Posts by veti

I doubt if cash was involved. Too easy to trace. More likely backscratching.

Re: Why, oh why...

Right. And in the countries where safe, reliable birth control is a thing - since it was introduced, has the population gone up or down?

I'll get you started: here.

Re: Sounds like ...

But long before they produced Hamlet, they'd have also produced a detailed account of the most embarrassing thing you ever did - complete with detailed timeline, witness and impact statements.

So let's call that Plan B, shall we?

Re: Company Vs Personal

Clearly these employees need retraining, because - as well as losing the distinction between professional and private lives - they seem to be unfamiliar with Oracle's code of ethics.

It lists "core values", and they don't include either "diversity" or "inclusiveness". The word "diversity" appears only in the context of non-discrimination in employment, and even then it's not at the level of a "core value". "Inclusiveness" doesn't appear at all.

Re: Minimum wage?

The cited information sources are not perfect, but they are independent and as close to trustworthy as you're likely to find. If you want to debunk them, it's really on you to find something better.

Re: To be honest ...

Yes. I know. My point is, that outcome came as a surprise to leading Democrats. They hadn't planned on it.

Hence, in part, their present disarray.

Or maybe an opportunity for them to trial new OS ideas in a confined niche, rather than rolling them out to the whole of the long-suffering Windows 10 user base.

Re: XLookup, that's nice

*Sigh*. Just when I'd learned to love MATCH...

Re: Squaring the circle

So, your policy is not to let doctors see you naked? Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, there really is a very significant difference between Google and Facebook. Google takes your private information, with or without your consent, and keeps it to itself. There has never been a credible report of their bulk data being leaked or sold to a third party.

(There's a good reason for that. Their business model involves managing the flow of information between me and their customers. If their customers could get hold of the information Google has about me, they wouldn't need Google any more, they could contact me directly.)

Facebook, on the other hand...

And that's why I personally am OK with sharing many things with Google.

Re: Extradition. Lynch:0 Sacoolas:1

Diplomatic immunity is a thing. There's no getting around that, and it was never likely that the Trump administration would voluntarily waive it just to placate some foreigners (read: non-voters).

Please don't conflate the Sacoolas case with the legal system, that was a purely political decision. Things are quite bad enough without getting them mixed up like that.

Operating systems, like all other software, absolutely do rot and break. Not by themselves, admittedly, but the whole point is they're not "by themselves".

Even after the OS has stopped getting updates, other software on it (e.g. Adobe crap) will keep getting updated. Or users or admins will change settings. Or someone will plug in a new mouse, and a new driver will be downloaded. Or whatever.

There is no realistic way of putting a freeze on the whole system, so if a single part of it is frozen, it will gradually, but inevitably, grow more and more unfit for purpose as it gets left behind.

Re: AC cos I'm ashamed of saying something nice about Vista

Yeah, I used a Vista laptop with 1Gb of RAM for a while, and I often got the feeling I'd have got quicker results using a stone circle. Probably a shorter boot time, too.

The thing that made the security annoying was that every UAC prompt had to be clicked through twice. I never knew why this was, but it was never fixed in Vista. It was fixed in Windows 7, and coincidentally the moaning about UAC pretty much vanished when 7 came out.

Re: Keyboards

Yeah, the keyboards may be OK, but the mice? feckin' hamsters, more like. Hairy and smelly and prone to wander off at random whenever you don't watch closely enough.

That's OK until you get to the first site that makes you change your password from time to time. Then you realise you're going to need not just one such phrase, but a potentially unlimited supply of them.

And of course it doesn't allow for sites that don't allow passwords to contain spaces, or start with numerals, or whatever other lame and usually undocumented rules they choose to apply.

Re: Shared registries?

What happens if two companies each grant the domain "myname.co"? What's going to happen when someone tries to use that in an address?

Someone has to make sure that every domain name is unique. That's the role we're talking about here. Hard to see how to make it competitive.

Nope. There's a whole sliding scale, from "unlawful" to "criminal", via "illegal" and "illicit".

Leaving your car in a parking space ten minutes after the meter has run out - unlawful. Not putting any money in the meter in the first place - illegal. Parking on the hard shoulder of a motorway - illicit. Parking in the centre lane of a motorway - criminal.

There are a lot more of the cars than rockets, so - no, not really.

Re: Avoiding Fees?

That would be one interpretation of the story, yes.

Another possibility is that people entered the country independently, as (say) students, and were only employed by the companies much later.

I don't see anything in the story to support either of these interpretations over the other.

Re: Danegeld

Tax collectors predate Danegeld by some thousands of years.

cf. 1 Samuel 8:11-17:

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; [...] And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

We've always known this. And yet, every civilisation in history has chosen to pay taxes anyway.

Contrast with Danegeld, of which Thomas Jefferson said: "[We] prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form and to any people whatever".

So, your suggestion is that I should be required to have an annual audit on my home PC? At my expense, presumably?

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

Re: This is about as deluded..

And how exactly do you propose to isolate them from "human intervention", with 7.5 billion people on the planet? How about those species (including nearly all currently living land mammals - ob XKCD) that wouldn't even exist in their present form without human intervention?

Re: One big mistake

To handle that - let us reset the password once we have plugged something in to a USB port on the IoThing itself. If we have local, physical access, assume we're authorised (to wipe all data on it).

Would be more meaningful, I think, to restrict the data that vendors are allowed to collect, and what they're allowed to use it for.

Re: Freebies?

They are if the system is past its extended support date, as originally published and advertised when you bought the license.

Re: There's a big difference...

I suspect the difference in many cases may be "about five years". A hero at the start of the project may morph into a rockstar once it reaches maturity and the team has grown enough.

Re: "because it can deliver quicker, cheaper and easier"

Contrary to popular belief, laws are not (in general) made to benefit the rich and powerful.

It's the other way round: people and companies become rich and powerful by successfully exploiting the laws. The legitimate loopholes (or "economies", as we used to call them) exploited by Amazon are available to anyone. Amazon merely figured out a cost-effective way to do it.

It's important to understand this, because it gives you a valuable predictive insight: if you change the rules, you will not prevent companies or people from becoming rich and powerful by exploiting them. If not Amazon, someone else will do it.

I'm not saying the rules can't be improved on. I'm sure they can. What I am saying is that any attempt to change the rules that's inspired by, basically, spite against Amazon - or anyone else, for that matter - is unlikely to be an improvement.

Re: Would you trust a USA court ...

Well, no.

But would David Davis be standing up for him, if he wasn't a millionaire, OBE, public school and Cambridge graduate...? Fairness, or rather unfairness, works both ways.

Re: No beer on the train?

Yes, but an unspoken requirement of beer drinkers is that the supply needs to far exceed any plausible level of demand within the time of the journey. A single thermos wouldn't last you long, you'd need to bring a six-pack of them. That gets a bit unwieldy.

Re: Needed for SharePoint

If your company uses SharePoint, you've got a bigger problem than the browser.

I don't understand why IE attracts so much hate, yet SharePoint seems to be relatively accepted, as if it were somehow a necessary evil.

Re: Enquiries

Well, I do see such a reason. Email is a terrible tool for communicating with a school. Even worse than with a bank.

For one thing, if I want to let the school know my child will be absent, it's nice to know that I'm communicating over a secure channel. (Of course someone may have nicked my phone, but if that's true then I'm likely to know about it.) With email, anyone could fake my address well enough to fool an average school secretary.

For another thing, I have all my communications with the school in one place. No filtering required, no filling up my mailbox with PDFs I don't want to keep. No having to hunt through a stack of correspondence to find stuff like term dates, appointments, special events, or old newsletters - I know exactly where to find all those things.

And last but not least, I'm reasonably sure that if I contact the school through the app, they'll actually receive my communication, and vice versa. With email that's by no means a sure thing any longer, such is the enthusiasm of current spam filtering.

tl;dr: email sucks.