Posts by Paul RND*1000

Nailed it...

...I think you have.

It's implicit consent

If the law-abiding public generally cooperates with plod, plod can do his/her job effectively, i.e. they are able to police. The public are consenting to their doing so.

If the public don't trust the cops, they won't cooperate and may even actively resist policing efforts. Implicit non-consent, making PC Plod's job difficult if not impossible. Hard to investigate a crime when the general public won't tell you anything and the less civil members of society are lobbing half-bricks at your head just for being in the area.

Oh, just wow...

You *do* realize that every time some innocent civilian is harassed, beaten or murdered in the name of "protecting us from terrorism" or "won't somebody think of the children", public resentment increases just a little and those "difficult circumstances" faced by officers become just a bit more difficult?

What is the "poor fellow" supposed to do? Obeying the bloody laws he's supposed to uphold on our behalf would be a damn fine start.

Photography only causes problems if it's blatantly intrusive to someone who isn't already pimping themselves out in the name of celebrity anyway (sorry, but public figures are fair game within reason, after all their career depends on being in the public eye), or if you're some sort of paranoid whack-job who seems criminal activity in *everything*.

Damn straight!

Every time I see the brutalized version of Return of the Jedi, with the "young Anakin" ghost at the end, I want to find George Lucas and insert a light saber into his "where the sun don't shine" place. Seriously, what the hell was he thinking there?

If movies could apply for restraining orders, Lucas wouldn't be permitted within 100 yards of the original Star Wars trilogy.

Location data

That strikes me as a little bit "chicken and egg". You need to know location data to decide which languages to localize for, but unless you've already localized for that language, the only users will be those who understand a language that's already supported.

OS version and (non-unique) device details are all fine and dandy, and very useful information to have as a developer. Anything uniquely identifiable (GPS coords + time, IP address + time) is out of bounds as far as I'm concerned because it *can* be used to ID an individual user.

Yes, they do a difficult job, but...

You're right, most people have no idea what police sometimes face in their day-to-day duties, but those same people are those whose trust is vital to the police being able to to their job at all. Harassment of those who are not committing a crime *will* destroy that trust. Difficulty of working circumstances is no excuse, you need the public's trust even if they *don't* get how hard your job is sometimes.

Sure we all make mistakes, but this particular mistake has happened often enough and been publicized widely enough recently that it's hard to see it as anything but deliberate thuggery and abuse of power when it happens now.

Make those "mistakes" enough times and watch how much more difficult policing will get when even law-abiding people treat you with suspicion. Want an example? Go find someone who was in the RUC and had to attempt to police areas where they were at best unwanted and at worst a target.

True equality

What's wrong with making a decision based *solely* on suitability for a task? That's what true equality should look like, and if some men can't handle being overlooked because a woman really was better for the job, that's their problem and they've got no right to whine about it.

But offer the possibility that they were overlooked based on something besides merit and you can expect that shrieking to continue. If it's proven that's what happened, the complaints become justified and could even lead to situations where someone who genuinely got the job because of merit can have that merit called into doubt because of their gender, colour, whatever...hardly a bold step in the right direction for equality, that.

It's about staying sane

Spoken like a true end-user. Try working in web development for a while then tell me you don't want to hold IE6 face-down in a bathtub until it stops struggling, too.

You should be free to look at the web however you see fit, that's kind of the point. But like it or not, the web has changed since 2001, sites are more demanding of browser accuracy in how they interpret well-defined standards, and if your choices mean you're part of a fraction of a percent of visitors, it's not realistic to expect that developers will go out of their way to accommodate you. It's essentially impossible to test for every possible combination of OS, browser and personal settings, so you test for the most common ones that cover nearly everyone. If the developer did their job right, and your browser follows standards, and your personal settings choices aren't completely off-the-wall, you're probably OK anyway.

This is where IE6 raises havoc. Getting websites to work properly in every other browser, even IE7, is generally not hard. If it displays normally in one, it should display normally in the rest without too much effing around, at least in my experience. But IE6, even in default out-of-the-box configuration, just doesn't play nice when it comes to rendering pages. It comes from a time when standards were being crapped all over in an attempt to grab market share and it shows. It's by far the biggest waste of developer time to get sites working right with it, but as long as it has some noticeable market share then there's a need for businesses to at least partly support it. Which means countless wasted hours that they're having to pay someone for to support a browser which should have gone the way of Netscape 4 by now.

I look forward to the day when IE6 share is low enough to ignore and if someone actually chooses to use it, well that's their choice and they have to live with the consequences. We still see occasional visits from NN4 and IE4 and 5, but I sure don't lose sleep over whether those 0.01% of our visitors had a good experience.

Yes, name-calling is pointless

The right wing have also thrown plenty of name-calling, ad-hominem attacks and even thinly veiled threats at people they don't agree with, rather than debate views. So don't try to pretend that it's only "leftists" who resort to name calling. That would be a lie and you know it, even if you refuse to acknowledge it.

That said, instead of name calling, Palin should be attacked for the things which really do point to her being unfit for public office. There are more than enough to choose from without ever having to resort to being childish and they're relevant whether you agree with her policies or not.

* There's a laundry list of ethics investigations, not all of which are frivolous or trouble-making in their intent. The most recent was filed by a registered Republican, who I doubt is a "trouble-making leftist" somehow. A lot of them relate to illegal use of state resources in electioneering, or illegally using her position for personal gain (like claiming travel expenses when not actually traveling, or drawing her salary as governor while off-duty during the 2008 election campaign).

* There are various abuses of power, well documented. She basically got away with a slap on the wrist over "Troopergate" but the fact that she even got a reprimand shows that allegation had truth to it. No reason to believe she wouldn't abuse power in other ways too.

* There's the core of this case: that she used a private email account for state business (which is illegal). The official state email she was supposed to use is traceable and accountable, which is no doubt useful while investigating ethics lapses and abuses of power.

* Did the RNC ever get all of those expensive clothes she bought with campaign money back?

* Alaska Independence Party, ties to.

* Her recent book "Going Rogue", accused by McCain campaign staffers of rewriting history to settle scores. Steven Schmidt, the campaign manager, was quoted as calling it "total fiction". I'm looking forward to his, or indeed McCain's, memoirs of the campaign if they ever choose to write them.

* Highly inflammatory statements made during the election campaign. There's a fine line between "stirring up the base" and "inciting hatred". Whether she crossed that line is a matter of opinion but she sure strayed dangerously close to it. She acted in a similar manner recently during and after the healthcare debate; gunsight graphics pointing at congressional districts whose representative voted for the legislation? Really? That's quite the statement she made, right there.

I get the feeling that's the tip of the iceberg, and look! No childish name calling or ad-hominem attacks required. Just verifiable facts which show her to be unfit for office, but admirably qualified to be a talk radio or cable news opinion host.

Since forever

This has been happening since the early 1980s. I played more than a few Spectrum games back in the day which were derivative, thrown together crap delivered with copy protection which had been given much more thought and development time than the game it tried to protect.

It usually took about 5 minutes for someone to crack those early DRM systems too, and the infinite lives hack would be in the pages of YS a month or two later. Besides, none of them were a match for a decent twin tape deck.

I'm sure all the other systems of the time had similarly pointless copy protection.

Not sure that they'd be thanksful for that, really

I'm not at all thankful that these memories are fading, and somehow, I doubt any veterans would be either. In fact it makes me worry for the future; how long until we repeat history that we've forgotten?

I wonder what will happen when the atrocities of WW2 have fallen out of "living memory" and become just another bunch of dry facts in a textbook, taught to disinterested teens by teachers who are just reading from said textbook and have no real connection to events themselves?