Posts by Robert Carnegie 4546 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009
I don't know if the car history data service described there is valid or not. Presumably it does what it says and it may be something that you want to know and they don't misuse the data, but I don't know if it's a reasonable offer. For one thing, I'm a cyclist... Note that where it says "Try it now!", I assume that it's not free, that it costs you £3 "plus standard network rate" straight away. But to me it isn't obviously and exclusively bad.
It's possible to offer a service legitimately that is paid for, and puts food on the table figuratively speaking, via a premium rate charge. Unfortunately there also are cheats, and also services that are just expensive and not particularly necessary.
Isn't there a facility to bar premium rate numbers selectively or wholesale on a phone contract? Or unless a special pre dialled code is used to unlock access? Or is it just for land lines?
Some apps (on Android and when I last looked) exist in a free demonstration edition that provides a limited service. If it looks good then you buy the fully functioning product. You also may look at users' reviews.
You also may be able to return an app for a refund immediately after purchase. Again when I last looked at Android apps, I think the time allowed was FIFTEEN MINUTES, which to me seems not really enough at all. I thought Apple was more generous, but still not more than a day? Still, as I say, you can try a demo version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Campbell,_Duchess_of_Argyll is a divorce case in which either one or two faceless men - apparently they don't even know -that- - were photographed in (I'm assuming) consensual sex acts with the Duchess. And this apparently with "the only Polaroid camera in the country". Granted, there may have been important people -that- time wanting the issue clouded, and an unusually large set of men that it -might- have been. But they never really found out.
As for -this- case, I am sorry to hear of it. I thought Canadians were nice people?
I think Amazon has forked Android and is using its own version. And they probably could use their own app store exclusively anyway. Google's authority with partners may be limited to withholding the Android trademark and/or barring access to Google Play for rogue devices. That has been an issue with tablets before there was a proper Android tablet edition; you could use Android itself, but not the Android Marketplace or whatever it was called then. The support forum for one tablet that I looked at was mostly about them "breaking in" to make the Marketplace work and let them get apps, and Google then blcking them again.
We saw a palm-reading machine in an amusement arcade in the 1970s. I think my Dad and I had a go on it. We each got a small neatly pre-printed card with our fortune told on it, as well as the card numbers 28 and 29 - or something like that - they hadn't shuffled the deck, they apparently just came out in number order.
So, the West does already have this technology.
Fortune-telling is considered naughty in Christianity and in bible Judaism because I suppose you're supposed to get the future told to you by God's authorised prophet. Islam in the present time is a non-prophet religion and iN some Islamic thought God has already decided what the future will be, but I don't know if it is considered to be legitimately available. For that matter, weather forecasting comes to mind. Jesus said something about that and he seemed to think it was O.K. but doesn't tell you when the Second Coming is.
This month U.S. and South Korean armed forces have been marching up and down along the border with the North. This is the context in which North Korea is getting touchy, although apparently the military exercises happen every year at this time. But, I wouldn't assume that the U.S. administration does not want a limited nuclear war against an easily defeated enemy, to show the rest of the world who's boss, and maybe put the fear into Congress and Senate as well. While they still have some nukes and weapony stuff that hasn't been foreclosed on yet.
The death of Margaret Thatcher reminds us that war is good for a government - she'd be a footnote if it wasn't for the Falkland Islands. On the other hand, we're now terrified of letting more women into the government. Well, so was she.
Obviously you can't legally grant data to Google that belongs to someone else. But by doing so you can get them into trouble. The legal language used is probably designed to get you into trouble too and protect Google. Since they need to protect themselves, evidently.
When I borrow a well-used e-book, it's going to add interest if it comes with bent page corners and torn pages, underlinings, crude drawings of body parts in the margin, food and drink stains, and residues of various bodily secretions, benign and infectious. I think this is where e-books have fallen down so far. Dammit, I'm entitled to have digital dandruff and I want it.
Really I think what they're referring to is the number of lends it takes to kill a library book, which can be as few as thirty - remember we're playing Reader Roulette as to who handles it. PLR merely pays a small amount for each lend AS WELL AS THE PRICE OF THE BOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE which is as much as the author deserves.
I have an everyday bank debit card, but I'd probably use a credit card if I was going to make risky transactions. So I only degauss the debit card.
I reckon if you scrape off the brown or black stuff of the magnetic strip on the card, and then colour it in with a permanent marker pen, then no one will notice, let alone mind. And if your card doesn't work at all then you're unlikely to be blamed, particularly if you only use the chip anyway.
Having said that, the next generation of card fraudsters may, um, do something about that. I can think of a few ideas that they probably can think of for themselves too, but nevertheless I don't want to give them any help.
The last I heard on BBC radio's "Moneybox" programme, banks have to supply your card with a working magnetic stripe, but you don't have to keep it that way. I used a magnetic bulk eraser on mine, or you could probably just file it off. If the bad guys can't read your mag stripe then you're probably safe.
If you do find an ATM set up for skimming, bear in mind that the bad guys are probably nearby reading data wirelessly, and if you interfere with it, they may switch to Plan B of mugging you. Likewise if you get your phone out at the machine. You could be OK if you pre-emptively go nuts and beat the hell out of the machine when it doesn't give you money, but make sure that skimming is the reason for that.
Apparently they're concerned about animal neglect specifically. If the animals are being neglected then presumably there's nobody there who's human. The people who are nglecting the animals are somewhere else, doing the neglecting. Privacy is for humans only, or am I missing the point?
Do emus know they can't fly? Well, the story I was told may be wrong, but it concerned birds that feed on roadkill, then take off when a truck comes, but they can't get very high and are liable to fly straight at the windscreen and smash through it, which isn't good for anyone concerned. But my memory also has the word "galah" attached to it, but it doesn't look like the kind of bird that would do that - although it doesn't do to judge by looks.
I've been told that providence has supplied Australia with at least one large, stupid, clumsy species of bird that, presumably, Australian helicopter owners know to be wary of. This drone plan (presumably using cell phone communication) is just another similar aerial obstacle. As for it being shot down, I dare say that a helium airbag device will be adequate for a rescue, and if it does take out a farmer's chopper, then, fair play, I think they can count that as a win. It's unlikely that there would be evidence except for the drone's own video and maybe its cell phone records.
The other one is about a company called SCO that claims to own every operating system whose name ends with "-ix", obscurely including Windows (Posix, or is that a kind ofi crewdriver?) No, not SCO. SCO was the real one.
This is an oblique parody of Summly, the software that reads for comprehension so you don't have to - allegedly; I'm expecting to see it fall flat on its face as it over-compresses valid news stories and converts them into accidental libels. We shall see, now that it's in the spotlight.
There also is prior art for Dummly - the parody - for instance, Charlie Brooker wrote a newspaper article in 2006 proposing a "Life GPS". It seems inconsequential to me, but I have read science fiction, so this sort of concept isn't astonishing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/sep/08/comment.charliebrooker
I also read a short story once where as far as I remember, everyone in the world, or at least everybody rich, spent their lives in a sort of robot suit that managed their physical comfort and social interaction. One day a young man felt that this wasn't satisfactory and he found a way to switch the thing off so that he could tell his girlfriend that he loved her without the message being robotically moderated. Then he switched it on again because unmoderated physical existence was a ghastly experience. Everybody thought this was wonderfully romantic, and from then on, most of these life suits came with an off switch, but no one ever actually used it, except for the original discoverers.
If you think that's bad, the same set of Charlie Brooker's articles has some discussions about looking for a wife himself, which I hope the charming Konnie Huq, whom he married subsequently in 2010, will never see. Ms. Huq, if you're reading this: be warned. You know what he's like and you took him on anyway, and we're not talking about a Blackbeard or a Rochester (I hope), but still... don't look.
I expect that they had to prove that they do what they say they do in order to be judged legal. Or, at least, you'd expect that the networks, who for some reason hate this, would think of proving that they don't do it. Unless that is being saved up for the appeal. In litigation the goal may be not to win a case, but to keep the other party in litigation hell until they finally give in.
My impression of the story initially was that it's the equivalent of this company installing a Tivo with network connection for each customer but on their own premises. Then when you stream, you are effectively just using your Tivo. But if legally they only need one antenna per customer, I'm not an expert but I daresay that lots of little ones that add up to be one big one MAY be both legally valid and technically functional - so that the design wouldn't work for 1 user with 1 tiny antenna, but works OK for a thousand or more.
Currently you can write Windows Store apps and sell them through Windows Store with Microsoft getting 33% of the price, I think - plus whatever you have to spend on development tools. And you can also write non-WIndows Store apps, but they don't run on Windows 8 RT devices and probably won't run on future Windows versions - it'll be Windows Store only. Or else what's the point?
So, yeah, life will be simple.
But in my experience, speech recognition is a sluggish experience, even when objectively it is faster than typing. That's why I have my eye on Windows tablets with a better than Atom processor, and also more RAM. Still, you could give it a go. From experience, it takes hours of training on the provided standard texts and then suddenly works really well, but you may have to start and continue with American pronunciation of "a" and "the", rhyming with "hay" and "bee", or they'll pop up when you haven't said those words or any words. And you'll probably save time if you can assign a swear word or two to perform the "delete that" function. On the other hand, carefully enunciating swear words into your tablet isn't dignified either. I suppose you could invent new ones. See if the Microsoft speech research lab has come up with some.
Otherwise I favour the Fitaly on-screen keyboard, although I don't think that it comes in a Windows 8 edition, and a combination of Wacom stylus and Bluetooth mouse; instead of tapping the screen, I click the mouse button - the mouse movement eye is duct-taped so that it works for clicking exclusively. In this case, the button on the pen might work, too, or it might tend to move the pen away from the intended target.
I want a version of Fitaly - kind'a. As it is, I use Fitaly on full-fat Windows touch devices, such as right now. For stylus or one-finger typing, it's a lot faster than the QWERTY layout, once you learn it. But about half the speed - for me - of typing on a good real keyboard. I assume that a tablet screenboard or skinnyboard is also less satisfactory than a real keyboard - and real keyboards presently very very quickly make my hands and wrists hurt like heck, so I need to use an alternative. Speech recognition is cute, but I'm a programmer so I have to write things like "SET @if_digest = N'IF ( ' + STR(@spdigest) + N' = 1 ) ' " which are, at best, tricky to say aloud.
There seems to be a genre of anecdote in which a famous foreign person visited England - usually before they were famous, although there also was briefly a legend that Michael Jackson performed impromptu at some club in provincial England - which is more likely to be the work of an impersonator, and "Anton in Eastbourne" (the playwright Chekhov) is a work of fiction. But Lenin, and yes Hitler, and Jesus, are supposed to have walked upon England's mountains green - if you believe it. (Re Jesus, no, not just because of the song.) Supposedly Lenin came to see Letchworth.
I don't know if this is just an English hobby, or reflective of an island nervous about immigration. You might sceptically include the Book of Mormon (not the musical show) in an equivalent American genre, and a rare case of Americans admitting that anyone who isn't an American -is- famous.
Magazines, at least, were printed in Canada because that was cheaper. Having said that, I think Canada is in a sort of international trade whatsit with the U.S., and these were magazines printed -for- the U.S. publisher. Anyway, there was a lot of snow, and you didn't get your magazines in the U.S. for a while. Come to think, that also stands against the regular complaint that the United Kingdom doesn't deal with snow or other bad weather conditions as well as other countries do. Mother Nature can ruin -anybody's- day, week, month, or decade. I was about to say "At least we don't have volcanoes" but there was that one in Iceland that blew ash all over Europe.
I had a turn with a capacitative screen a few years ago. Multitouch didn't arise. Accuracy did. And a metal pen
didn't really work, but an old cheap felt-tip pen with all of the ink washed out of it and a hole chopped out of the side of it into the main felt body, which was well moistened, meant that I could hold it and, hmm, capacitate from my hand touching the wet body of the pen, down to the tip. However, for my specific need of onscreen keyboard use (Fitaly is the product, I have a keyboard disability), I preferred Wacom floaty pen pointing combined with an ordinary mouse or trackball to click on what I was pointing at. Oh, and a little circle as cursor pointer instead of the Windows standard arrow.
The screen cleaner probably isn't up to dealing with your grease. Try water with washing-up liquid in, or some sort of human-body-oriented soap, but switch devices off before applying.
Say the boss downloads some NSFW software that compromises his PC - then in this scenario, one of the things that a hacker can do is to connect from the perv-station to the printer. Or, say a disgruntled employee does it. Maybe all that he or she is disgruntled about is being last in line to use the printer, so, silently cancels everyone else's prints. It's still inappropriate to make that possible.
According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21680884
the online clothes retailer American Giant got a huge boost in orders when they were featured in the Slate web site, which they have had some trouble coping with. A good business (which this may be) can have trouble reaching out to potential customers, and cheap trials are one way to do that. There's a catch with Groupon in that you may be reaching an audience that likes cheap trials and novel experiences but isn't going to use your services regularly. It seems to me that you should use Groupon to sell services at a loss when you can hope to have customers come back and let you earn a profit, and also for seasonal special offers, and stock clearance. And don't have people feel sore when they miss out on the deal. And sell your service at a fair price the rest of the time.
but I suppose it's dusty inside a PC. But maybe these devices are for use in special no-dust enclosures. At least.
This also probably isn't going to work when the PC's lid is off (unless you have a darkroom! And photographers don't need those any more...) I once had a mouse problem; it was opto-mechanical, I had a desk next to a window, and the laser and sensor in the mouse didn't work in the afternoon, because it got direct sunlight then. So I bought a fluffy mouse cover with eyes and a tail, but "cover" was the main part of the solution, I suppose. You could also use duct tape, but it wasn't widely available then hereabouts.
In some places and some industries, some kind of lockdown of IT is a necessity and a legal obligation, and using a non-managed e-mail account for business can get you busted. On the other hand, the Dilbert cartoon has (or had) the recurring caricature charactersof Mordac the Preventer of Information Services, or something like that, the guy who won't let you use your USB ports or a password that you actually can remember and can type. And then he laughs at you. Actually laughs.
Most businesses and other ventures have data that they really don't want to have stolen or damaged. And most device misuse, from the point of view of the company, is games, social, and pornography. And maybe online shopping. So the only way to avoid being resisted by your own staff even when they aren't themselves stealing or damaging your data is to let them enjoy their business devices responsibly in all of those ways. Maybe on a time meter and with an appropriate warning that "You are about to access adult services that may contain unadvertised horsemeat", but flexible.
Let's face it, most people who are reading -this- page shouldn't be.
Well, the government that sets immigration policy is elected by, and elected to act in the interest of, in this case, Australian citizens only, pretty much. It's much the same elsewhere, except that other governments may be not exactly elected. In some places in the world, there are universal human rights with legal force, but I seem to recall talk recently that the President of the United States, for one, is allowed to kill any foreigners that he likes. Or, probably, dislikes.
they carefully don't put "These animals carry disease" and "Eat them, they're tasty" next to one another. That is left to me. You're welcome.
This is also why I don't want horse-burger when it was supposed to be cow. You don't know if it's good horse or bad horse or cat-food horse. You only know whether or not it's good cow, and it's not.
Well, if I was trying to sell details of a web client vulnerability to hackers, Russian and Chinese customers are who I'd think of contacting initially (wealthy Nigerian princes - less so), but if I was in that business, I'd probably have a better idea of who's paying big money. And supposedly the Chinese government in particular is investing generously in the field, but, as it happens, I don't have anything to offer to them. Which is probably just as well for me.
If legal monetary gain wasn't on offer, people wouldn't be trying to find bugs and claim prizes - prizes offered by the software publishers. All that you could do is legitimately disclose a bug to the publisher for a more modest reward or none at all and an obligation to keep the secret until fixed, or else criminally sell the bug to Russian and Chinese hackers. Or, for maximum money, do both.
I mean, -I- don't go looking for dangerous bugs in the web browser or virtual machine that I'm using. I might, if the rewards were better.
"I agree wholeheartedly. Installing apps on google play should not be a case of, this app needs access to <huge list of things that most folks don't understand at all>, continue or cancel? There's got to be a way to stop apps asking for the moon on a stick and the only other option being that you can't install them."
There is another way: put multiple versions of the app in an app store, with different features active.
Many somewhat unexpected requests are about making money (i.e. downloading advertisements from the internet) or behaving properly in the phone environment (turn off the sexy wallpaper when your wife phones so that she doesn't see it and she thinks it's her that you're excited about), but if you don't understand what it's asking for and why, then say no. This may demand that owners (or users) have some understanding of the device that they own or use. And so they should.
I suspect that the example described does qualify as malware of the "Trojan" sort since it seems to be doing things unrelated to its overt function, the sexy wallpaper - even though it asks for permission. But that so many users -gave- it permission is extraordinary. Is it perhaps possible that instead it was downloaded many times by its creators to give it a fake popularity?
I've got a version of it and I seem to be stuck with it. But a keyboard bent around the middle letters so that your fingers line up with your forearms instead of bending from the wrist can avoid it coming on in the first place. I haven't seen this as a touch-type option in tablet on-screen keyboards and I think that's a pity. I think speech recognition is the future, although by now it should have been the present. And in the meantime, I'm using "Fitaly" on-screen with a stylus, at about half of my former proper typing speed. It's good for what it is, though.
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