Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: @ Alain If they allow copyright on APIs ...

Ian, are you really mixing patents into that copyright case? Really?

Re: Devalue BTC, kill the profit?

They ask for 2 BTC because the value is high. Shoult a BTC be worth a few cents (as it once was) they would ask for thousands of them, that's all. Or for Western Union, like the 419 scammers. Or for anonymous prepaid cards like the "your browser is locked until you pay the fine" nag pages.

Re: Mechanic

> Who changes your oil for free?

The mechanic in the original analogy

Re: Ha, the pitfalls of the cloud-based strategy

I changed the power supply instead, and they decided on a backup schedule without too much pressure. Apparently, brix were excreted for the whole 3 days it took me to source a replacement power supply. I just switched the thing back on 1/2 h ago; I officially achieved semi-god status (for the whole of 5 minutes).

Re: IPCC blaming heretics again? - @ribosome

I hate to break it to you, but you're wrong and the guy you respond to was at least partly right.

"During the Devonian, which is when plants were really dominant, levels dropped from about 5000 to 500 parts per million. 20%? Pull the other one. Between 40 and 400 times too high."

Photosynthesis was not "invented" by plants but by cyanobacteria. When these evolved there was 0% O2 in the atmosphere and quite a lot of CO2 indeed, 20% isn't far off the mark.

"The pH would simply be too low. Even at 5% you wouldn't be getting any dinosaurs or fish."

Your pH assumption is bullshit, 5% CO2 is what we give to cultured mammalian cells in labs, precisely to keep the pH exactly right for them. That pH of course depends also on the bicarbonate concentration in the medium. With common lab media we achieve pH 7.4 with 5% CO2. Of course the sea is not a "common lab medium", but still 5% CO2 is not what I would call incompatible with life. Actually a lot -most- of your own cells are seeing 5% CO2 as you read this, and some (though much fewer) are seeing 20% indeed.

When correcting someone else's percieved mistakes, try not to make huger ones.

Re: Azerty

> that suggests there is a French keyboard for every 3 English ones, which seems unlikely.

On a French keyboard you need the shift key to type numbers on the top row, so people end up using 'azerty' far more often than '123456', hence the apparent over-representation of 'azerty' compared to 'qwerty'.

Re: iPhone batteries are replaceable

>> Nice for you that you live within lunchtime visit of an Apple Store, but most of us don't.

In my experience no-one does. Even if the shop is 5 minutes away, I found that although there are usually roughly the same number of staff and customers in the store, the average waiting time is an eon and a half due to aforementionned staff being busy telling each other's week-end adventures while walking across the store and back in a busy-looking manner while doing absolutely fuck all. Twice have I just walked away without what I came to get, because my lunch break was nearing its end.

Re: Backdoor? @Scorchio!!

> It merits noting that there was a Cisco vulnerability not long back

Sure. to be honest I don't care much about specific vendors, and especially not about Cisco (one of their router models I had to deploy gave me no end of trouble a few years back). This particular story still strikes me as the typical firmware dev blunder, as happens all the time with closed-source, rushed projects. There is simply not enough peer validation in the closed-source system. See asdf's very apt comments in this very thread.

To this regard, this is a relatively minor vuln, certainly nothing worth getting paranoid "government-mandated backdoor"-style.

Re: It's Not The Laws, It's Their Interpretation

"for most westerners, getting into the US is as easy as it gets"

For most westerners, getting into the USA is a lot of pointless paperwork, pointless queuing, and repeated useless "checkpoint". I used to fly there at least 6 times a year, with a VISA even (because the so-called "visa-waiver program" makes it even more of a hassle, especially if you go there often). It's by very far the most bothersome western country to get in, and that's with a "friendly" passport and a permanent visa.

"for most westerners, getting into the US is much harder than getting into any other western country, and for no good reason"

They also forgot to mention that beer was never intrinsequely purer than water

Even nowadays it is extremely easy to get a hellish diarrhea-inducing thing when homebrewing if you're not careful. Beer is not boiled, that would kill the malt enzymes, It is heated, but not enough for it to become sterile. Then you have a mix of nutrients in water, which rapidly becomes a mix of toxic bacteria if you're not careful. The yeast out-competes bacteria for the nutrients, which helps, but is far from enough (yeast grows ~10x slower than most bacteria in these conditions). The point of drinking beer (or mead for that matter) is that

-it makes you drunk which is pretty fun

-you take it along so you know where it's from, instead of drinking from a random typhus-infected poodle on the way.

Re: AC "they made the best one"

A very short time after the original iPod came out I offered my then-SO a relatively cheap MP3 player; not too sure about the brand, I suspect Sony. It was the size of a large-ish USB dongle, with a 1-line LCD and a simple but intuitive interface. It held just over 500MB of music, included a freakin' _radio tuner_ and was a 2-part job: a smallish USB drive that plugged into a larger body. You just detached the USB part and plugged it into any computer to add or remove media files, then plugged it back into the main "body" and there you went. It worked on a single AAA battery, which would power the thing for month (she used to fall asleep with it and only shut it down in the morning. Every single day.). It was friggin' AWESOME (her words). She got herself an iPod nano a few years later, she found it was the lamest thing ever. The controls were fiddly, it did not have radio, adding or removing files was an extremely painful process when it worked at all, andshe had to bring it back to the AppleStore 3 times because she thought the lousy battery life was due to her repeatedly getting a faulty unit before she realized it was "normal". She kept using her good old non-Apple music player until she recently got herself an iPod Touch, which she uses more like a toned-down iPhone (AppleTalk apparently _is_ good). She is what you could call a fangirl (she dipped her toes in the computer world on her father's Apple ][, later got the first-gen iMac, the first-gen MacBook which she still uses, a MackBook Pro, she got a MacBook Air as soon as the larger one was launched, etc...) and yet it still took Apple more than 10 years to release a MP3 player she would consider using over a cheapo USB-Stick-style one.

Think about it.

Re: wtf is AIX?

that sarcasm?

Yup.

The 2 iPhone owners in our team had a look at iOS 7, found that it looked horrid (from the owner of a pink and leopard handbag that's a bit rich but there you have it) and just did not upgrade. No upgrade, no complaints, surely that can't be hard?

Re: Umm.

Security != safety...

As long as the users have any control at all on the added security features, these features make them _less_ safe, not safer.

The hit-and-run kid will still grab your phone no matter what, because even a locked/wiped/etc phone is worth more than nothing at all. And for the more serious muggings, well it will just make the perp want to hang around longer, which is not really _decreasing_ the probability of an "accidental" stabbing/shooting now, is it?

Re: Apple can't be responsible for every app in its store

From where I stand Apple checks and "stocks" the app, charges for it and re-distribute some of the revenue to the dev. So they are as responsible as a shopkeeper who would load the shelves with illegal content.

"it's not convenient for them" is a strawman argument; they chose how they do business, if they can't abide to the law it's noone else's fault. Now I am all for giving them a bit of leeway, because, let's admit it, making sure that everything in the shop is legal is a huge burden (again, Apple chose that to begin with, but hey, let's be tolerant).

But it's nothing more than a favour done to them, if they willingly ignore complaints they should get ready to prepare the book-deflecting shield.

Re: France and secure communication

"But having to declare or getting authorisation for its use is something I still see as a restriction."

AFAIK only the importation is regulated (declaration or authorization), not the use. Again, as that's the direct application of an EU directive (strong auth. is considered "dual use", i.e. potentially used for military applications as well as civilian ones), so I think most of UE countries have similar "restrictions". Of course it only applies to businesses anyway (in France and elsewhere), and only once per tool (GPG for example has been declared once, so a business "importing" it , or exporting a product using it, need not declare anything).

Re: Re; liquids

Meanwhile, last month my 10 cm (2 mm head) nail punch got a 1-way ticket to the trashcan. When asked, the bagcheck drone told me "it's metal, Mr". The thing costs 3 bucks so I did not pursue the matter further than pointing out that any one of the 5 pens in the same bag were more likely to be used as an improvised weapon (to which he just replied "yes, but this one is metal"... d'uh, so's my 15 cm aluminum-body mech pencil). If I was in the disposition to try and hijack a plane with my nailpunch, I'd just go and get a glass bottle of anything at the duty-free shop and use that instead. Or I could steal cutlery in any of the post-checkpoint restaurants. Whatev's.

They must appear to serve a purpose, so they pick stuff at semi-random and trash it; at some point lighters were a no-no, but they must have faced enraged smokers so now lighters are OK. I can't really blame the guys, they serve no purpose other than blunting the unemployment stats, if they did not discard some thing or other from time to time to make people feel like they're protected, they would kill themselves. Of course they pick preferably cheap-looking stuff, so as not to cause lengthy heated arguments with the victim. Over the years I've never had anything of significant value discarded by them. A lot of cheap stuff, but nothing even remotely dangerous, mind. Nail clippers, that kind of stuff.

Re: @OP

"if you put a big enough engine on a rollerskate people with no taste will buy it and no doubt add their own fluffy dice"

Tastes in colour notwithstanding, it sounds like you're dead inside. I bet you hate unicorns, dolphins and Santa, too ;-)

Although there's pretty much nothing uglier than a pair of FF0000 fluffy dice...

He's a Commonwealth citizen; extraditing him from the UK may be in breach of agreements with gov.au, or that's what I read. Sweden doesn't have that problem; in fact they once stated that they would not press any charge that would interfere with the US' prosecution for the leaks, should the US ask (a statement that was later scrubbed).