Posts by JaitcH

Does anyone know where/how to ...

to opt out of the NHS datasystem?

Thanks.

Rupert Murdoch? Rupert Murdoch? Oh, yes, I remember ...

he is the guy who owned the near criminal enterprise called News of the World and tried making loving noises to Tories so he could own the whole of some satellite TV outfit.

Hopefully he will soon be tormenting the gatekeepers of Hell.

Ballmer doesn't need the money ...

he has billions already.

PayPal a system to avoid, regardless

PayPal decides whether to pay out or to hold your money. They also force their politics on you.

Remember Wikileaks.

Even HCBC doesn't do this - and they are one of the worst banks around. (Think otherwise? Then explain why they have to wire money between YOUR accounts in some countries?)

No charge for 'little tete-a-tete'?

Cook has just raised $610,000 for a one-hour coffee break with some idiot.

I guess the appearance before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is a freebie?

So this is the Olympic Legacy?

I was of the understanding that the IOC party leftovers were to be used for sports related activities.

Given that the shindig cost 12-BILLION POUNDS +++ I wonder what the true cost of this building is and whether the proposed rents will actually help recoup the capital outlay, or is this yet ANOTHER Tory giveaway to business?

I imagine workers in this place won't be too enamoured of it's location when it's a game day at the stadium.

Too much marketing information (for Apples peace of mind)

Learning the back room deals that Apple sets up is very interesting and enlightening.

If they do this for books, just imagine how much this sort of agreement is costing Apple customers with all their products.

Any country who sentences someone to life, no parole, for stealing a slice of pizza ...

or a pair or $2.50 socks is nuts at best, given the daily cost of jail.

The US has the highest world population, per capita, of incarceration, too.

And the very self-same country declares itself to be the leading defender of human rights ad protector of the poor.

Utter crap.

Junior Grades Don't Need Calculators or Computers

The reason many junior schools don't permit even simple calculators is because they want children to learn the 'mechanics' of doing mathematics. Pushing buttons teaches little whereas lining numbers up and 'carrying' a surplus to the next column means so much more.

Likewise with writing. The WHOLE of VietNam has an almost unified handwriting style, it is a delight to watch children writing AND adding diacrytical marks on the fly. Children in the far south have the very same style as children almost 3,000 kilometres away.

And what of Chinese, Laotian and Thai children and their character-based languages?

But technology can be used for evil by children. I teach, volunteerily, in big Ho Chi Minh City as well as rural Buon Ma Thuot up in the Central Highlands. I noted the children in BMT never slacked off, they were their usual studious selves.

About a month ago, I noticed a slackening in the pace of my students in SaiGon/HCMC. As if they hadn't a care in the world.

Then I found about their use of technology. For $30 they could have an App added to either their computer or Smartphone and on the day of the TOEFL tests students could use their individual passwords to activate the App and the anwers to the TOEFL examination would be revealed!

The organisers were smart, not all answers were correct and the incorrect answers were randomised so it would be hard to detect any patterns in the answers. This week the certificates were issued. Interestingly my workaholics in BMT achieved higher marks than their Big City counterparts.

So much for computers 'helping'.

If a PASSPORT is good enough for a COUNTRY ...

just who the hell do companies like Apple think they are?

Many statements can easily be word processed, especially when pumped out by an on-line banking system. Many people don't have passports and yet more don't have driving licences.

This is yet another form of discrimination targetting well defined areas of the population.

Besides, 'supporting documentation' is easy to manufacture/forge.

CAUTION: Western Union AND Moneygram DEMAND TWO PICTURE IDs in every country they cash out in! (Even when all your documents have been stolen)

"the USER is then TOLD what sort of input is needed to verify their identity"

Not exactly democracy in action. Just who the hll does PP think it is when it says: USER is then TOLD?

Stuff it PayPal, there are better funds transfer systems around, and they neither pinch customers funds or impose their political thoughts upon them.

"we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable" AKA Up yours, MS

It seems that MS is not having a very good year.

Huge swathes of users hanging on to XP; Win 8 in the garbage; fancy coloured notebook-type thingies not selling and the MS cellular OS in the doldrums.

For the ISS to switch to Debian has to be the last insult it can take for a while.

'committee has not found any legal wrongdoing ... behaviour has been "immoral".

If they are looking at morals MPs, given their recent history of expense abuse, are hardly the best equipped, or most suitable, to discern a moral.

And, talking of scruples, when are the likes of money lauderers like HSBC going to have a day of reckoning, or are they too big to question?

Never Heard of Proof of Concept?

This first edition does have attributes:

1. It actually shoots a bullet;

2. It is an ideal murder weapon since looking for striations on the bullets (CSI fans) is pointless;

2. As a murder weapon, it can be easily disposed of and leaves minimal traces.

The first combustion engines were jokes when compared to the present day wonders, likewise with 3D printing, don't be in too greater haste to write it off, it is being used by weapon systems manufacturers - now.

US Trade restrictions couched in 'security'

Even the dumbest politician should see this just another 'dirty trick' by the USA to protect it's falling exports. Devloping countries are used to these blatant attempts at blackmail.

Even Canada was screwed over, many times. in regards to softwood lumber. Time and time again Canada won adjudications under NAFTA and WTO yet the USA kept imposing special duties even though ruled illegal.

Out here in the Far East a recent series of export blackmail attempts have included FrankenFood, rice and beef. Hillary, the Bad Hair Woman, tried selling beef and Texas rice to Japan. Then she visited VietNam and mumbled about the USD$6,000,000,000 annual seafood exports to the USA along with suggestions VN allow GM seeds in along with dodgy US beef.

Unfortunately, for the US, the average VN food purchaser is very savvy and they still don't buy crap American beef that's laden with drugs nor tasteless rice grown from GM seeds in Texas.

If the US is so concerned with data safety, why is CISCO building routers in China and GE it's range of SCADA infrastructure control switches?

Besides, why does China need 'backdoors', the front doors of the world's supposedly leading technology centre are wide open and the keys so simple that even school children can diddle the locks.

Get real, Obamarama, we know what the US is upto, trying to sell exports.

Another stupid idea ...

Apart from offering yet another opportunity for water to enter a phone.

Additionally, the holes would offer wonderful receptors for granular dirt to enter and block them, rendering yhee 'feature' less sensitive or inoperable.

Additionally, it would offer yet another 'no hold' area for users to avoid.

I don't think even Apple Lemmings would consider this worth paying out their annual tithes to be able to be a 'rear admiral'.

Safety is never a joke

The picture showing a man standing in a completely unsupported pit is sickening. I have witnessed a 'hole' collapsing, along with a trench, in Toronto, notwithstanding they were lined with heavy sheet steel.

As a contract employer likely you would have been likely held criminally responsible for the mans death, had the hole collapsed, and undoubtedly been made to make financial support payments to the surviving widow and children.

Then we readers would be able to laugh - at your stupidity.

Hope the well dries up soon.

We use a Mitel product - 3300

My wife owns two 30-40 room hotels and I have a business employing just under 40 people. Previously we had used Skype for our hotels but since MS assumed ownership, and it's attendant loss of privacy, we moved to Mitel.

All businesses are linked through a 3300 series switches. What attracted us to them is the lack of yet another desk hogging screen. Simple handsets with the essential minimal of buttons yet backed by a switch that allows us to take advantage of the latest switch features. Hotel guests don't need to learn yet another set of operating instructions.

Although our two hotels are separated by hundreds of kilometres, guests are not aware their calls are being handled remotely at certain times of the day. As I was involved in the connection of the first Mitel switch interconnected to the switched public network in Canada, I have always been aware of the in-depth study of customer needs by Mitel which gives their products an edge.

Our non-hotel office controls all it's calls, within and without office hours, and after hours calls are handled with a pre-programmed destination assignments which ar both landline and handset. We do not expect our salary staff to be available 24/7. Our systems can also handle English, Chinese and Vietnamese customers without operator intervention.

So many of the new systems seem overly complex with far too many features that, like Word, most get ignored.

It's nice to know I am a SOMEBODY with a ...

Bi-Directional Remote Video Terminal (BDRVT) in my pocket.

And my TV, I presume, is a Uni-Directional Remote Video Terminal (UDRVT)?

So, help me out, what is the InterNet screen/computer to be called?

These letters are getting so confusing.

B U T ...

I thought Apple had patents on everything including prior art.

Nice to know they haven't ...

Nothing beats ...

Hubble for ROI, reliability, years of service!

And great pictures.

It's only when you ...

work in a true 'equal opportunity' country do you realise just how many jobs in the West are non-female.

My favourite InterNet tech is a female who has fixed several fibre optic problems that her male counterparts 'patched' up.

A few years ago I was on a job that involved climbing a 100 metre transmitter mast. Luck of the draw assigned a female radio tech from the carrier company. It rained much of the time we were up there, but not one word of complaint from my partner and she pulled her fare share of the bad parts of the job.

Equality works, try it, you might even like it. And make sure females get paid the same for work of eequal value!

Why all domestic meters need a mechanical readout

All 'OLD' domestic meters, gas - water - electricity, have a very good security device, the mechanical meter.

These new 'smart' meters can also be ordered with mechanical meters in addition to their electronics BUT how many electricity suppliers are doing this? Why should we trust electricity companies to read our meters?

An up and coming thing is METERED HOT WATER. An Italian developer in Toronto is promoting metered hot water in it's condominiums. THE PROBLEM IS 'hot water' is not defined NOR measured so even when cold water comes from the hot taps, the meter keeps on counting.

Back to the future? That's what I did in the '70's

I used to roam all over God's half-acre in Northern Ontario, Canada where the winter temps frequently drop to minus 40 - it doesn't matter C or F as it was the same either way - and I used a remote to start the engine which needed 15 minutes to warm up the oil and the transmission.

The remote gad another feature: it could sound the horn AND flash the headlights.

I guess what I didn't realise was I needed Bluetooth (before it's time) and sensors buried in the car parks as well as a computer. Had one of those, either a PDP8 or PDP11. And I used for eyes and ears for location purposes.

More Apple Tosh.

Copyright violations ...

it's in Apple's DNA and started with their name and their logo.

Don't believe me? Then go check out the half-page adverts taken out by three 'Apples' and often printed alongside each other in Byte Magazine.

I hav two words for the venal specimen MAY ...

SILENT CIRCLE!

Now I can send up to 60 mbyte files and secure voice and, this week, e-mail!

Stuff that in your BAE bag of tricks, MAY, and see what you can hear.

Ignoring these requests works much of the time ...

my employer has found. Love those lawyers letters!

We have several server clusters in different countries with all of our 'dubious' content, including forums hosted on our own server in a country that could give a fig about ruffled feathers/hard feelings. It's amazing how many of these complainants don't read URL's. We have several travel related web sites and many of the complaints come from the on-line bookers and airlines, all involved in price fixing.

In authoritarian countries it is good practice to criticise a ministry or organisation rather than the minister or the CEO, as let's them blame others whilst not interfering with the message's intent.

A new ruse used by lawyers is to claim copyright on their letters - so we changed our TOSs to reflect any letters claiming copyright to the letter itself will be ignored.

Good to see that Google isn't bending over for these vacuous personalities.

The real offenders are ...

thos incompetents who can't set up servers and keep their patches current.

Doesn't speak SpOzzie

QUOTE; 'My own experiments were rather less successful, as attempts to dredge travellers' Spanish from the deep recesses of my mind resulted in some mis-spellings'.

Few dialects torture Foreign languages more than Australian twang. In a few months it will be fluent.

Heat! No kidding?

QUOTE: "The result is that some of the electrons energy arriving in the LED's drive current is given off as heat instead of light."

Kind of obvious since my add-on headlight LED's require bar copper to conduct the heat away from the LED arrays, and my ambient is often around 40C.

Now, if I could figure out how to boil water with the dissipated energy on my motorscooter I could make cafe sua da on the go.

Old, basic, technology works best

Directional infrared communications work - how will Witch Two be able to tap that?

Another method, already used, and observed by the police, is for two people needing to communicate to go to a park, lie on the grass facing each other and with their mouths covered with their hands, is almost assured of confidentiality. But impractical.

The other method is to overload the system so it can't handle all the information.

What Canadian Crude?

This stuff is metered near the border crossing and at that point the near-tar is the property of the buyer.

The crazy thing is that the US is simply going to refine the oil and sell it overseas.

Oil politics, even more confusing than Westminster.

Mad MAY'S Knickers in a twist

That crazy woman running the UK Home Office (we can't catch illegals) is still drooling over the prospect of buying BILLIONS of Pounds of hardware so GCHQ can monitor all comunications touching the UK.

Such a waste of money since Silent Circle defeats the whole process.

Apple doesn't think 'Chinese', Samsung does

There is a certain amount of resentment in China about things American (continual war, Spratly Islands, etc) and Samsung is in a good position to exploit this.

Not only that, Samsung knows how the Chinese mind works.

Take multiple SIM phones. The West questions the need for multi-SIM phones but there has always been a market for the oddball/ecentric accessories in China. A multi-SIM phone user typically has one SIM for regular use, another for family and yet another for the Spare Tyre/Tire (girlfriend) - all active at the same time.

Apple would most likely have a moral fit, if it thought some features were being used for extra-marital affairs or placing bets.

Farmers frequently carry basic smartphones so they can monitor market prices, as do other resource suppliers. They might not have running water or main electricity in their basic houses but they will never give up their solar powered cell phones.

You have to hand it to the Chinese, they are innovation experts ...

whether it's melamine in baby formula < http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2010044,00.html > or recycled cooking oil; fake green peas < http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-03/31/content_9664992.htm >, pesticide-tainted vegetables, exploding watermelons, “lean meat powder” < http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2060741,00.html > and pork reconstituted as beef, the Chinese have done it.

And don't buy Chinese 'honey'.

They have been copying things for years, even using transferred technology in unofficial shifts to produce competing products adainst the IP owners!

Switching fake parts for real are just a progression in the Chines SOP.

How fitting. Bong rhymes with Dong ...

as in Ding Dong ..., the Bag Lady's signature tune.

Wet iPhones? They should have bought waterproof Androids!

The six-month long wet season is about to begin in Ho Chi Minh City and along with the rains come Baggies and big repair bills for iThingy users. (The Baggies are a poor iPhones owners answer to waterproofing)

Only takes a couple of minutes to flatten an Apple product.

Still, others are happy, they are the Motorola, Samsung B2710, Sony and Tuff Phones (UK) users who thumb their noses at the rain.

Why would you ever believe a government, specially the US Government, say?

Although I concede assuming the control of, or even seriously disrupting an aircraft, with an Android OS handset is likely very remote ANY claims made by government should be taken with a fistful of salt.

I remember when the late Yasser Arafat and his Merry Men were recycling aircraft in the Middle Eastern deserts, the Foreign Office tossed high-powered SSB communications systems in to primarily the BA predecessors aircraft without much testing. So if a 200-300 watt HF SSB set passed muster, why would a 0.3 watt Android cause concern?

Likewise, BOAC aircraft did long range testing of other government systems. Decca Navigator had equipment aboard many BOAC flights to Moscow to test coverage for potential RAF bombing use (some of the lane ID signals were lost although the 4 main frequencies were fine).

The recent DEA claim that it couldn't 'hack' iThingy messaging systems was most likely a ham fisted attempt to persuade their potential clients to use an open door which they happily monitor, trolling for new business.

Social drug dealers should continue to cross-post messages on travel web sites, as they do now, avoiding any that are hosted in the USA such as Trip Advisor or LP. The avoidance of any cell handset communication in and around Thailand is recommended for them, too.

The GLC was dismantled ...

Yet another Thatcher 'success' story.

'Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead'

Thatcher: Her achievement? People celebrating her death - justifiably

How many, and what were the characters of, people who have induced such unusual reactions to a persons death?

Not too many, and none too savoury.

Ignoring the Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, Nicolae Ceausescu, Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein - there are others equally as bad but celebrations would not have been tolerated politically - I can think of few who generated this public outpouring from apolitical members of the public - maybe bLIAR will get a similar treatment when his number comes up.

Since Thatcher ruled, the UK has been through THREE recessions, THREE RECESSIONS since World War 2.

She believed the UK economy could be built on a SERVICE economy - destroying the British manufacturing base (not SDK assembly) - you will have a hard job finding a British made screw. Where are our Plessey's, Marconi's or Leylands now?

She also set the 'Fat Cats' on their route to raping the industrial sector. Scargill got her right, she was anti-worker (and NO, I am not a Labour supporter). Who else has used Plod and the Armed Forces as suppression of democratic strikes and protests.

Although I left the UK many years ago, before Thatcher, I hoisted a 333 celebrating her death, along with all those 'street' celebrations that had to be broken up by Plod.

She screwed Britain, in a way that no one else has managed to do. Good riddance to her. And may she rot in Hell.