Posts by Dr. Mouse

Re: Add to the list

Just had a look at that. It seems like exactly what I want, except for one thing: You have to provide your online banking login details to it!

Sorry, but whatever they say about security bla bla bla, that's not happening. Nobody gets access to any of my login details for anything. Not only that, but handing my details over to them would give the bank a get-out on any fraud. It's a breach of T&Cs.

To be honest, I have thought for a long time that banks need to get a standardised reporting interface together. I believe they have one in Germany, and it can even be used to make bill payments etc.

Re: Never ever trusted TOR enough to use it

The advantages of TOR come when you only use TOR. As soon as they exit onto the real internet, you are vulnerable.

The "multiple anonymous men-in-the-middle" shouldn't be able to see your traffic, as it is all encrypted until it reaches it's endpoint. If the endpoint is an exit node, you loose that protection as soon as you exit. If the endpoint is a TOR node, your data can only be seen by it's intended recipient.

Very well said!

If successive governments around the world had not systematically destroyed any trust we had in them, this would be a fantastic system. But I do not trust that they will not misuse, abuse, or "loose" this data, and my medical history is one of the most private, intimate datasets I have.

Resistance is futile!

"all personal income be taxed at the same rate whether it is earned income, inheritance, dividend income, capital gains or whatever"

I will clarify: I am not advocating a flat rate income tax. I would suggest our current income tax structure is about right.

I would also, personally, not argue for inheritance to be taxed as income. Anything passed on when you die should already have been taxed when you earned it, and I feel it is quite unfair to tax it again when you die. Passing on property, however, should be counted the same as selling it, so capital gains would apply against the estate, based on a valuation at the time of death, and capital gains would count as income to those receiving the inheritance.

Re: Newton?

Actually, while there were PDAs around then, that did seem innovative to me (at the time). I don't have the time (or inclinations) to check if there was anything similar around then, but I had never seen anything like it: Touch screen, with "handwriting recognition". It looked awesome!

So I will change my opinion, they have produced one innovation.

If they are in critical embedded systems, they won't shouldn't have Windows Updates automatically installed (at least not directly from MS). They should be thoroughly tested before being applied. If not, they have noone to blame but themselves.

Although IMHO a critical embedded system should not have Windows installed full stop.

Re: Are you a slave?

harder and longer

*giggle*

Re: Peak Processor?

You can add to that gold and many other metals.

Although you could always just use the universal label: http://xkcd.com/1123/

Re: Good budget tablet

My wife and I have the Tegra Note 7.

Brilliant bit of kit. OK, not much is "the best", but it does everything I need well. The stylus is really useful, the front speakers do a much better job than most for music, and it cost ITRO £130.

Re: Jaguars are astonishingly awful in the snow

Jaguars are essentially undrivable when it snows

I have a friend who drives a Mazda MX5. He now refers to it as the MazdaSledge(tm), after one particularly snowy period. He said more than once that he needed to start driving it in reverse, because that was the direction it always wanted to be facing.

Re: This isn't the Droid(tm) you're looking for

IIRC trademarks apply in a particular area. The Lucas trademark on Droid will be unlikely to cover this app.

Also, as there are many apps already out there using droid, he's obviously not actively defending it in this area.

So I reckon devs can just tell Lucas "These are not the droids you are looking for".

Re: So the FBI's position is that it is legal for governments to hack US servers?

IANAL, but as I understand it the logic is:

The constitutional protections don't extend to the foreign nation. The protections are from the US govt. So, for example, a US agency would be violating the constitution if they forced someone to incriminate themselves, even if that person was in a country with no such protection.

Why would anyone want to spend time on something like this?

To quote George Mallory, "Because it's there".

Sometimes, the challenge is the most important reason.

It also minds me of my bosses attitude: "No time spent coding is wasted time". Of course he will be pissed off if we delay a project because something we did hasn't worked out, but we will have learned something in doing so.

Re: Live tiles on the desktop?

So why not place them where users actually reside and do their work, instead of on one or more special menus that have to be specially invoked and opened or switched to?

I, personally, see the Start Menu far more often than I see the desktop. The desktop is covered by all my applications (the things where I, and most users, actually "do my work"). The start menu comes out when I need to launch something new. The desktop, on the other hand, is visible for a few moments when I first turn my PC on.

However, I do agree that having the option is a good idea. I just don't see how that is good in the enterprise, where people are actually doing work.

Re: Do the quotes have limits?

Can you, for example, quote a whole book?

According to the article:

the extent of the quotation is no more than is required by the specific purpose for which it is used

I guess you could say "I am using the quotation to get around copyright law, so I need to quote the entire work", but I doubt that would stand up in court...

Re: Tim's hopes for solar and wind are doomed

Hard to get the virgins these days, Squire.

I beg to differ. Just go to a comic book convention.

Oh, you meant female virgins.

Why? Surelyit is easier to have your website open a window direct to your payment processor?

It also looks rather horrible.

This is not for a garden shed business, but a reasonably large beauty products distributor. We need to look professional.

A payment tokenisation system looks, to the average punter, as if they are sending all details straight to us. Instead, the form sends the details up to the payment processor and retrieves a token for us to charge.

Granted it is more complicated, but it looks a hell of a lot better than "OK, we have your order, now someone needs to take your money on our behalf because we can't be trusted with it".

WRT PCI DSS, tokenisation doesn't exclude you from it, it just reduces your scope, as you aren't storing any card data.

What's the worst that could happen, someone can't make a call for 10mins

That depends entirely on what the phone call is.

If it's some ****head taking loudly to his mates, fine.

If there is an emergency (e.g. the bus has crashed on a remote road), that 10 mins could be the difference between injury and death for someone.

Personally, I would say you are being just as much of a **** as those using their phone. You are imposing your own wishes on everyone else. What about those who want to have a text conversation with someone with their phone on silent? That would have no impact on you, but you are stopping them from doing so.

Some people just think their own wishes are more important than anyone else's. What society needs is more understanding and consideration from everyone. Your attitude is that 2 wrongs make a right.

Re: Most people realise

"That accounts for 100% of the cases of dropping a phone in a toilet that I'm aware of"

I've heard of a few where it dropped out of a front pocket, but the funniest was a friend who had one of the Nokia phones with a waterproof case (can't remember the model, but the case split in half between screen and keypad). He found it easier to text with the case removed. You can see where this is going: texting while sat on the loo, case removed, slip, plop.

As for the iPhone issue, many people do keep their phone in their back pocket. If that's what they are used to, and it has never damaged their phone before, they are going to be peeved if they find their brand new, overpriced expensive device has bent under what they take to be normal use.

Re: "keyboard doubles as a capacitive multitouch trackpad"

"getting good at swype, not sure I really want to go back to double-thumb-punching"

With the touchpad layer, I could see swype-style functionality being added. This would have the advantage that you could feel the keys as you swipe over them, and could be incredible.

Re: Niche Market

Database servers and large data analysis systems, too.

Oh, and I'd shove one in my desktop if I could.

Come to think of it, if I could get lower capacity (and cheaper) ones, they'd be great for embedded machines. A single DIMM instead of a HDD/SSD (with all the additional cabling etc) would be great.

The more I think of them, the more uses I can see. I'm pretty sure they will be the future (storage on DIMMS, not necessarily using flash).

Re: Copyright and reformatting: not an easy thing to "rule" on.

Buy a 'cheap' A4 sized print of a local artist's work; then scan and up-sample to A1 rather than paying for the large print in the first place. Is this fair?

I would say yes. You do not get the same detail in the smaller piece, and no up-scaling will bring back that detail. You may get a reasonable copy by doing so, but you will never have an A1 print, you will have an A4 print enlarged to A1.

Re: 129 per cent

Pebble - technical people only.

Why?

You get the Pebble, install the app on your phone, pair them, and then use your phone to install apps on it. I really don't see how that is for "technical people only".

Re: Viper-engined bike is not so strange

V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin inside a mini

Not quite as extreme, but I saw a Mini with a Landrover V8 (3.5l I think...) at a Mini Show 10-12 years ago. The guy built it for hillclimb racing, then found it to be completely unusable for that.

His words to me were "It's OK to drive, as long as the road is completely dry, and you drive it like you are on ice."