* Posts by Tom 38

4341 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

Revenge pornography ban tramples free speech, law tossed out – where else but Texas!

Tom 38
Thumb Up

Re: or things like revenge porn.

Ah, see, here in America we don't have peerless paragons of virtue who do not suffer from the lapses in moral integrity us mere mortals contend with to act as arbiters on controversial subjects

Yes, we can all clearly see the problems that your politicised judiciary cause you, but why do you need to be snarky about it?

Must be nice to have people so exemplary that they can be relied on to rule fairly on their judgments of "knowing when they see it"

It really is.

Tom 38

Re: or things like revenge porn.

I suppose if we are wondering if particular speech is worthy of protection, we can just ask you. Because you'll know it when you see it.

This is why we have judges, and why they are separated from the political process. Like hardcore pornography, hate speech doesn't need explicit listings of what is or isn't hate speech, we rely on our judges to "know it when they see it".

I think it works better than your "free speech". Our far right are laughing stocks of the country, yours arrange torchlit marches where they wear white hoods and shout anti-semitic abuse, and are condoned by your president "on both sides".

Tom 38

Unless that is you make an amusing video of a dog trained to make a hitler salute when certain nazi phrases are spoken in which case you are arrested, prosecuted and fined. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

I wish the law was that incitment to violence was a crime but other things aer not but that is NOT the law. Hate speech is an offence and that is disturbing.

Phrases included in that video included "Gas the Jews", followed by giggling. He then shared the video to youtube where it had over 3 million views in order to drive traffic to his other (equally shite) videos. He was supported in court by EDL's Tommy Robinson. He claims it "accidentally leaked" (on to his public youtube profile? pull the other one, its got bells on it) and didn't realise it had that many views.

We don't have free speech in the UK, and never have had. If you want to live in that sort of world, America is across the pond, enjoy.

X marks the Notch, where smartmobe supercycles go to die

Tom 38

Re: In defence ..

Speed is a major factor, and the battery lasts anything up to 4 days: given that my last "smart" phone was an iPhone 6 with a battery life less than a lemon with 2 elements stuck in it.

The last phone you had had a sucky battery after a while, so you went out and got a more expensive version from the same manufacturer? Truly, one born every minute.

Yay, you've won your Fitbit lawsuit, folks. But, lawyers, about those filet mignon expenses...

Tom 38

Re: 625 million claimants?

I simply don't believe that when there is an award of 4 cents per claimant, the claimant has only suffered a 4 cent loss.

If the awards don't accurately reflect the loss suffered by claimants, then the whole thing is an exercise in punishing companies and rewarding lawyers. What is the point in that?

Lawyers should only be able to claim for a set percentage of the award (20%?), which they can receive from the excess of a percentage of the claimed loss (50%?).

eg if there are 100,000 claimants and the claimed loss is $10 per claimant, the lawyers can claim at most:

award of $10m - they get $2m, claimants $8m

award of $1m - they get $200k, claimants $800k

award of $600k - they get $100k, claimants $500k

award of $300k - they get 0, claimants $300k

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Replacing the batteries.

Power != Range.

No shit. But the poster I was quoting said the power of an old car does not decrease. I even included it in the quote so it was clear what was being referred to. I find arguments that start with outright blatant lies difficult to digest.

Tom 38

Re: Replacing the batteries.

> How much power does your Petrol/Diesel

> engine lose after that sort of distance?

err...none, whatsoever.

Are you high? Engines degrade over time with wear and tear on the drive train, on the valves, maintaining compression etc. Do you really think that when you stick a 10-20yr old car* on a dyno it will generate the same bhp?

* UK average miles driven per year is <8k miles, (with large variance, I know! You don't need to tell me how you commute from Plymouth to Skegness every morning, IDGAF). For comparison, US average mileage is between 15-20k

Cutting custody snaps too costly for cash-strapped cops – UK.gov

Tom 38

Interesting definition of "not possible"

I didn't know you could use it to mean "our systems are shit and we cba to fix it".

I wonder how that would play at a GPDR audit: "Oh its not possible to generate a list of what PII we have, its spread over everyone's different machines. I know it's the law, but its just not feasible, so we'll just keep doing it the broken way. Still, good enough for the Home Office eh?"

US government weighs in on GDPR-Whois debacle, orders ICANN to go probe GoDaddy

Tom 38

If you want to do business in the EU, you must abide by EU law regarding personal identifiable information. So if Godaddy want to keep selling domain names to Europeans, or ICANN to have contracts with European registrars, the law applies.

If you weren't aware of this, you should get aware, because the fines will be stupendous - up to 20 million euros or 4% of global turnover, whichever is greater, plus actual compensation for affected people - not just paying bribes to lawyers and "privacy foundations" like they do in the US.

NASA's TESS mission in distress, Mars Express restart is a success

Tom 38

they sell an expensive bit of kit and then walk away, hoping that when you get pissed off with it you'll buy another one (from them - how likely is that?). This doesn't guarantee a stable cashflow.

It does if you are Apple. You start with them loving the device, as it is so much better than their N-1 model. Gradually, the performance degrades until they hate the device, and wish they had something better, something N+1. They get it, they are ecstatic about the new shiny, and the process starts over.

They can't jump to a different ecosystem, because everyone else in their circle is using the services provided to interact with each other, and they fear missing out.

PS: Modular phones truly would be dreadful. It has been tried before, clunky and with useless upgrades.

Car-crash television: 'Excuse me ma'am, do you speak English?' 'Yes I do,' replies AMD's CEO

Tom 38

Re: The modern F1 car is basically a wheeled computer,

It's trite to say that Kimi accidentally ran over his team-mate - he did nothing wrong, and went on the go signal. You might as well say the rear jack man ran over his team mate, he didn't signal the tire hadn't been changed, or whatever bright spark came up with the idea that if the wrench spins one way and then the other then the tire has been changed.

Apple leak: If you leak from Apple, we'll have you arrested, says Apple

Tom 38
Boffin

Re: Leaking the anti-leak memo to Bloomberg

..meaningless without Apple also giving an estimate of how many leakers they didn't catch

Problem with that is the same problem with declaring something bug free. Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs, as some nutty professor once said.

Now I must return to organising complexity, mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.

Exposed: Lazy Android mobe makers couldn't care less about security

Tom 38

Re: No money in it

My point is: I would definitely pay more for a phone that was guaranteed to receive OS updates a reasonable time -- say version upgrades for three years and security updates for a couple more beyond that.

So get <anything that supports Lineage> and use that. My Oneplus2 gets OTA builds every week and updated to Oreo a while back.

No password? No worries! Two new standards aim to make logins an API experience

Tom 38

You don't have the NFC yubikey? Get the NFC one.

Apple store besieged by protesters in Paris 'die-in' over tax avoidance

Tom 38

Re: Isn't this a consequence of being in the EU?

If a French resident/citizen buys €1000 in ads from Google to show to people in Paris, that's €1000 in revenue that can pretty definitely be claimed as earned in France.

But if the same French citizen buys €1000 in shovels from Bobs Shovels (Ireland), the economic activity is in Ireland. Why do you think that services should be treated differently from goods?

I don't think it should, but I also think that these companies should be actually following the rules, and the tax offices should be validating and verifying. For instance, the bullshit that google do by having pre-sales account assistants based in the UK, and the ad sales based in Ireland, and claiming that the UK workers are a cost centre rather than how they derive their income - that's just BS.

Tom 38

Re: Isn't this a consequence of being in the EU?

It's not done by classifying all of your profit as revenue to escape taxation.

And that's not what is done with transfer pricing either, so...

Tom 38

Re: But!

Getting all businesses within a territory to pay equal tax so the non-domiciled ones don't have an advantage is still a good idea though, in my opinion.

It's such a good idea that it is in fact what actually happens at the moment. All companies - big, little, domestic, multinational - pay exactly the same rate of corporation tax, employer payroll taxes, VAT and local taxes as each other. The only difference is that most of their profit is derived from economic activity elsewhere - designing things in the US, building them in China - and the profit derived from that economic activity is taxed there.

Arguing about the size of that proportion is the job of the tax office; if you think they aren't doing it right, they are the ones that should be picketed.

As a side note, most of the companies in the FTSE-100 are multinationals whose profit in the UK is boosted by revenues from abroad in exactly the same way. People in glass houses shouldn't throw too many stones.

Fear the Reaper: Man hospitalised after eating red hot chilli pepper

Tom 38
Mushroom

Re: Nominative Determinism?

When I was about 13, the gag in our rugby team was persuading someone that deep heat on your knob was a ticket to happyhappyfunland.

It is not.

Facebook crosses off one legal headache, another pops up: Server blueprint theft spat with Bladeroom settled, but...

Tom 38

Re: Zuck will say nothing of significance

It would seem that all he has to say is a bunch of stuff like this:

"I have no recollection of that"

"I don't recall"

"It's conceivable, but I don't remember it"

<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/everything-jeff-sessions-did-not-recall-under-oath/>ad infinitum</a>

They forked this one up: Microsoft modifies open-source code, blows hole in Windows Defender

Tom 38

Standard zip encryption sucks, standard rar encryption is hard to break. File splitting works better in rar than in zip.

For those reasons, its method of choice for certain modes of distributing unlicensed media, meaning it's kind of important that your virus checker can check them.

Facebook can’t count, says Cambridge Analytica

Tom 38

Re: Eh?

The statement also says: “We did not use any GSR data in the work we did in the 2016 US presidential election.”

When a company like this says something like that, you have to look at exactly what they said. They did not use any GSR data in the US election, fine. However:

1) They did work in the 2016 election

2) Their work involves mining data to provide targeted micro ads

3) They used another set of data

Perhaps the pertinent questions now will be: what data DID you use in the 2016 US election, where did it come from, are you still using it. People are acting like the GSR quiz was the only profile harvesting tool in operation.

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

Tom 38
Facepalm

Step off a tall building or a bridge.

Run the car in a garage.

...

Wow, you convinced me, fuck those retards at the WHO.

Tom 38

Re: You can't legislate evil out of society

Don't understand why this post has 10 down votes. Do people really not understand that evil intent is independent of the means to carry out that evil intent?

Because the downvoters believe the OP is simplistic in his view, and that accessibility and access to firearms make "evil intent" into "very evil actions". You cannot change human nature, but you can limit its effects on other people. If it is easy to get guns, any deranged loon can get them. If it is hard, you have to be organized, which is often difficult for deranged loons.

Tom 38

Good luck throwing off that government that has become unjust and tyrannical when that government is the only ones with the guns...

So the citizens of the World's Greatest Democracy feel that inevitably, at some point, they will not be able to change their government democratically?

Tom 38

@Prst. V.Jeltz

~$200K-USD fine because they didn't plant 50% of their yard in grass

Weirdly valid

Tom 38

Huh, it's harder to jump? How so?

I know bringing actual facts and statistics in to the discussion has no effect, but if you are interested, people actually do do studies on this kind of stuff.

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/9/07-043489/en/

Given that the relationship between the availability of suicide methods and the level of suicide is principally mediated by firearm and pesticide suicide, it could be concluded that these two methods should be the main targets for prevention. In practice, many deaths due to pesticide poisoning and firearm suicide could easily be prevented if progress in public health were to outweigh the inertia of political and economic interests

Who would have thought, when you are suicidal and have a gun under your bed, more people choose the impulse to shoot themselves. When they have to actively prepare for it, many people chicken out.

Tom 38

Yes, because somebody that wants to kill themselves would go "Dammit, I can't get a gun, oh well!" and not just do suicide by cop, jump off of a building/bridge, jump in front of a bus/train, slash their wrists, etc.

Yes. All of those options result in much lower numbers of suicides than easy access to guns. It is much harder to jump than it is to pull a trigger - and when you don't have guns all over the place, "suicide by cop" is quite tricky because the cops, instead of being murderous thugs who shoot you in the head whilst pinning you to the ground, actually try to talk you down or incapacitate you first so you can get treatment.

Tom 38

Gun homicides are kind of like rape where 1% of the population is causing most of the problems. If you locate them early and say not allow domestic abusers to own guns [..] then you don't have to take them anyway from everyone.

Excellent news. Now give me a complete list of all the people who are domestic abusers or mentally ill...

What works is gun control. What apparently doesn't work are most 2nd amendment hobbyists brains.

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Tom 38

Re: Violation of national sovereignty

The fact is while Microsoft employees in Ireland are not directly answerable to the US government, they are answerable to senior Microsoft employees based in the US who in turn are answerable to the US government.

In most countries, working for a company doesn't mean that you are obliged to break the laws of your country because your superiors abroad order you to.

Here's the list of Chinese kit facing extra US import tariffs: Hard disk drives, optic fiber, PCB making equipment, etc

Tom 38

Re: I'm with Mr. T on this one

The problem is, Trump thinks he is the one holding the stick. He thinks he is bashing China with it, but he hasn't noticed he keeps missing and smacking himself in the balls.

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Should have happened decades ago

The two decades of currency manipulation, direct and indirect subsidies have killed near all of the non-Chinese electronics manufacturing. All of the manufacturing is in China.

Fact check: China produces less than 5% of globally produced semiconductors[1], and buys less than half of all semiconductors produced[2], so there must be a fair bit of electronics manufacture not going on in China.

[1] trade.gov 2015 semiconductors executive summary

[2] Statista Worldwide semiconductor sales by country 2016

Tom 38

So Trump, in an attempt to keep/bring jobs back to America has made US IT service companies more expensive to run and (shortly) not legal in Europe. That will end well.

Which? leads decrepit email service behind barn, single shot rings out over valley

Tom 38

Re: Why not just move to a email forward service?

Re-do your GDPR training.

Elon Musk's mighty erection fires sperm at orbiting space station

Tom 38

Re: Title

Awesome setup! People think comedy is all about the gags, but without a straight man it'll all end up on your face.

Tom 38

Re: LOHAN

Why not try a country of negotiable bureaucracy? I bet we could get a Venezuelan* Space Agency authorization for twenty million bolivar fuerte or so (about $400**)

* Venezuela is 11th on the Corruption Perception Index for 2016; all countries above it are either in actual bombs n shit wars or impossible to openly travel to (Norks). Sorry to any Venezuelans.

** $300..... $200 ...

The best outsourcers fire themselves

Tom 38

Commonly, a friend told me as I was sailing slices of rare steak through L'Entrecôte’s green sauce, outsourced projects boomerang back to the in-house staff.

It's like Bong, but not as funny.

Boffins laugh in the face of Twitter's API limits. Now they can slurp info to their hearts' content

Tom 38

Not much of a paper is it

"We installed an open source package and configured it correctly. Here are graphs showing we did it right".

Well that went well: Polycom sold for the same figure it fetched two years ago

Tom 38

I reckon their brilliant future is going going gone. We've got a bunch of Polycom kit; 10 years ago it was impressive, but now? 3k for a little box that constantly crashes, takes minutes to boot up*?

We use google hangouts/meet now. I don't think we're buying any more polycom tat.

* A common occurrence was getting to the meeting room and finding someone had unplugged the mic. Despite all the signs saying "STOP UNPLUGGING THE MICROPHONE". You can't just plug the mic back in, you have to reboot. Sometimes twice. Each time taking 3-5 minutes.

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

Tom 38

Re: Is that how you spell...

Looking to get tutored, Ralph? My Vet does Llamas ...

Thats probably not something he wants broadcasted..

Yes, Emergency Service Network will be late and cost more - UK perm sec

Tom 38

Agile for everything!

Except, in this case, agile means "I don't know what we want and we're making it up as we go along".

Actually that's just like almost every other agile project...

10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it

Tom 38

Re: Can't wait..

I mean that's clearly not fibre is it? Its vDSL to a cabinet which then has fibre. The ADSL is fibre too in that case, its ADSL2+ to an exchange which then has fibre.

I blame the ASA for allowing both Virgin and BT to claim that HFC and FTTC are "fibre"; if they are fibre, so was my 56k dialup.

What's an RDBMS? Don't ask the UK's data protection watchdog

Tom 38
Joke

Re: He's not wrong...

Yeah but they gave the boss a £40k raise so that should sort everything out.

Software gremlin robs Formula 1 world champ of season's first win

Tom 38

Re: Sorry, I still don't get it...

We've seen this time and time again, a lucky pit stop when a safety car has been deployed (virtual or actual) can make or break a race for a driver.

Yes, it was astonishingly lucky that the Ferrari funded Haas cars both got sent out of the pits with their wheels not done up about a lap before Ferrari #1 driver wanted to pit.

As dodgy as Nelson Jr smacking the wall whilst going down a straight in Malaysia.

Huawei wins patent injunction against Samsung in China

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: China stole enough IP to rise to the top

s/China/USA/

Its basically the most hypocritical thing a nation can do, steal IP rampantly whilst they are a developing nation turning from agriculture to industry, and then pull the bridge up behind them and say "Hey, stop stealing our stuff! How DARE YOU use our IP!"

No, Stephen Hawking's last paper didn't prove the existence of a multiverse

Tom 38
Boffin

Re: Awesome

However not all of these Worlds, are in fact habitated. Therefore the average population of the universe must be Zero. As anything divided by Zero is as next to nothing as makes no odds.

Interesting points:

* You think you don't exist?

* I assume you want the word "density" in there somewhere.

* Check what "Therefore" means.

* Check your maths on what happens when you divide by zero. It does not approach zero.

If we assume that you actually do exist, then the population of the universe is at least 1. And we know that 1 divided by any number >0 is also >0. So as long as you exist, and the universe is not negative sized, the average population of the universe is greater than zero.

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

Tom 38
Joke

Re: "... impacted users ..."

In medical parlance, that would mean "constipated users"

Tom 38

Re: US law is a corrupt joke...

Honest question: do you consider the data held/acquired by the police and the data held/acquired by the security services as equivalent?

The point of the security services is to get data that other people have, secretly, in order to do things relating to the security of the country. Are we saying they shouldn't get that data, and if they don't get that extra, secret, illegal data, should they even exist?

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

Tom 38

Re: Sharp Practice

And bricks and mortar retailers wonder why people buy online?

What happened here is even more egregious - these people HAD bought online. They chose to click and collect their orders, and when they turned up the B&M sales staff tried to force them to pay extra for the thing that they had already paid for or they could not have the thing they ordered.

There must be something criminal in that.

Airbus CIO: We dumped Microsoft Office not over cost but because Google G Suite looks sweet

Tom 38

Re: Courageous

It saved €14 million in license fees, but cost ~€17 million to migrate over 10 years and ~€82 million to remediate systems to work with Linux. As per Munich council's own figures.

When the new political administration decided they needed a report to justify their change, they got an obliging gushing Microsoft partner to write whatever they felt they needed in order to justify it.

I'm sure they did the same the other way around when they decided to go to Linux, but believing politicians when they say things about money is just foolish.

Tom 38
Joke

Clearly O365 is so amazing that AC here doesn't actually have to do any work, just post here every 15 minutes about how great it is.