Posts by JimmyPage 3225 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant..." -John Stuart Mill
Preventing you from having access to <whatever> to protect <other> is how governments keep you in your place.
Or rather the ability for a call recording app to connect the audio file to a call details.
Thus -at a stroke- removing my main reason for pushing all comms onto my mobile. If only Linux VOIP ware wasn't so shit at recording :(
I feel sorry for the guys who wrote my call recorder: https://nllapps.com/apps/acr - it was a really nice example of what an app can be, now pretty much obsolete. It's one of a few apps I actually paid for.
So clearly having a "pilots licence" isn't enough, if every individual airplane has different controls and responses. Suggesting pilots need to train to the plane ?
Was this wheeze from Boeing an attempt to avoid that extra cost (thus making the plane more attractive to airlines) ?
Perhaps regulators need to take a similar approach to automobiles ?
90% of "apps" are a thinly disguised (and badly written) needless waste of memory. That's before we get into the motives for requiring people to install them.
Besides my smartphone has run out of memory and apparently I "need" all these apps.
I've just cancelled my TiVo subscription with VM (mainly because it was unused ...) as the final straw was they removed the ability to control it via the web and insisted on you downloading an "app for that". The poor sales droid at cancellations couldn't understand why anyone would not want an app for that ....
Taken in isolation that suggests that the researchers are in fact missing what must be a huge advance in being able to power such devices using the bodies own energy source - and find a way to tap into the glucose energy system (or whatever it's called, my biology is 30 years old).
In the absence of better batteries, surely the next best thing is a power source that can accept a soup of chemicals and turn those into electricity ?
If I were to ever lead a team and wanted to demonstrate what teamwork is all about, I would tell HR to fuck off with their bomb-defusing away days, and show "Apollo 13" in glorious 4K instead.
Even now - nearly 50 years on - I cannot think of a better example. Bearing in mind it was completely outside the bounds of anything that had been anticipated.
That's the America we could do with seeing "made great" again.
(or is it "crapper" ?)
Rather than all this noise (which I doubt will achieve much) Amazon could have made their site a fucktonne more useful (and therefore get more sales) if they got the companies supplying them to properly apply tags and attributes to their stock.
An example from yesterday .... if I am looking for a 4TB external USB drive, that's what I want the search results to show. Not a host of "1TB,2TB,3TB,4TB,8TB caddies" for £10 each. As a PP has noted I can chose the fucking colour of the thing, but not the size ? Or rather, checking the size drags in the fluff above. Which seems to bypass the "price" filter so you are forced to see it.
Looking for phones also ... no, I wanted a Samsung G9, not 1,000 cases for one.
All the past 2 decades have done is exponentially increase the noise being stored in the world, while arithmetically improving search technology.
Amazon need to up their game. I've been generally impressed by their incremental improvements, but they appear to have forgotten where they came from.
(Have they added a feature to add to a wishlist from a search listing yet ? I only suggested it 10 years ago.)
I thought he was against being made a living god, and turned it down ? As Augustus would have (except Livia persuaded him it was "good for Rome").
After that, of course it was no holds barred ... Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero ...
If you like your history with debate you could argue that it was the insistence of the Romans on treating their living emperors as Gods which made the Jewish problem intractable. Generally Romans didn't give a fig what god(s) anyone bothered with. But they insisted on worshipping the emperor as a God .....
My original Wileyfox Swift is still running perfectly (or perfectly enough for me).
The good lady wife is still happy with her Alcatel Pixa 4 (6" - big screen for poor eyesight).
Ultimately there's only so much you can do with the concept of a smartphone. And it's pretty much been done. The next few years should be spent consolidating, not trying to artificially "innovate" with fripperies. Better batteries, and more accessible UIs should be the areas of research.
As long as I can recall, extraterrestrial life has been predicated upon liquid water - and a lot of science has been devoted to looking for it (hence this story).
If it turns out water can be made by a nuclear process (which is what this article says ?) then surely we've just massively expanded the places where life might have evolved ?
Either way, well done NASA ! ---> have something a little stronger than water
The NCA copied the drive's contents through the use of a so-called "harvest drive", which the judge said "allows data to be seen and preserved". The NCA slurped 124GB of data; however, "before that process could be finished an encryption process cut in to the devices themselves".
One of the commandments of forensic data analysis is that the suspect machine, once acquired, is never powered on.
So how could an "encryption process cut in" when a raw data drive is being read, unless the drives firmware has been hacked ? And if that were a possibility (I have no idea about Mr. Loves talents) then why didn't it kick in immediately, and prevent any data recovery ?
The UKs intense reluctance to allow the US to prosecute this case may be related to the above issues. Someone, somewhere hasn't played ball, or has lied to the court.
Before I start sucking TSBs dick, I'd be curious to see the survey and questions used.
I have taken quite a few YouGov surveys where there is no correct answer to the question. Or rather they don't supply an option allowing me to express my correct feelings. From there it's trivial to misrepresent the results.
Here's a case in hand that crops up a lot:
Who do you think would make the best PM:
-Theresa May
-Jeremy Corbyn
-Don't know.
Now the correct answer is "neither", but I can't chose that. Moreover I can't complete the survey without submitting something. So when the results of that survey show that 60% of people preferred May to Corbyn ...
(I once met some YG folk, punting stuff to my employer and asked them about that sort of thing. They said that they advise clients, but ultimately the survey is what the client wants.)
Not sure which is more depressing ... the list of websites pwned, or the numbers of morons that sign up to them ? I bet the strike rate for reused credentials is sky-high in that pile.
That said, while I struggle to believe that the six million accounts supposedly contained in the "CoffeeMeetsBagel" dataset relates to six million people, I could easily believe the owners of said website stuffed their user table with six million records in the hope of finding someone to buy them up; which seems to be SOP for some sites ....
"Individual operators will be reluctant to be first to pull the trigger"
Clearly he didn't live through the 70s and 80s when petrol prices (which used to feature daily on the news) all went up in lockstep, and you'd here the delicious phrase ...
<MegaOilCorp> is raising it's prices to remain competitive
PaddyPower could do a book on it. I reckon 6 weeks after B-Day.
While true, it's also not a get-out-of-jail-free card for IGG either. After all, they're the first link in the chain that took the money - plus their whack.
I'll be blunt: I am fucking sick and tired of the mushrooming of outfits that are more than happy to take your money to secure a product or service, but if anything goes wrong they wash their hands and just point you at the provider saying "you need to deal with them.". Parcel2Go being one. Any number of mobile resellers over the years. It's basically the PC World/Currys/Comet (RIP) sales model for the millennials. We'll sell you shit. And if anything goes wrong we'll (try and) make you do our job for free.
So what the fuck,pray tell, was that 10% you were creaming off for ?
I get that projects may fail and that's part of the IGG experience. But that's only applicable when there's transparency and honestly. And it's up to IGG to either enforce that, or bear the pain of producers who don't.
I'm punting that autonomous cars will lead to private motoring being phased out (either by market choice, or legislation). After all, why do you need a car sitting on your drive doing fuck all for 150 hours a week, when you could hail a podcar within 5 to take you anywhere ?
I'm increasingly aware that a lot of "thinking" about how things develop seem to be based on one thing changing at a time. Which I would have thought the past 30 years would have shown is clearly not the case.
Arthur C. Clarke becomes more and more a genius the older I get ....
Pondering idly on this yesternight, and it occurred to me that mounting your BFO rockets on an asteroid, and building the cabin space at the front would allow you to go to Mars protected by hundreds of metres of rock. Cleverly (FSVO of "clever") avoiding the cost of having to haul up the shielding from Earth.
Oh, I know (The Martian etc :) ) but the point remains ... any failure in launching something with that much radioactive material on board really doesn't bear thinking about. Especially if it landed somewhere deep in the ocean.
While I agree entirely, I would be (and I hope NASA and their equivalents around the world are) concerned about the dangers of a failed launch dumping a live nuclear reactor back on earth.
Now if we could devise a binary type reactor that can be sent up in safe discrete units and assembled in orbit ????????
My cheap'n'cheerful back-of-an-envelope suggestion ...
Mount the panels so they are able to be rotated, and with a little bit of attention to the profile, you could "wash" the dust off by slowly rotating the panel and letting it "sweep" the face of the panel as it falls to Mars.
Thinking ahead, it would be interesting to know if Mars holds any possible source of radioactivity that could be shovelled into the appropriately designed reactor ....
I despise victim blaming as much as the next person, but ultimately, these scams work because somewhere down the line, the victim DOES SOMETHING THEY HAVE BEEN TOLD NOT TO.
Ever since I have had a bank account (1982, in case you wondered) , it has been drilled into me UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES am I ever to reveal my PIN to ANYONE. EVER. ESPECIALLY to anyone claiming to be from the bank.
The moment you decide to ignore that instruction, it's pretty much game over.
I am aware there are much more sophisticated frauds - but as you climb the greasy pole, they are fewer and fewer and much more targeted.
Does anyone recall that journalist (Guardian, IIRC) who wrote a massive article screaming about a "sophisticated" new fraud that had managed scam even them ? I read the article to see how the scammers had managed to be so fiendishly devious, only to discover the "expert" journalist had happily given them their debit card, and a few minutes later their PIN in a phone call.
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