box on my network. You simply have to know. If it's totally unknown, then how can you have a BCM plan to keep it going, and DR plan to recover it? What effect does failure have on the business? Prayer should not be a service management tool for a professional.
The first thing I do when walking into a new job is go prying into everything in huge detail to find out what lives where and what it's doing and if the documentation matches reality. In this sort of case I just plug my own box into the same switch and stick wireshark on it and figure out what it's communicating with, before then moving to the box and figuring out which processes are doing what and so on. If the conclusion is "nothing" then test that by disabling them and seeing if anything/everything breaks.
Last time I came across one of these boxes it was a 2k server and actually had fuck all running on it and went within about 24 hours of me encountering it for the first time. My guess is that the signs and warnings dated back to when it was the only DC. It was still the PDC, probably for no other reason than the signs promising death and dismemberment should anybody interfere with it had successfully scared my predecessors off of touching it.
I know that as well as looking for "Heil Hitler", details of the weather, and similar stuff - one look-out post sent "Nothing to report" day after day, using different keys, a godsend for the codebreakers
And having established which look-out post sent this same very useful "nothing to report" message every day it was decided that the disturbance of the people in it might lead to a different report being sent, so the people in this look-out post had a very, very quiet war.
Um, ABS just prevents the wheels from locking and thus exerts the maximum possible braking action.
Even if ABS doesn't work, then you just press the brake down until the point that there is a screaming SCREEECCCHHHH sound, the smell of burning rubber and a sliding sensation. At that point back off the brakes a bit and your probably close to the best braking performance anyway.
If your leaving roughly the amount of clearance to the next car that is laid down in the highway code and not leaving your braking to the last femosecond (again, as required by the highway code) then frankly you don't actually need ABS. I had a car without ABS and braked hard enough to have gotten the lovely sound and smell precisely twice and both times I adjusted down my speed as required in plenty of time. Lack of ABS shouldn't matter *that* much.
On earth, you can use a power drill because your mass is pushed down by a large gravitational field which allows one to maintain their position with minimal effort.
In orbit in microgravity, were you to try and tighten or loosen a bolt with a power drill then the effective mass of the person holding the drill is near zero. What's more likely to rotate when you apply the drill, the bolt or the astronaut?
Some imagination suggests some interesting possibilities. If they do have a tool designed for that sort of purpose then i'd expect that it's going to be designed to be suction clamped to the surface to preclude it rotating the astronaut, but that itself would preclude the damage shown in the previous picture...
The deeply traditional hatred between the Army, Navy and Air Force is very deliberately maintained as it is.
The basic idea is that if any one service decided to stage a coup then you could reasonably expect the other two services to be willing to put it down, with using lethal force if required. This requires a certain level of slightly beyond healthy rivalry between the services. One of the side effects of this is that they are going to generate substantially more opposition to adopting a crap system foisted on them to replace a perfectly working system than many other organisations would do.
Except that one can buy a (new) pay as you go mobile for all of £10 with a SIM from most supermarkets, and you don't get asked for ID when doing so. A mobile number is not exactly a high bar to preventing access, although it does provide some possibility of getting caught due to CCTV in the store, and the mobile network knowing which base station it's connected to.
Another question: those that have never had a gmail address: Have you had this type of spam in your Inbox (the variety containing text in it, as opposed to the ones without)? If "yes" then that blows a hole in my theory.
I have owned my own domain since before gmail was even released as a closed beta.
I have never received a sextortion scam, although I have also never had a webcam that didn't have a physical power switch which has only been turned on when I want to use it. This sharply reduces the chances of anybody ever having any compromising photos of me using a webcam so I wouldn't have paid much attention in any case.
I'm also male, and one assumes that script kiddies are still predominately male and so targeting woman.
But artificial Intelligence does just give the appearance of being intelligent.
The current state of the art AI is still no more "intelligent" than a complicated excel macro in that it performs specifically programmed tasks. There is a huge disconnect between the rhetoric from the sales types and the technical progress in development of AI's.
How any man can walk past a Plus 8 or Roadster and not want one is beyond comprehension. I may never buy one, but I'll always want one.
Due to seeing a vehicle as a method of getting from A to B rather than an object of desire in it's own right?
Personally I drive around a 19 year old car that was cheap to buy, is cheap to run and is reasonably comfortable when driving it around. Given that my yearly maintenance bill is below the monthly rental costs of a new hire purchase deal I have no particular desire to replace my vehicle while it's still working, especially not with something expensive.
Mono laser printers of old can be quite fast, high resolution, and very cheap to run.
I'd say that are (broadly) two types of machines. Cheap to buy and expensive to run like inkjets and expensive to buy and cheap to run machines like large network grade laser printers.
If you pick up a formerly expensive printer from ebay then you bypass the high acquisition cost but still benefit from the low running costs. Typical home users that print maybe a hundred sheets a month will literally take a decade to get through the cartridge on a network grade laser printer and a century or so before hitting the service interval.
After suffering a bit with what I inherited I ended up buying our home users second hand network printers from ebay of the same model that we use in the office. Complete and total overkill, but you don't run into problems with them to the point of forgetting their existence.
It sort of depends on your point of view.
Maybe 5% of the population actually wants a no deal brexit. However, failing to prepare tends to be preparing to fail. In this case, does it cost UK PLC more to support making the bluff looking like a somewhat viable plan that then has to be honored as a legitimate threat by the EU negotiators that can then be negotiated away than it would cost if the EU negotiators call the bluff, knowing that it's a bluff?
If the potential cost of having the bluff called is higher than the cost of supporting the bluff then it's worth spending the money, although I do think it a bit of a shame that negotiations affecting ~500 million people and the strategic balance of power in Europe for the next 50-100 years are being treated as a high stakes game of poker that inevitably neither side can win.
Before everyone gets emotive and irrational, hows about the EU/Austria first define "fair".
That was done about a quarter millennia ago. The company pays the country x% of profit (X% varied, but was around 10-25% depending on which country) and in turn the country could afford to build and maintain roads, hire police forces to prevent highway robbery, educate the populace and later to provide things like healthcare and pensions.
Companies decided that they could find and exploit loopholes and not pay their taxes, and all of a sudden are competing on how little tax they can pay. If you were defining "unfair" then this is probably it.
The problem is that a minority of businesses are making profits, and then not paying a not unreasonable 20% tax on their profit before transferring the remaining 80% abroad.
Your suggestion to obtain more money from these businesses who are not paying that 20% is to lower the tax on having an office or other physical business space which they can't avoid, and then switch to taxing via VAT, which is currently being evaded by these companies in the EU by "paying" the VAT in ireland at a rate of 0% on exports. Your suggestion actually appears to be "don't tax multinational companies".
I can't see who benefits from this other than the heads of the multinationals.
Why do you need to post that as an Anonymous Coward, by the way?
Ok. So this proposal is for a 3% tax on revenues as all of the profit has been classed as revenue and passed out to tax havens such as Ireland and Luxembourg, who predictably are trying to oppose the existing arrangements changing as it benefits them to the detriment of everybody else.
I have two major objections. First is the timescale. 12 to 24 months seems a bit slow. I was thinking 12 to 24 days. It shouldn't take much longer than that to draft something and push it through both houses of parliament when both parties are likely to vote for it. Every country in the EU could have slightly differing legislation in place within a month or so if there was will to tackle the problem and legislation can always be amended in tidying up exercises later down the line if required.
My second objection is simply the numbers mentioned here. Services companies tend to expect a 20% profit, and retailers can make much, much more than this.
Assuming that 20% of revenue is profit:-
10% revenue tax would be equivalent to 50% tax on profit
5% revenue tax would be equivalent to 25% tax on profit
2.5% revenue tax would be equivalent to 12% tax on profit
At the moment UK corporation tax is 20% tax on profit. If there is a 3% revenue tax applied as suggested off in the article then companies are still going to be getting a tax discount compared to if they hadn't of gone evading tax to start with, or maybe be in a revenue neutral position. I think that this approach is seriously wrong.
My take on it is that after ~250 years of taxing companies on their profits if we are now having to come up with new laws to deal with a new generation of amoral pointy haired bosses who are scamming their tax bills down then the response should be sufficiently punitive to make it painfully clear for the next 250 years that it's not worth creatively exploring the limits of what is possible to scam the taxpayer out of.
I'd apply revenue taxes individually to companies that have taken the piss. In my view, the absolute minimum level of revenue tax that should be considered is 5%, equating to a rough rate of about 25% of profits going by my assumptions above.
Personally, my conscience wouldn't be troubled by taxing the companies involved at up to 15% of revenue (or higher) until Her Majesties Revenue & Customs have collected around 120%-200% of what they think might have been evaded by that company with creative tax arrangements, at which point I might be inclined to consider talking about considering returning to a percentage tax on profits for these companies if they are willing to stop taking the piss. It'd leave a lasting message that it's not worth pissing about and quietly dismantle the "don't pay tax!" industry.
What's the worst that could happen? The affected companies might struggle, but public services are struggling because taxes aren't being paid so my sympathy is rather limited. If we have a few billion extra in tax receipts then we can slip the NHS an extra few billion or start paying down the debt pile, repayments on which are comparatively larger than either the defense or education budget.
I doubt that anybody on either the political left or right is going to seriously complain about taxing companies that have not been paying their fair share of tax. Even if this level of tax is too high, and puts those companies out of business then what's the worst that happens? The companies smaller UK competitors who have been disadvantaged by paying tax end up picking up their former competitors market share which UK PLC then gets the tax money from there instead? Hardly sounds like a disaster.
I'm not convinced about "the police have lost all trust" meme that a minority pushes.
Firstly, those examples? So long ago that the people responsible are either retired or dead in practically all cases. Most police officers serving today hadn't even been born when many of those offenses took place.
Secondly, i'd highlight that the same people who scream that "da police are pigs dude" are as a rule the first to call the police when they are attacked by some nut hopped up on drugs, or get offended by unpleasant Facebook or Twitter messages.
The reason that the police on the street don't have any trust is because you don't see police on the street anymore, unless they are responding to a 999 call because they are so tied up with meaningless drivel like the aforementioned nonsense Facebook/twitter messages that people call them with, or they are tied up with absurd amounts of paperwork. And yes, I think that filling out 17 different forms for arresting somebody is fairly describable as absurd.
Police officers tend to join up because they want to run around catching criminals, not spending >70% of their time doing basic admin work.
Or are more than half of the features that a given Office user uses in a business setting missing?
The only feature missing is the ability to perfectly impersonate word/excel through whatever interface is used to programmatically create documents from an external program. (ie, business CRM systems, etc)
Apart from a superficial layer, there's not exactly much choice though, is there?
There are now 4 major browser engines available and people create lists of the top ten decent web browsers.
If you remember being stuck with IE6 or IE6 (with a shut down development team, because Microsoft put Netscape out of business so they didn't have any credible competition) then that's a big improvement.
Then how come it works SO well that Chrome overtook Firefox
Because Google tells everybody to install chrome who visits Google with a different web browser?
As one of the people who moved off of IE6 to FF1 my view which browser is presently in the lead is really an irrelevance. The important thing is that there is competition and choice in web browsers. This is definitely the case.
Personally, I got fed up with the constant barrage of new versions in firefox and went for the ESR release years ago. Then I got fed up with trying to fight against whomever at Mozilla has been taking lessons from Microsoft's Windows 10 team in changing my existing user interface preferences and making it difficult to change them back, and figured that I wouldn't be the only one fed up. I found one of the Firefox forks (Pale Moon) which is populated by people with the same complaint, and switched to it.
That's what a healthy competitive market for web browsers looks like. One where you have choice.
We don't need to jam Galileo. Without correction, the atomic clocks drift. A small fraction of a second is a meter inaccuracy, so you have a bunch of ground stations that collect data to spot them drifting so they can be updated precisely.
One such station is located on Ascension Island, and another is on the Falklands Islands. If we depart on bad terms with the EU and somebody pulls the plug then this is quite sufficient to cause Galileo problems without going the extra mile.
The wages paid at the lowest end are limited by the minimum wage level. If you want to campaign to increase that, I'll even support you, but you will pay more for the privilege.
This is what the situation should be, however it is not the situation that actually exists.
The lowest end in our economy is also the reason why employment is so "low". People are forced into being "self employed" by their employer evading any employment protections. The former staff member having "resigned" from their employer (of course, no coercion; no siree!) then has no rights at all. They get no pension, holiday pay, and are often paid per job, rather than per hour. This is essentially a return of piecework from Victorian times.
A 37 hour week on the minimum wage does not put you at the bottom of the lowest end of the UK Labour market. Not by far.
I'm curious to see if anyone will be able to pull that off within the next few years. Anyone of you been messing about with these type of headsets care to comment?
I have played with various generations of 3D system, some of which date back before some people reading this have been alive so I am probably aware of a few issues which tend to go overlooked.
Each generation of 3D system has improved somewhat, but overall are still disappointing. They are a gimmick, and will likely always remain so.
Certain problems are never addressed with any system, and are probably unfixable. Any system using glasses means that your eyes keep focusing on something very close to them, and then is being tricked into thinking that it is seeing different distances. This means that your eyes muscles are under a tremendous amount of pressure in constantly refocusing, which leads to eyestrain, which leads to headaches.
Additionally, as the system gets progressively better, you end up with motion sickness when your eyes report that you are moving, and your other senses (inner ear, etc) report that your stationary.
The magic leap system is an attempt to resolve the latter issue, but the former issue is effectively impossible to resolve.
Once upon a time I went to London and visited the Science Museum. They had a great many legacy technology on display, including Sptifire and Hurricane fighters, which makes me wonder if all those exhibits still enjoy regular support and maintenance from their original factories.
. . . Actually, yes. They do.
In 1963, a Mr Bill Lear Jr was living in Geneva, Switzerland and flying a surplus P-51. After numerous problems with the starter clutch on his Packard-built Merlin, he contacted Rolls-Royce. They instructed Lear to send them the clutch, which was quickly repaired and returned. Lear adds:
“I called my benefactor to thank him and to ask him when to expect an invoice. His reply was: ‘My dear Mr. Lear, Rolls-Royce-designed products do not fail. They may require occasional adjustment, but this is covered by our unlimited warranty. So there is no charge, sir.’
I was blown away. The engine and clutch had been manufactured under license in the U.S.A. by Packard in 1944, yet Rolls still stood behind them in 1963!”
Apparently this has been found quite handy by the RAF with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, but I suspect that the science museum doesn't really require that much in the way of support.
Oh, how terrible.
Actually, an admission; If I was answering a survey similar to this honestly then i'd have to reply that i'm still running either NT4 or Win2k. (not actually sure which) Additionally, i'd have to admit that it's never had a security patch since being installed and that I have no plans to touch it.
This is because it runs the firms voicemail system, and came with the telephone system a very long time ago and has quietly kept ticking on since. It's connection to the outside world is via a bank of 56k modems, which receive telephone calls and also do the usual voicemail playback stuff for internal staff. It doesn't even have a network card, being of the vintage where motherboards left network and USB connectivity to be provided by PCI cards, rather than being baked into the motherboard.
The only way of getting information out of it would be direct physical access to the console (bringing your own PS2 mouse & keyboard + DSub monitor) and then writing something to transfer the data via the serial port. It's sort of more "no risk" than low risk when you consider remote data compromise. It's (still!) got an external support contract for BCM, which ends any concern about it still being kicking around after what now must be about 20 years.
I have yet to speak to somebody else at an industry event who won't admit to having something really old like this sitting around somewhere.
Challenge: the various systems operated by each police force are setup to automatically send information to the national police database, but are not programmed to retrieve data from the national system when a case is deleted, meaning that deletions would have to be a manual process until change requests are done for each of the systems in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_forces_of_the_United_Kingdom
Whitehall has 44 county police forces, plus the British Transport Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and the Ministry of Defence Police. =47 police forces to deal with. If you take a dozen people per force * 47 forces this would require a commitment of 564 staff.
Scotland has one police force to deal with. 1 * 12 = 12 staff.
This might have some bearing on why Scotland.gov is happier to quickly commit to things like this than Whitehall.
Did they read peoples post back in the day?
In the UK, according to MI5 they did. Firstly they required a warrant to open each individual letter, and faced with WW1 and german espionage they did a blanket authorisation to open the letters of suspects.
This however was a manual process that involved individually intercepting the message from the post, redirecting it to a centre where it was opened by steaming it with a kettle to make the glue stop sticking, reading the letter and checking for invisible ink etc, followed by then copying the contents down, resealing said letter and getting it back in the Royal Mail delivery system so a delay wasn't noticed.
This required a lot of work. Setting a scanning program up that searches for certain key words in every electronic communication sent by anybody in the country is a bit more intrusive, and probably more tedious as it results in a few useful bits of information buried in such a mass of false positives that I suspect it's practically useless.
My view is that HDD's die when SSD's get the production cost lower than an HDD. While companies will probably exit the HDD market, this just props up the others, until only one is left. When that happens, that manufacturer will probably just ditch all of the R&D (no point in future development after a certain point) and just churn out cheap drives on their existing equipment.
Taking tape drives as a point of reference, i'd expect that HDD's will be with us for the forseeable future, certainly the next 10 years, probably the next 20 although likely dropping into niche markets like SAN's, which have a good use for low cost high volume storage. Of course, if the cost of making an SSD suddenly drops by half (which I can't see happenning) then all bets are off and the SSD probably dies within 6 months.
One of the reasons for the Fall of Soviet Communism is that they convinced the rooskies that everything American was shiny and good, so they spent more on industrial spying than they did on R&D. I feel confident that both bogus plans for real cool things, and real plans for bogus cool things, were on offer.
Might I suggest that you google "Farewell Dossier" and have a read?
Armed with foreknowledge of what the Soviets were trying to steal it was ensured that they stole "designed to be faulty" processors, control code etc. When this stolen technology was used it screwed with factory output which helped add to the infamous soviet quality problems, and it's claimed that this was directly responsible for the siberian pipeline explosion in 1982.
If someone who calls themselves a "technical person" and is unable to operate Linux, then they're lying about something.
Sure, I can operate Linux.
But the company I work for wants productivity software that reduces the need for a dozen people to do the job manually. That software only exists on Windows, ergo the company ends up running Windows desktops.
Now, somebody is going to come and say "but you can write the software!" in a minute, so i'm going to relate a little story.
I was chatting to the outgoing CEO of a large industry specific software house some while ago. By the by, he was one of the founders of his company (and the original coder in the really early days) and worked his way up to the top as the company expanded.
He related to me a tale about a larger competitor of our firm; they'd decided to go their own way and write their own system. The project was cancelled in favour of buying off the shelf software from his company after 6 years and a very, very large sun written off on the systems development.
He pointed out that his company could have been bought several times over for that expenditure. That is the stark reality of "oh, but you could develop the software...". For most companies it's far simpler (and ultimately cheaper) to buy off the shelf and let somebody else do the development.
Paper ballots have been counted and tallied electronically since the late 80-es.They are actually LESS secure than a PROPERLY implemented electronic voting system.
Actually, nope. Maybe in the USA, but that's another one of those famous "only in America..." things.
In the UK, it's all done by hand and much information can be found on the process by the magic of Google. With 300 years to perfect the system for dealing with paper votes I think that frankly it's better and cheaper than any alternative.
Same goes for spy slurping, you need to hide your targets in some noise operationally, even if not expressly legally.
You don't need to hide that information from the person authorising the warrant though.
Fortunately I don't believe GCHQ could genuinely monitor everything regardless of the tin foil hat brigades comments.
Probably not. But the fact remains that they are doing a dammed good job of trying, and the spy agencies do not have any meaningful or effective oversight, and there is evidently nobody to hold them to account when they are engaged in misconduct.
Microsoft could, dare I say it, voluntarily provide such a facility as a corporate social responsibility thing.
Exchange management console -> Organisation settings -> Transport settings -> Maximum number of recipients.
Stating the obvious however, the orginisation has to have the social responsibility to change the settings from the defaults.
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