Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: demanding your right to trial by Jury costs you ten years?

The offer was "admit you played a misguided prank that went wrong and take a slap on the wrist, or try to get away with it and face the consequences", in my opinion.

Re: Suppose it goes beyond Sh(c)are point...

"I think if it works"

It does. It is widely advertised a mitigating measure against a wide range of browser-based attacks. On most machines I have 3 different browsers: 1 for banking, 1 for general browsing, and 1 for potentially dodgy stuff (the latest being usually something small and JS-resistant such as w3m, websurf, or the like).

Re: How about this?

"You put a motorized camera on top of the thing, to take panoramic photos of its surroundings."

That'll fail. Because of at least 2 reason: no motorised camera is going to report it's facing direction accurately enough for that use. And building the panorama while the mower is moving would render the resulting panorama completely useless anyway.

You need a 360 degrees camera.

The third reason why it will probably fail is that with vibrations, light variations etc you will probably never be able to reliably recognise the features. Certainly not reliably enough to do any kind of triangulation (that's true for most of the proposed optical triangulation methods, btw).

I stand by my guns; the only thing I'm still working on is the precise calculation of the curves (as in my proposed method, errors are cumulative, that's potentially a BIG deal).

Re: Powerline networking? (Allan Bourke)

A couple WiFi bridges ($25 a pop) would have done the same, probably more efficiently.

PS: when the contract is made (was:Re: Very clear)

"the law should be made clearer as to when a contract is made electronically."

That very clause applies EVEN if the contract is already made. That is a get-out clause.

As for when the contract is made, some would argue that the T&C apply ( in which case, paid or not, you're toast unless the item was sent already) and some would argue that common law overcomes "illegal" T&C. There are things to be said on both sides; I intuitively side with the "common law wins over dubious T&C" people. However, I fail to feel any sympathy for the "I bought 100 iPads at 50 quids each, now to sell them at 500 on eBay" crowd. The former is customer protection, the latter is encouraging moronic rapacious profiteering on honest mistakes. Now I do understand that Tesco is probably anything but honest in that case, but that's not the point.

And, as previously stated, the "obviously wrong" price clause applies whether a contract has been established or not (as I understand it). The customer can also cancel the contract after the fact, too (if the product doesn't perform as expected, among other get-out-clauses). A lot of countries even have a no-question-asked cancelling "golden period" for customers in case you just change your mind (that's a protection against over-agressive marketting); not sure about the UK.. All this is just common sense. Of course it won't stop the "typo-chasers" from spreading news over twitter, but that's typical rapacious profiteering, and as much as I despise marketting types I just can't bring myself to fail them on turning that behavior around for their own benefit. After all, rapacious profiteering is their bread'n butter, trying to outsmart them on that stinks of stupidity. He who live by the bamboozle, die by the bamboozle. Or something to that effect.

date object, yes.

Or, failing that, at the very least a check for leap years.

Re: Bah!

I think it was meant to read "liquid helium"; that would make more sense. Although liquid oxygen would be way more fun.

Re: Sounds like Planet Telecom are the people you should be cross with...

In Canada, in the case of an unexplained telecom mishap assuming that Bell has the answer but won't tell you is always the safest bet. Not always true, but still statistically the safest.

That's true for home users as well as corporate ones. My BFF has been waiting for 3 month without her home internet connection because, in order:

1) Tech support told her that everything is alright from their side, datalink up and ADSL modem responding as it should, so please reboot everything and call us back.

2) (several days later, due to Bell support being mostly unreachable) tech support admits that no, the modem doesn respond someone must have made a mistake, and it's probably down to the modem, please make an appointment with the service department.

3) (several days later, due to the whole service department in town consisting of a "recycled" pizza delivery boy on his moped, working 9-5. Or so I must suppose given the delays and unpredictability of the visit): Yes, that´s the modem alright. The lights don't go blinky-blinky as they should, and let me refer that back home (appart from the fact that they rather obviously sent a sales rep to reboot her computer for her, one wonders how the no-blinky-blinky fact has been overlooked after more than 1 week of back-and-forth communication)

4) several days later, after arguing back and forth because all traces of her previous communications had seemingly disappeared, she is told that it's probably down to the power brick, because this model tends to go "poof" every so often which is a known issue, and don't worry my dear, just go to any of our salespoints in your town (of which there are many) with your faulty unit, and they will replace it.

5) several days laters, after several visits to several salespoints in town, it appears that Bell mothership had ceased to provide replacement units for the faulty model, _several month_ prior the whole kerfuffle, but that wasn't made clear to either the service dept, the customer support dept, or even the retailers (who kept sending my friends to other outlets in case they had a unit left). The solution is to mail in the deffective unit, and the replacement unit should arrive shortly after reception of the faulty one. After some arguing along the lines of "I'm not paying 20 bucks to send you back your broken stuff after several of your staff confirmed it was broken, onsite and off-site" / "tough luck then dear, we can't do anyting without it", it is agreed that the replacement be sent. With the threat of just leaving for the competition providing some, erm, lubrication. The delivery adress being set as the customer's _work_ adress, to avoid wasting to much time.

6) several days later, nothing being delivered, it appears that the customer's adress was not updated, and that the part was shipped to a previous _home_ adress, and returned to sender. Obviously. After much arguing, the home customer adress is reset and a delivery is agreeed on. at the customer's _work_ adress, again.

7) several days and a couple of delivery notices at the customer's _home_ adress later, followed by delivery to the wrong Post Canada pick-up point (the sole blunder here that is not blamable on Bell Canada), and after threats of bringing the matter to regulatory instances, an agreement is reached for reimbursment of the 2+ month of paid-for -but undelivered- internet service and termination of the contract.

And they lived happy ever after.

As also demonstrated by Trevor's story: when you suspect a problem could be down to Bell Canada, don't do chit-chat. Directly go for the official complaint. You'll save heaps of time.

Re: not

That "jerk DJ" thing is, as I understand, at the core of US radiophonic culture.

The once-Merkin-now-Brit madman-in-chief Terry Gilliam made a great movie around such a person... It's called "The Fisher King" and is obligatory viewing for anyone who wonders what a red dragon in Central Park would look like. Or who wants to see Robin Williams in the buff for that matter (one of the very few flicks that remind you that, yes, Mr Williams is an actor).

Re: People have to understand (@IMG)

"People have to understand that Sweden is protecting their own rights and personal freedoms. Nothing more, nothing less. Had it been you, you would have already been tried in Sweden by now."

Ahem. The swedish prosecution team made very clear that they would NOT press any charge in Sweden if the US required extradition (pretty much a given now), so as to not slow down the extradition process. They even got public about that, did you miss the memo?

It is thus very clear that the Sweden charges (which are for consensual sex without condom) are a direct proxy for extradition to the US where he will be tried for espionage which carries the death penalty. Mathematically reducing the equation, consensual sex without condom=death penalty.

That sure sounds fine. Not.

Re: @ rtli- about contradiction.

> All I'm after is middle ground: due process _and_ the authority to search for evidence.

Good luck in your search.for middle ground. There's none. Either you have to provide the password no matter what, and in this case tough luck if you don't have it/don't remember it, OR you don't have to provide the password, in which case expect crims and innocents alike to refuse to provide it, for protection and/or privacy reasons Or just because they can, which is as good a reason as any.

Re: "he's proven his level of genius" (@ Vic)

"I see most of these tools as training wheels; once you've got the hang of what needs doing, you tend to go straight for the config file, because it's easier. But in the early days, that's just too much complexity for a bear of very little brain, such as myself. So the tool is useful for getting to know the system. After a while, it becomes surplus to requirements."

Fair enough; what is missing in that case is probably a better documentation, though, not a GUI tool. There are a number of problem with GUIs; the biggest one is that they usually rely on a specific backend, and thus a fairly minimal tool may force you to install very big libraries that may or may not even be available as binaries for you system (not to mention the wasted ressources, compiling a GUI backend from source is not very hard but not very n00b-friendly, rather defeating the purpose of the tool in the first place). The second biggest is that it takes more effort than writing a text-format documentation, possibly with examples, which is guaranteed to "work" on any system.

Re: What? surely you're kidding.

The handset is not "more likely" to consume data, though. They all have a 100% probability of consuming data and the same goes for browsing the web. In volume, the iOS device are likely to consume more data, I agree. Which is bad for the carrier.

Re: .com is supposed to be US

I like that post of mine being uniformely downvoted. Sincerely.

Even though I still think it is in effect the reason for the shutdown, and my post was wrongly understood as defendinding the US landgrab on .com instead of just describing it (my fault, probably). It is good to know that people don't like said landgrab.