Posts by Version 1.0 5411 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I completely agree, I feel the same way but I'm not going to fool myself into believing that these companies can't track me just because I said "no tracking". Sure, we can object to this but they all find their way around our objections ... Facebook tracks people who have "visited" Facebook friendly sites but never signed up for Facebook - it's just data collection in their eyes.
You can say no tracking, you can live on a VPN, delete cookies when you close the browser, and they can still track you - these companies are not dumb, this is how they make their money by selling our data so they are not going to stop no matter what you think.
Facebook and Google track and trace people all the time - this program would win approval if advertisements were being delivered instead of vaccines. Cambridge Analytica sailed away for all their tracking issues but now we're concerned? I guess the problem is that you can't deliver a vaccine via peoples phones.
Given the cost of the iPhone they could easily show a "loss" on the repair yet they have already made huge profit from the sale so keeping the customer "an apple customer" means they will keep making money when the battery dies and they buy a new phone.
But that was a long time ago and the world has changed a lot since then. When IPv6 was created everyone was saying that we would run out of addresses soon and the internet would collapse ... that was about 25 years ago and we're all still sailing along just fine. I think this tells us more about the basic design of the internet than a little thing like the address scaling that has an itch or two.
It would make sense to dump IPv6 now and look at what's happened over the years and create a new mechanism - hopefully one that could be implemented without the massive changes that IPv6 requires.
So they are talking about coronavirus tracking but not coronavirus testing? Most states in the US have rules that you can't be tested unless you have been with someone who has been tested and has been shown to have virus. But if you are just feeling sick then nothing happens unless it gets really bad. The president is very happy, America is leading the world again!
Books, music, images, all created by artists who get paid a little and then lose control as they float about the world on the internet. At least if you are a musician you can get something back from live performances (it works for The Grateful Dead), artists can move to the graffiti world like Banksy, but all authors can do is keep writing new books...
As for the rest of us, there's no much we can do, you can print your own money but that doesn't normally work well.
I think is "passive" in the same way that a tick works, simply absorbing specific RF without radiating in a way that can be detected - sure a tick leaves a little hole but mostly you don't notice it at the instant that it bites, you just suffer afterwards. So you could have a situation where one manufacturers phone works but everyone else nearby has crappy reception.
But maybe this is an opportunity to make an "RF eliminator" to sell to people who think that they are RF sensitive.
I set my VT100 up to run on 132 characters/line for a long time, eventually I discovered that I needed glasses and went back to 80 characters. The 80 character limit was readable on every terminal - but these days we all use phones, maybe we should knock the line limit back to 32 characters?
The current presidential view is that failing to vote for a Republican candidate is undemocratic./joke
If you want to understand American politics then the best way is to flip the statements around - what would the Republicans have said if Obama has made the same statements that Trump makes?
The Republicans are right about postal voting being easily hacked - they know this because they have been doing it for a while now. You send out "helpers" to collect peoples postal votes and hand them in - once you have collected them you examine the postal votes and throw away all the ones that didn't vote for the Republican candidate before handing them in.
The other big problem with postal voting is that while a voter thinks that they voted, they will never know if their vote has been counted because when the vote is opened the name and signature is checked and if the examiner doesn't think that they match the registered name and signature on file then the vote is discarded.
It would be very interesting and useful to sort out how that bug managed to get through the testing unseen. Bugs are useful, they tell you a lot about how well the code has been written and tested and what else might be hiding.
I would guess that the programmer writing the code did not have any flight training to realize how important air temperature is when you are flying and suddenly want to change things.
Possibly these incidents are related - I had been thinking that the malware deliveries were increasing because the hackers were self-isolating at home. Like everything else these days it's a nice example of how you rarely know the true cause of any incidents until afterwards.
It's Friday - icon for everyone.
I saw FORTRAN programmers struggle to translate their code into new applications, they always succeeded but it was an effort and wasted a lot of paper. Pascal programmers just switched from one system to another in a minute or two, I used to write FORTRAN programs in Pascal - it's so easy to translate any language into Pascal. The nice thing back in the early days was that you could write a program in Pascal and run it on a DEC PDP-11, VAX,or MSDOS on the desktop in the days before Windows existed.
These days I have to write in modern languages but I still think and plan the code in Pascal in my head.
It's not all bad, I have "Make America Kittens Again" installed on Firefox so I can enjoy the stories by looking at the pictures and skipping reading. Politically it's time to flush the toilet as far as I see it but then I'd miss the Kittens because El Reg never posts stories about Borish and Dummanique.
TS Bertha was further north at the time but it's Florida, in the tropics electrical storms are common when the tropical warm air meets cooler air from the north and convection gets going. In the past there have been many launch cancellations but generally the meteorologists have predicted the weather and the date or time has just been shifted a little.
So this has never been necessary before and nobody ever saw any reason to develop anything for it? It seems that nobody ever thought that there would ever be a pandemic or epidemic that might need this happening. We were caught completely unprepared because the government ignored any suggestion that there might be anything like this in the future. I guess some government advisors just thought that even if it did happen, they could just drive around and it wouldn't be a problem.
Initially you could install MSDOS from a single floppy disk, then they "upgraded" to Windows and you needed half a dozen floppy disks, then along came NT needed a couple of dozen floppies, then we progressed to Vista and Windows 7 needing a CDROM to install an operating system, then you needed a DVD and finally Windows 10 "upgraded" to installing a few gigabyte from the internet.
Will the next release of Windows need a terabyte or two to "upgrade"? What kind of idiots think that this is improving life? Every app they "update" gets bigger and runs slower.
In general the younger crowd normally have good training and ideas, unfortunately they are hobbled by the concepts that they have been taught but not learnt. A while back I was talking to a friend who worked for HP doing power supply design, he had been fired and replaced by college graduate after he complained that half an ohm in the power supply connector was too high a resistance.
@ Danny 2
"Don't rely on a vaccine working"
I don't rely on anything that doesn't exist, there is some evidence that the COVID-19 may be able to resist a vaccine but there's also evidence that a vaccine might work. Fact is, we will not know for certain for at least a couple of years so contact tracing and sanitary precautions are the only defense we have right now.
Contact tracing is needed until a vaccine is available so installing the app is a reasonable thing to do for the greater good of everyone. But the government needs to guarantee everyone's privacy and mandate that all data collected and related to this app is completely and permanently erased once we finally have the upper hand on the current situation.
But that's not going to happen is it?
If the corporate world organizes this then workers from home will get paid less, and with no need to maintain offices the corporations costs will drop. I expect that we'll see of lot of home workers being classed as contract workers, so in the US that means no healthcare and lower wages like Lyft and Uber workers. Home workers will have to pay for their own toilet paper, heating and air conditioning, and clean up their offices too. This should boost corporate profits in a year to two.
Another side effect is that home workers will have to work from a home with decently fast internet service so they are going to have to live and work in a reasonably well off part of town - poor areas and areas outside town generally have much slower and less reliable internet service.
Premier Li's statement is reasonable, at this point we simply don't know what the world will look like in the future.
I expect that the US will initially rave about this as a conspiracy and then follow the same course, even expanding internet accessibility to allow poor people to work from home and their kids to "attend school" from home too. This will be touted as a "Great Benefit For America" but will edge the country back to the days of segregation.
My family name is a common word, as a result when Facebook first appeared and I tried to sign up multiple times I was rejected each time and then received a message from them saying that I would be prosecuted if I didn't stop attempting to log in with a fake name (my real name).
As a result I completely abandoned any attempt to create a social media profile anywhere - I'm so happy these days that I don't exist in the social media world!
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