Posts by JimmyPage

Out of interest ...

what are the sanctions or remedies in the inevitable cases where someone who has dotted i's crossed t's and done everything correctly, in order and in time to opt out, finds they *haven't* been opted out ?

If, as I suspect the answer to this question is measured on a scale from "fuck all" to a generic "we know how important etc etc" with no way to (a) unring the bell, and (b) gain any recompense, then you can't help but feel "what's the point ?".

We can only hope that as time rolls on, and more people realise how irrevocable a loss of personal data is, the clamour for proportionate punishments grows.

People like Max Moseley are a good example.

All you need to know in one line :

The key to this is a proprietary technology – Powatag – which is not NFC and about which Wagner will not reveal any details,

Does anyone remember "Space 1999" ?

Where a nuclear explosion on the moon kicked it out of orbit, doomed to wander the universe in flared trousers and lapels ?

Showing my age ..

But RS-232, and it's spawn of 25-pin, 9-pin male/female variants, which meant you never had the right pairing ....

Does anyone still remember Data Circuit Equipment and Data Terminal Equiment ?

This from a government that makes you use IE6 ?

That's all

I would gladly sell my house

and all it's contents to pay for the BBC ...

How many sales of Windows Phone

have been driven by corporates (like mine) that have a "Windows Only" policy ?

And the water temperature goes up another tenth of a degree ...

When will the frog die ?

OT:RSA algorithm ...

do I recall dimly that when the US ban on exporting encryption *software* was in place, you weren't allowed to export disks, but paper was fine ? So the guys who developed PGP just printed out the code, and scanned it in the other end ?

Is anyone surprised ?

Gosh, a story where laws intended to prevent "terrorism" are being misused.

This is so 2004.

(Waves across the pond) "Hello USA. Glad you could join us"

Why can't elections all be like this

a small minority vote against (say) a candidate in an election, so they don't get returned. Would work wonders for the UK government

Is this the 21st Century equivalent

of counting how many angels can fit on the head of pin ?

For some reason ..

I have just had an image of someone with 2 phones, a scammer on each line, putting the handsets down with mouthpiece to earpiece, and walking away ....

68000 - 16 bit

The QL was released when I was in my first year at Uni - doing a course which had a large element of microprocessor design. Our lecturer commented that it was a bit of sharp practice described the 68000 (lovely processor btw) as 16 bit. I still recall his comment ...

"It's a bit like sending of five quid for a coat hanger and cigarette lighter, to receive a bent nail and a red headed match"

He *may* have once worked for Sir Clive ....

It's immaterial. Really.

Whatever the outcome. No one will be censured. No one will be blamed. No one will held accountable.

Life as a public servant means never having to say sorry.

Desmond Bagley "Running Blind"

The premise of this book was an electronic thingamijig which the US & UK had fed information to the USSR about, claiming it was part of a revolutionary radar system which could see down to the ground, and over the horizon.

In reality, it was a circuit board with every single odd and anomalous electronic effect designed it. (At one point in the book the protagonist asks an engineer to examine it, and the engineer is baffled by it's behaviour).

The idea was to let the Russkies "intercept" the component when a jealous UK had supposedly stolen it from the yanks. And then waste many man-years of their expertise trying to examine it.

Would these analysts ..

be the ones telling farriers back in the 1900s that "things will look up".

Or telling sail manufacturers "we're through the worst of it" in the 1800s.

There has been a paradigm shift in the computing landscape. Take my missis (oo err !) as an exemplar. We bought (actually acquired box through work. I've never bought a PC) a PC in 2009 specifically for her. She used it daily. Emails, surfing, and forums, with a little media playing (mainly YouTube).

I got her a nice 10" android tablet in December. She hasn't used the PC since.

Has El Reg teamed up with "Viz" ?

just asking ?

A timely reminder to all

to check EVERY SINGLE element of their business infrastructure.

A few years ago, the clowns that hosted our web site and database had a power failure. When I asked why this had taken our website offline for 2 hours, they replied it was because the primary and backup servers were on the same circuit. Which they thought (in writing !!!!) was a perfectly acceptable setup, and they had never had any complaints before.

plus ca change ....

back in the 80s, people used to advise that "FORMAT C:\" was the magic command, and many "lulz" ensued.

Of course everyone got wise to that.

And then people started circulating "hacks" to speed your machine up. They were suitably impressive. You had to run DEBUG, and then issue an "OUT" command. Which proceeded to call your hard card (remember them ?) low-level format routine ...

Am I alone in having no sympathy for someone who blindly follows something from the internet ? It's almost Darwinian .....

Interesting POV.

Of course if people did just use Bitcoins to avoid transaction fees, and for cross-border payments, then it's volatility is less of an issue. You just but whatever value of bitcoins you need for the transaction (say £50 worth) and then transact. It's immaterial whether that £50 bought 1 or 0.00001 bitcoins.

Which is exactly what the banks *don't* want.

I wonder if part of the hype surrounding bitcoins is pushed by a shadowy cabal of bankers hoping there will be a bubble-burst which will put people off digital currencies ?

I will bet ...

the whole problem was when a sysadmin decided he wanted to receive alerts at his personal email (gmail) account, and had a finger-fumble moment.

The real question is why on earth such a mission critical system was happy to accept an UNVERIFIED email address as the endpoint for diagnostic emails. Almost every system + dog nowadays insists on clicking on an emailed link to verify the address before using it.

The more this debate rumbles on ...

if cigarettes are *that* bad for you, then why aren't they illegal ? After all we're told that cannabis (for example is illegal). And nobody has ever died from cannabis[1]. Yet thousands die EACH YEAR from tobacco.

Just highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of our society. We don't make laws based on evidence and fact. We enforce someone elses morality on society.

When the smoking ban came in, I did some quick calculations based on personal observation of how much less people were smoking, and how many had given up. Those figures equate to a loss to the treasury. ISTR it worked out north of £100 million a year. I couldn't factor in the increased costs to the treasury of (a) more people claiming their pensions and (b) older people needing more expensive healthcare, but I would hazard a guess it will be at least equal to the lost £100 million, and slowly growing (as more people giving up get older).

So that's around £200 million a year the government needs to find from other sources. Hello non-smokers.

I suspect if the government had been honest and said "are you prepared to pay 5% extra VAT[2] to plug the loss of revenue from tobacco", there would have been an awful lot less people so keen.

Personally I smoke 3 hand rolled cigarettes a day. Not so fussed by the smoking ban, but it could have been made a bit more flexible.

[1]Please don't post a link to that moronic coroner who recorded a death due to cannabis. No doctor believes him.

[2]What ? Why do you think we've already been warned that VAT increase will never be reversed ?

I would pay ...

if when I search for a song, I don't get 100 videos of kids in their bedrooms "interpreting" it for me.