Posts by Paul RND*1000

Glad I wasn't the only one to notice that loophole

"lawful network traffic".

So, that means P2P, BitTorrent, and whatever else the ISP might not like that can be lumped into "unlawful" because some people use them to download movies and music illegally.

Blocking WikiLeaks, or Cryptome, or any other site you object to and which could be claimed to skirt the edge of legality, would be well within that remit with a suitably compliant judge and a good attorney. Both of which are widely available to those with deep pockets.

Hell, you could block standard email on the grounds that it is used by spammers to pitch illegal offshore pharmacies and counterfeit watches, and force your users to use your own proprietary email system instead.

That one word "lawful" might have been put there in a fit of well-meaning, but it forms one hell of a big loophole.

Take a look at your numeric keypad if you have one

Or your phone, or any other numeric keypad. You'll see why he chose that password.

Not representative

Limbaugh isn't representative of America as a whole any more than any other burger-inhaling, loud-mouthed right-wing stereotype is. He just gets paid a lot more than they do and when he runs his mouth it's not just to his buddies, it's to anyone who'll tune in and listen.

Bottom line: he gets paid a lot to tell a sizeable minority of people what they want to hear. Think about that for a moment. His job is to get on the radio, be all shouty and get a certain audience demographic nicely riled up. In exchange, he takes home large piles of cash from his employer and corporate sponsors. Everything he says and does in public is calculated to achieve that end and if it helps elect people who are overly friendly to the hyper-wealthy, that's just cream on the pie for him. I'd be surprised if he truly believes half of the nonsense he comes up with, but he knows that his audience will and that's all that matters to him.

It's just a wee baby one

I had the fun of dealing with combined CAT-5/telephony cabinets in the office where I did a work placement year as a sysadmin.

Each cabinet was large enough for a full-grown man to stand up in, if you removed the networking gear, and served a floor of 70 or 80 people each with a phone and a networked PC. We had 5 floors, each with one of these cabinets.

Later in the evening, when the office was quiet, I swear you could hear the muffled screams of former network engineers who were trapped in there after attempting to troubleshoot a cabling problem.

I doubt it somehow

I don't see her being electable to any important office once people beyond the Tea Party have any say. TP'ers aren't even close to being a majority of Americans, they just make enough noise and have enough support from certain corners of the media to sound like one.

She could certainly win the GOP presidential nomination, unless enough moderate Republicans show up in the primaries and put the stoppers on it. After that, she's screwed unless Obama goes out of his way to cock up his next 2 years in office. Maybe if he accidentally nukes Des Moines, or something, she might have a chance.

With presidential candidate Palin the moderate Repubs will recoil in horror. They won't vote for Obama, but there's a half-decent chance they won't vote for Palin either. More importantly, the independents who actually decide the elections will run hard in the opposite direction and Dems will hopefully get up off their complacent arses and make sure to cast votes that aren't for her.

She might be the only candidate who *doesn't* have a reasonable chance of beating Obama if things stand as they are.

Fit for purpose

"There are many people of course worried that perhaps the type 45 will not be fit for purpose, well if i could just allay there fears. Its purpose is to provide protection for our aircraft carriers."

No no no no!! It's purpose is to funnel obscenely large piles of taxpayer money to the military-industrial complex, thus protecting the interests of politicians whose constituencies happen to contain people who work in said complex.

On that basis, it is eminently fit for purpose.

The real real problem is

When someone stuffs some part of their innards with semtex. Backscatter scanners aren't going to detect *that* subtle ruse.

"Privacy whiner", huh? I'll keep my privacy, thanks, and trade off against the vanishingly small risk of having my flight blown up. There are plenty of places you can choose to live if you don't object to having no rights or freedoms. I'd rather this didn't get any closer to being one of them.

What if...?

Exercises in "what if?" are all very well, but if you follow that to its logical conclusion and manage to assess every possible "what if", there'd be no way you could ever allow an aircraft to move, let alone leave the ground.

Ever flown an early morning international departure?

It's a joke.

"Be at the airport 3 hours early" they say.

I got there 2.5 hours before the flight. Then had to wait for an hour anyway until the check-in desk opened.

That was the last time I bothered obeying that particular rule. Now I show up 1.5 hours before departure. Nobody has ever said anything about it.

Spectrum, too

I recall typing in a listing (remember those?) from either Your Sinclair or Popular Computing Weekly, which rendered a passable Mandelbrot set in black and white using Sinclair BASIC.

It took a Very Long Time Indeed, though.

Economics

By no means scientific, because I don't know the numbers, but the sending cost per spam mail would be incredibly low (especially since they're *stealing* other people's bandwidth and CPU cycles to send the actual messages, of course they have to pay some low-life shitbag for use of a botnet but I suspect that isn't too expensive either).

The response rate is also incredibly low, but high enough that they cover their costs and then some. If it wasn't, then spam would go away because it just wouldn't make financial sense to do it.

Spammers are evil, but you can also thank the fraction of a percent of clueless idiots who buy crap from them for making it a sustainable business model.

With all due respect Sophy...

...just because it's default is currently set to "friends only" doesn't mean it'll stay that way in future.

Sorry, but Facebook's record on privacy and in particular changing privacy defaults under the auspices of "improvements" speaks for itself in this regard.

Happy slappy generation gappy

Honestly, as a "Gen-X"-er (1973) neither do I. It all seems like a rather artificial division when you consider that every generation does the same things in the same order, barring any massive worldwide upheavals.

My generation bitches about how the boomers screwed everything up for us while deriding gen-Y and millennials for being lazy, selfish, slacking feckers who'll never be ready for leadership.

Sounds a lot like what I hear some boomers say about my generation and that of their parents, doesn't it?

All a bit silly really, if you ask me.

*sigh*

People are now so jittery that leaning down to tie your shoelace on an airliner might be enough to induce fear and terror in some of the more paranoid passengers. God help you if you sneeze or fart, biological and chemical attacks are especially fear-inducing.

Then again, perhaps we can use that criteria to put political advertisement creators and cable news opinion pundits in orange jumpsuits, since they mostly deal in fearmongering to an easily scared audience.

Another AA advantage

If you also have an add-on flash unit, it typically will use AA cells. Dedicated battery for the camera = dedicated charger for the camera battery. AA rechargeables for your flash as well means now you need two chargers. But if the camera can use the same rechargeables as the flash, that's one less charger to lug around on your travels.

Stick with Eneloops or other hybrid-type NiMH batteries and self-discharge is a non-issue. Keep a set of those lithium AAs in the bag as an emergency fallback. Alkalines don't do so well in these type of applications.

I think Pentax got it (nearly) right with the just-announced K-r which uses a dedicated Li-ion battery but has an optional holder to use AA cells. The (nearly) is because it looks to be a separate item instead of coming with the camera.

Free speech is great...

...but the speaker must remember that it carries a heavy burden of personal responsibility. Words are powerful. Words have consequences. Words can start wars. Words can destroy churches, end pastoral careers and get innocent people you've never even met killed just because they happen to have a certain nationality or religious belief.

The right to free speech is NOT a license to be deliberately inflammatory or hateful and expect there to be no consequences to yourself or others just because it's "protected speech". There are way too many people in positions of influence who have forgotten that, or aren't willing to accept responsibility for the consequences of their words.